i've just seen a...

my sweet friend and i seem to be have been bitten by a baking bug. not sure exactly how or why, but we are just going with it for the moment. she is baking cupcakes and cakes and i am baking...anything. and though i am not one to celebrate today, i felt a strong pull to bake these...

and these...
and even these...

which inevitably led to this...

it was a lot of fun though. had not baked like this in many years. next time i won't make a double batch. one batch is quite sufficient. and d & t, i do not know how you get along without your kitchen aid. seriously.

because of the baking bug, i have not had as much time to work on this...

the beginnings of the lace ribbon scarf out of malabrigo silk blend. the pattern has been in my ravelry queue for awhile so when the LYS announced it was doing a KAL of this pattern and suggested the silk blend as a yarn substitute, i was in. i have been lusting to use this yarn for something but did not know what, so here was the perfect excuse!

since using a weightier yarn then the pattern calls for, the suggestion was to use size 8 needles and drop a repeat. but i didn't have size 8 needles that were suitable, then couldn't find size 8's that were suitable. so after a bit of knashing, grumbling and finally swatching (!), i decided to use size 7 circulars with the number of stitches called for. the pattern came alive on them. and can i tell you how much i love this yarn. love this yarn. it is heaven to use and looks beautiful. since it is hand dyed, the variation of color is subtle but adds a bit of sparkle. i had never understood the fascination with manos until i used this yarn. and now i may just be hooked!

but i am not sure when i will get around to knitting on it again since tomorrow i am planning on making home made tortillas and pesole. that bug!

just a little steam

when i was pregnant with my sweet friend, my cute husband invited some brits over for christmas supper. they were working on a special project at his company and staying in a hotel with no where special to go on christmas day. to make them feel even more at home, the ch decided to get a traditional "pudding" recipe for christmas desert. so he contacted a friend in australia who faxed over a copy of a steamed pudding recipe she used. having never made a steamed pudding, i was a bit anxious. this first one was steamed in a bundt pan with a tin foil cover. but everyone loved and raved about it and i have been making christmas pudding every year since. so when zorra sent out an invite for sugar high friday to post about pudding, i was in!

since the posting deadline was christmas eve i needed to find an occasion to make one before christmas. i took a chance on the staff holiday potluck. which turned out to be the perfect occasion. i knew the pudding was a success when folks took slices home with them.

this is a dried fruit pudding. the recipe calls for 1 cup of dates; 1 cup of raisins and 4 cups of mixed dried fruit. for the first few years i experimented with various dried fruits but have settled on a cup each of golden raisins, dried cranberries, dried apricots and dried pineapple. mixed with butter, sugar, eggs, and self rising and regular flour. steam for about 4-4.5 hours. because of time, for the potluck i steamed the pudding for about 3 hours the night before, then steamed it for another 1-1.5 hours the day of the potluck. it turned out so well, i thought i would do it for our christmas day pudding. hopefully it will turn out just as nice.

so here is my pudding. the first picture is fresh out of the pudding mold before the staff potluck; the second is after the staff potluck. it is always fun to make pudding and i welcomed the chance. thanks, zorra. once again, this was real fun.

monday randomness

first off, a picture of a package i received from purl(dot)com. i don't know why this wrapping tickled me so, but i thought it the sweetest way to send a package of yarn. and why buy yarn from across country you may wonder. the yarn was for my sweet friend's ruffled scarf and cute husband's socks. i had purchased yarn for these projects at purl soho during the nyc spring excursion trip. but i had a brain burp when buying the pink yarn so was short a hank, and felt i needed one more hank of sock yarn for my cute husband's socks. so i decided to continue the theme of the yarn coming from purl soho. plus i could shop online at midnight. what more could you ask?

the second is the challah i made for hanukkah presents for some work mates. i was thumbing through baking with julia for bread baking day #4 recipes and came across the challah recipe. since braided breads are a favorite of mine, i couldn't pass up the opportunity to bake braided bread and give gifts at the same time. so here they are, fresh out of the oven. the egg glaze baked brown right away so i had to cover the loaves with tinfoil for the last half of baking time. i also used black sesame seeds since i could not find where the regular golden ones had been creatively stored by the kitchen helpers. so though the sesame seeds may look like they were burnt, they weren't. and regardless of any of the above, the breads were much liked and enjoyed. my office mate served hers the next night at hanukkah supper when her grown daughters and their significant others flew into town for hanukkah. she was barely able to save me a slice so i could taste it because it was eaten all up. and that is what gift baking is all about!

it's to cold to rise

in honor of bread baking day #4, i offer this post.

bread baking day #4 was hosted by baking history. many thanks, this was real fun. the assignment was to bake a bread with spice and post about it by 1 dec.

since it is baking in december and the beginning of various holiday celebrations, my first thought was to bake gingerbread. the silver palate cookbook has my favorite gingerbread recipe. very quick, simple and wonderfully good. i bake this for my sweet friend and i quite a bit during the holidays. since i am always striving to trim the fat, i used cholesterol free liquid eggs and substituted half of the oil with applesauce. and since i do have an incurable sweet tooth, i used all of the lemon glaze recipe for pouring over the hot gingerbread! i am not sure if it was the lack of fat or that it was freezing cold in our house or that i poured the complete amount of glaze that made it harden instead of soaking into the bread. it is probably a mixture of all of those things, though it did not affect our enjoyment of it. there is barely enough of the loaf left for tomorrows breakfast tea!

and since gingerbread is a quick bread instead of a yeast bread, i also chose to bake swedish cardamom braid from bernard clayton's new complete book of breads, the revised and expanded version. this is a very rich bread with both butter and eggs. again, i used the liquid eggs and put in 1/2 cup of flax seed meal for a bit of the butter. i also substituted currents for raisins. and since our house is drafty and cold, this dough had a bit of uneven rising. once i turned on the oven and let it rise on the open oven door, it did much better. i brushed the braid with an egg white glaze before baking and baked it on a stoneware cookie sheet which browned the outside of it nicely. while slicing i was a bit worried when the crust seemed a bit hard. once past the crust, the bread inside is so crumbly the browned crust kept the bread from falling apart. the bread is a little rich for me, though the cardamom offsets the butter well. but i love braiding bread and the look of braided loaves, so it was nice to do that again.

but i love baking bread and it is always great to see what others bake, so thanks for hosting bread baking day #4, baking history. it was great to be a part of it.

a nearly perfect weekend

so i have been alone this weekend. the big guy is at school and my cute husband and sweet friend are at a ymca conference for three days. i had the whole weekend to myself.

and i nearly did all the things i wanted to. i got some material to make more knitting project bags; i picked out new lip colors; i bought a waffle iron; i stopped by the LYS for the first time in weeks; i made myself turkey meatloaf; i knitted; i slept in; i made buckwheat waffles; i cleaned the house a bit and did a bit of laundry; i took a long walk; took pictures of my stash for ravelry and baked bread. and believe it or not, the list of things i did not get to is longer than those i did. but that's ok. i did whatever i wanted to and did not feel pressure to do more.

and i got to bake one of my favorite breads, pioneer bread. it was a baking staple when i was single. the recipe calls for cornmeal but i would substitute millet. since there wasn't millet flour, i would buy millet in bulk and grind it up in a spare coffee grinder in order to bake with it. maybe it was the name, maybe it was the fact i had to grind up the millet to make the flour, but the bread always reminded me of something ma ingalls would do. so i always appreciated baking day.

but this time i got to use the new bread pan. which is cool, but may be to small! who knew my bread loaves were hefty size?! so the bottom of the loaf did not brown like the rest of the bread(s). the recipe also has eggs in it which makes the bread very soft. the first few slices were quite wiggly. it may have been because it was hot out of the oven! but it is very good. and it made a mean turkey meatloaf sandwich!

when birnam wood comes to dunsinane

my sweet friend has been performing in her high school musical the past two weekends. they are performing into the woods, a wonderful but very subtle and smart musical. as refreshment co-chair and makeup help, i have also been to all of the performances as well as the dress rehearsals and there are still things about the play that surprise me. that sondheim is layered!

but i digress. as refreshment co-chair, my main concern is, "are there enough treats to sell?" to that end, i knew we were a little light on treats tonight so offered these: the cupcake version of into the woods. though the design made perfect sense to me, i found myself explaining the squiggly line was the outline of a tree with green sprinkles for the leaves and multi-colored flakes for the trunk. sigh. though the cupcakes may not have been understood, at least they sold out!

in honor of orange

finally some FO's. i was beginning to think i was in a circle of hell where there was only endless knitting, no finished projects.

the dish cloth is in honor of halloween. out of sugar 'n cream orange on size 7 crystal palace needles. there is a jack o' lantern image that is difficult to see in this picture. coupled with the fact that it is not as cute as i expected. but it will still be a fine dish cloth.

the scarf is a christmas present for a friend who loves orange. this is the misti alpaca chunky, ribs and ruffles scarf in the copper melange colorway. the pattern is free on their site and is a one hank project. i used size 15 needles instead of the 17 called for. the pattern seemed more defined with the 15's. and can i tell you how much i love this yarn. it is so soft and cuddly. delightful to work with. though it may not show, the colorway is a bit heathered so there are various tones to it. and, if one were to devote some serious knitting time, this scarf could be made over a weekend, if not a day. my original thought was to make this up for a couple of friends as christmas presents. then i thought i should really knit from my stash; but now that the scarf is done, i am once again drawn towards using this yarn. time will tell.

on the bread baking front, last sunday's bread was once again courtesy of the tassajara bread book, but i added one of my favorite flours, buckwheat. only a cup of it and the white whole wheat, for fear my sweet friend wouldn't eat it (and she won't) but i love it. didn't have poppy seeds for the top (thought i did), maybe next time.

plus i just received the new bread pan and package of yeast i ordered from king arthur flour. the pan is chicago metallic and supposed to be professional weight like real bakers use. so i will see how it does this sunday and keep you posted.

i need another bread pan...

little did i know that tuesday was world bread day. the sole pupose being to bake some bread. so i offer my simple little post:

sunday bread came from one of my all time favorite bread books, the tassajara bread book. though these loaves were courtesy of the revised and updated version, the original tassajara bread book introduced me to the vast world of bread baking beyond betty crocker. it introduced me to my first sponge and sourdough; it helped me continue my experimentation with various grain(s); and it taught me how to braid six strands of bread dough. i am forever grateful to this simple bread book.


and my sweet friend is grateful i am making white bread. though the majority of the bread is white flour, i have always put a couple of cups of king arthur's white whole wheat into my bread, just to give it a bit of heft and to make myself feel the kids were getting a bit of whole wheat without all the "but i hate whole wheat bread" discussions. i do risk a "MOM!" by putting sesame seeds on top though.


and lest you think this is turning into a food blog, i have been knitting. but i seem to have so many WIP's nothing is getting finished. coupled with the fact that since doing the vvs swap, the number of blogs i read has expanded! i spent this afternoon doing a bit of reading until i came across the breast cancer awareness month dishcloth pattern by vyvyan from knitting in a happy camper. it made me run to my sugar 'n cream stash to make sure i had enough yarn to knit this "reminder" for as many of my women friends as i could. it is a bit quirky and i truly don't mean to offend, but click on over to see if you would like to "remind" someone you know to stay healthy. take care.

pure simplicity...

many, many years ago, when i still lived with my parents, i baked...a lot. every sunday i would bake a pie. the house favorite was lemon meringue since my father and uncle henry, who lived next door, loved lemon meringue pie.

i also baked bread. which was difficult since this was the era when baking bread was considered buying those pre-packaged bread loaves in the freezer section and the only cookbooks available were those all encompassing cookbooks like settlement or better homes and gardens, etc. until, one christmas, a dear friend gave this book to me. it changed my life. there were actual bread recipes in it, multi grained ones! i was very thankful and excited.

though i was into rye and pumpernickel and oats, the fam could only tolerate white or whole wheat. so, as you can see, the honey whole wheat bread got made A LOT. it was simple, it was good and it made two loaves at a time.

i took the book to college with me and proceeded to make weekly bread for my various roommates. it survived my introduction to the tassajara bread book (first edition, where all the recipes made four loaves of bread at a time; way to much to eat in a week). but it had a difficult time surviving my seduction by sourdough, biga or sponge based breads. and when the kids came along, the big guy was only willing to eat sourdough type breads, so that is what i baked.

but today, while wandering thorough the local hardware store, i came across these.

which reminded me of how a friend of mine used something similar to sprinkle flour onto her work surface while making pizza dough, which got me thinking about making bread; which got me thinking about how i couldn't make bread because i would only get half way through a sourdough, biga or sponge recipe today.

until i remembered the honey whole wheat recipe. my sweet friend eats whole wheat bread with her turkey sandwiches (though she wasn't fond of the sesame seeds). my cute husband will eat any home made bread, and i need something for lunch. plus i got to use the new "salt" shaker that is filled with flour to sprinkle my work surface with. quite the lovely evening.

mmmm....almost

so the intent was to do nothing but knit on monday, which was the memorial day holiday.

though i did knit some, it definitely wasn't a whole day of knitting. i puttered; i did a little of this or a little of that, always with the same intent, "as soon as i finish this, i will sit and knit". but i did not quite get there until we went to supper at a friends house and then i was able to just sit and knit.

but i did make some bread to take for supper. this bread was not as chock a block full of good things as wish i were baking puts in his bread; the kids don't tolerate much more than a bit of white whole wheat; along with the bread being some sort of sourdough! but i had not baked bread in quite a few years; the house smelled of rising and baking bread. the family remembered how much they loved that smell and the bread. it was great fun.

since i forgot to save some dough for a levain, i will have to bake some more bread. some friends just bought their first home a few blocks from us. i think i will bake another batch as a home welcoming gift and walk it over. i almost feel like donna reed!