Baking is for the Dogs: Peanut Butter and Bacon Biscuits

Well, it can be. We have a black lab named Beaker who is 9 going on 10. Because we have no children yet, we probably focus a bit too much on our sweet dog- and we love doing it. Beaker has several dog friends in our neighborhood and for the holidays, I decided to bake them some homemade dog biscuits. Mindy, Maggie, Kinsey, Bailey, Izzy and Oscar will all be receiving a homemade Peanut Butter and Bacon biscuit.

Beaker seemed to know I was baking for her and kept me company in the kitchen. She gladly offered her quality control sampling skills for the bacon.

The rising interest in where food comes from and how it is made is not limited to people food- in fact if you go to a pet store, you will find quite an array of dog food and treats from standard kibble and biscuits to mix it yourself/ handcrafted food and treats. After seeing some really nice dog biscuits for a fairly expensive price, I decided that I could make them at home. I went to the library and found this book- which I bought.


I actually met the author at a food show and she was kind enough to autograph our copy.


This recipe for Peanut Butter and Bacon biscuits has great ingredients in it: natural peanut butter, oats, baking flour, whole wheat flour, uncured bacon, and water. In fact, we should probably be eating this instead of Beaker. Justin has pointed out that I bought more premium ingredients for Beaker than for ourselves.


Essentially, the dough is mixed and rolled...then baked and dried in the oven.


And the result is...voila! Peanut butter and bacon biscuits that look just like some familiar granola bars.

Did I try them? Of course! You saw the ingredients- nothing out of the ordinary. They actually taste pretty good- like a savory cookie. A little sugar and it could be pretty delicious.

Perhaps it can be a future flavor for people...after all bacon is in.

Are You Baked Out? The Last Christmas Cookie of the Year is a No-Bake!

Merry Christmas to you! Here's the last Christmas cookie of the year: White Chocolate-Peppermint...and it's a no bake cookie if you want it to be! After baking and making

gingerbread snowflakes,

rosemary butter cookies,

chocolate crinkles,

lemon bundt cake,

and chocolate peppermint cake,

I was baked out and needed my last cookie to be simple. I originally planned to make the White Chocolate Peppermint cookies from scratch from this Martha Stewart recipe here. But I was running out of steam and needed a shortcut! I found these Nabisco Chocolate Wafers in the cupboard. They aren't easy to find but you can get them at amazon.com. These are known for being used in an icebox cake.
So, I decided not to bake my own wafers but instead to use these. I melted Ghirardelli white chocolate in the microwave in 30 second intervals, stirring in between until melted. I added a teensy bit of peppermint extract. I dipped the wafers into the white chocolate and put them on wax paper.

As the recipe suggested, I crushed some candy canes with a rolling pin and used a strainer to sift the pieces. This resulted in two sets of crushed candy: one that was very fine and one that was chunky.

This is was a great idea! I topped some of the cookies with the chunky candy cane and some with the fine.
These cookies were then transferred to the fridge where they did take a few hours to really harden. I kept them their overnight. They turned out very well and were a crowd pleaser (click the photo for a close-up).

Merry Christmas to you and your family! I hope you are enjoying the holiday as much as we are! Check out some of our other family holiday food traditions on Foodspiration.

The Cookie That Will Make You a Foodie: Rosemary Butter Cookies

Once in a while you find a recipe that is so easy but tastes like it might have taken you all day. This is that cookie: Rosemary Butter. The profile is somewhat unusual- a delicate balance of sweet butter with sanding sugar on the edges, fresh rosemary and salt. It's a slightly savory cookie that is perfect for a party- surprising, unusual yet impossible to stop eating.

The recipe for this cookie came from my Martha Cookies book but can be found here. It is a basic dough with fresh rosemary that is shaped into a log and frozen. Once frozen, the log is rolled in sanding sugar, sliced and baked. You'll notice that I didn't have a perfectly round log but I think it gave the cookies some character. I also didn't have sanding sugar but used a coarser sparkling sugar. I went to three stores and called two others and learned that December is a bad time to look for white sanding sugar! But, I highly recommend this recipe for an exceptional yet simple addition to your cookie portfolio- which is a long way of saying you should try it.

Christmas Dessert Gets Simple: Peppermint Chocolate Cake

I wanted to share this lovely holiday-inspired cake that is easy to make and delicious to eat! I like it so much that I have made it three years in a row! This recipe came from Everyday Food a few years ago and it is much easier than cookies (which take lots of baking time) and pie (which can be tricky).

As you can see, it has a dense crumb which makes it even more decadent! I also love it because:

1) it takes one pan

2) it looks fancier than it is

3) it is peppermint, which just tastes like Christmas!

One adjustment: for the frosting, cut the peppermint extract by half as not to overwhelm the cake. You can also melt the butter and chocolate chips in the microwave using 30 second intervals and stirring in between.

So, give this recipe a try. It will wow your guests!

Finally, the St. Nicholas Cookies!

You may have remembered my post about St. Nicholas' day and the special handcarved wooden mold I bought.

Well, I finally put it to use with my former neighbor's special St. Nicholas cookie recipe. When I was younger, she would bring over these cookies that were made in a special mold.

This year, I made her cookies which have a distinct flavor because of the spices- most notably cardamom. I must confess that I am still working this recipe out and it does have a variable addition of flour. The first time I made it, the dough was fairly firm and the cookies turned out fairly thick.

It is important the dough not be too soft as it needs to hold the shape and fine details but still release from the mold. Additionally, this recipe has no leavening in it, which is suspect also helps keep shape. I recall these cookies being thick as a child and I was worried that they were undercooked so....I accidentally overbaked them.

They looked great but the next day, they were hard as rock. I couldn't even take a bite.


So, I made them again and I didn't put as much flour so the dough was a bit softer. I intended for the dough to spread more with the force of pressing the mold which would result in thinner cookies. What actually happened is that they didn't keep the fine details after baking and they stuck to the mold! However, the taste and texture were about right.

You can see the cookies...the two overbaked ones are on the left and the less baked one that lost definition on the right. I also recall that my neighbor's cookies were also somewhat pale and not overly brown.

So, for next year, I should probably talk to my neighbor about the recipe a bit more. I think I might bake the dough again, using the higher amount of flour and erring on the side of underbaking rather than over.

Baking My Brains Out

A new post is coming soon. I have been baking so much that I haven't been able to post. I've made St. Nicholas cookies, white chocolate peppermint cookies, gingerbread, rosemary butter cookies, lemon bundt cake, chocolate cookies and peppermint chocolate cake. Phew. And I am making more gingerbread tonight....

Bake-and-Make Christmas Ornaments

As Justin and I were decorating this year's Christmas tree, I realized that we have some unique ornaments that we have made from food. This year's tree is 8 feet tall and our best by far!

Salt Dough Ornaments- circa 1999

My roommate, LG, and I made these ornaments out of salt dough during my first year of graduate school. We bought a fresh Christmas tree and didn't have many ornaments.We made the salt dough and rolled it out like cookie dough. We then cut it using cookie cutters. After baking them at low temperatures and cooling them, we decorated with paint. LG handpainted this heart ornament. We had hearts, angels, trees and some three dimensional ones like a birds' nest. I think we even used a garlic press to extrude the nest. Here is a link to the kind of recipe we used. I love having this ornament on the tree!

Macaroni Star Tree Topper- circa 2002

When Justin and I put up our first Christmas tree in Minnesota, we discovered that we didn't have anything to put on the top of the tree. Justin recalled making one of these in school and having it on top of his family tree. Out came the cardboard and some scissors to make the base. A little glue, a few kinds of dry pasta, and gold spray paint and voila- behold our tree topper until this day.

Christmas Cookie Ornaments- circa 2005

My tree decorating philosophy is to create a tree decorated with meaningful ornaments. I like multicolored lights with the eclectic collection but I also wanted to make a set of ornaments that had some continuity. Growing up, my mom had a collection of starched, crocheted snowflakes that were made by my Nonnie as well as a handmade angel. Because I can't crochet, I decided to bake these ornaments that I saw in a book called Decorating Cookies by Joanna Farrow. Actually, I had checked out this book from the library and I think it was called Decorating Biscuits because it was a UK version. The book seems difficult to find now and this was the only recipe I made.

The cookies took about a few days to make and frost. The intense colors of the frosting required time to set up so that the colors didn't mix and even so, on a few cookies you can see some color diffusion. I also experimented with the design as you can see (click on the photo for a close-up).

These cookies have lasted 3 years so far are holding up well. They are some of my favorites!

Look Alike Cookies that Don't Taste Alike

I made my first cookie from the Martha book and it had to be one that was quick and had ingredients that were already in the house. So I chose Grammy's Chocolate Cookies (click for recipe)...they look a lot like my grandma's molasses cookies and the chocolate gingerbread ones that Marc recommended, but these are a simple chocolate cookie with a great flavor and a beautiful "sparkly" appearance.

No molasses in these but you do roll them- these were in sanding sugar which is a coarser grade than regular sugar.

I made some batches chewy and baked a few more a little longer for crunchy texture. Thumbs up to this tasty and pretty cookie!

Holiday Confessions: Cheater Rolls that are Easy but not Quick

When it comes to the holidays, I love to make everything from scratch. However, I am going to confess that my holiday rolls haven't always been...but they haven't come from a can or the bakery either. I learned this wonderful shortcut that makes these rolls easy and delicious but not necessarily quick. They are the Rhodes or Bridgford frozen dough that you proof and bake at home. These premade dough pucks are perfect to make double rolls and fill the house with the smell of proofed dough and baked bread.

I made these the morning of Thanksgiving by spraying a muffin tin with some Pam, and putting two pucks in each cup. I brushed melted butter on top and put a bit of Saran Wrap and let them thaw and proof in an extinguished oven (set it to 200 and then turned it off) with a pan of water underneath.
Orient the dough pieces such that the flat parts are towards each other. I actually needed the oven after a while so I let the rolls finish proofing on top of the warm oven. The thaw and proof takes a few hours so leave yourself plenty of time.When I am really prepared, I thaw and proof them in the fridge overnight but this year I was distracted by pie. Once they had doubled in size
(a few hours), I took off the Sarah wrap and baked them.


They smell so good and are perfect for a turkey sandwich the next day as well. Make sure to make at least 2 per person!

For more ideas on how to make even fancier rolls with this dough check out the Rhodes website or this video on youtube. I might just do that myself or maybe I will find some time to make them from scratch...

Finding Good Pie Karma for Thanksgiving

We hosted this year's Thankgiving dinner for twelve. For details about the dinner, go to Foodspiration. Well, I have a pie confession: I had some pie problems this year and I'm really not sure why except that I tried two new recipes and I suspect they were the culprits.

Pie #1: Pumpkin

Okay, how hard could this be? I have made pumpkin pie many times and this year I was following the Pies and Tarts Williams-Sonoma recipe. First, the crust slumped terribly.

This was the pre-baked crust.

And this was the post. Has this happened to you? Any suggestions? I followed the recipe to the tee and didn't even cheat on the chill time. Arrgh!

Then, I made the filling which seemed unusually thin- it only had 1 cup of pumpkin and over a cup of cream- and the color was more yellow than orange which I suspected due to the lack of pumpkin. It would not set up...it baked over 20 min longer which really darkened the crust (I just bought a pie shield to help with this). I was so frustrated. I looked up other pumpkin pie recipes and decided that yes, there wasn't enough pumpkin. Even the W-S website had a different pumpkin recipe that had more pumpkin and seemed more reasonable.

So, I did what any Martha-loving person would do. I tossed that pie and went back to my Martha's pate brisee crust and maple pumpkin recipe. And it baked exactly as it should. We even foamed the whipped cream in the ISI whipper.

Phew...I had found my pie karma.

Tart #2 Caramel Cranberry Almond

This was also from the Williams-Sonoma pie and tart book and it was a beautiful tart. The trouble was that the cranberries were so sour and the caramel just wasn't enough to balance them...so it was a tart tart.

I essentially caramelized sugar and added cream...

and stirred in the cranberries and almonds...

which was so beautiful...

and baked 4 small tarts...

one large tart...

Was it a bad batch of cranberries? Does the recipe need more sweetness? I did sneak in a few more berries for color but was it enough to put the tart out of balance? Well, everyone ate it but my inner Martha was a bit disappointed. However, they were beautiful and I will just have to make it again and figure it out!

All in all, things were tasty and everything got done in time. Thanks to Dad for taking some of this post's photos!

Coming next, my cheater holiday rolls...