Recipes – Page 6 – Thimbleanna

Blueberries

43 Comments / September 3, 2010 February 22, 2011 / Recipes

Awwww. Thanks so much for all of your wonderful comments about my little baseball-loving boy. It was fun to see what so many of you have in common with us. Isn’t it sad when our babies grow up? Oh well, no crying over grown babies…moving right along!

I’ve been in blueberry mode this last month, so I thought I’d tell you about three very successful blueberry treats here in ThimbleannaLand. First up was blueberry jam, which looks remarkably like the raspberry-cherry jam MeMum and I made a few weeks ago. We used the same recipe, with three cups of crushed blueberries in the place of the raspberries and cherries and 3/4 cup of water in the place of the cherry juice.

Next were blueberry scones. Now, I’m not a scone expert like so many of you in Europe and Australia, but I’ve had bad scones (to my tastebuds – lead rocks) and excellent scones (light and fluffy). This month I found a fantastic new recipe for blueberry scones – they’re light and flaky and ooooh-so-good!

I found the recipe in a Cooks Illustrated magazine — it’s available on-line here. The secret is in the way they mix the ingredients. They grate frozen butter and knead lightly. Then, after chilling the dough, they roll the blueberries up in it like you would roll cinnamon rolls. I thought that was pretty cool — no more squished blueberries. If you like blueberries and scones, you should give this recipe a try.

Speaking of liking blueberries, I wouldn’t touch them until a few years ago. Then I read somewhere that they’re a superfood and I decided I should try to like them. Now, oddly, I can’t get enough of them. Anyway, the third recipe I tried was for a blueberry almond cookie from The English Kitchen (love her blog!).

I’m a BIG (as in cookie size) cookie baker and I resisted the urge to make these cookies twice as big as recommended in the recipe. It turned out to be a good decision, as these little gems are pretty rich. Marie says they might possibly be the best cookie you’ve ever had, and it’s definitely in my top five. How can you turn down drizzled white chocolate???

Yum..Yum! Don’t say I never gave you anything. The calories alone in this post, have to be worth something! Now I’m off to jump-start the weekend. My littlest angel, TheSecondChild is coming home for a few days with a new little friend — I must get cleaning!

Happy Labor Day in the US and Father’s Day in Australia!
XOXO,
Anna

Jam

44 Comments / August 12, 2010 February 22, 2011 / Recipes

Hello Boys and Girls. Ha! I was just practicing for all of you here in the states who are busily getting your children ready to go back to school in the next few weeks. I do miss those frantic days.

Last weekend MeMum and I made some Raspberry-Cherry Freezer Jam. When the boys were little, I planted some raspberry bushes at our then-house and that’s when I first started making this jam. It’s from an old recipe that’s quick and easy — if you’ve never made jam, this is a great place to start. We made two batches of 8 jars each in just under 2 hours. It’s reeeeaallllly good if you like raspberries and cherries.

Raspberry-Cherry Freezer Jam

3 cups raspberries
16-oz. can sweet cherries, drained (reserve liquid)
1/2 cup corn syrup
1 tablespoon lemon juice
5 cups sugar
Reserved liquid plus water to make 3/4 cup
1 3/4 oz. pkg. powdered fruit pectin

Fully crush raspberries; measure 2 cups. Finely chop sweet cherries; measure 1 cup. In 4-quart bowl, combine raspberries, cherries, corn syrup, lemon juice and sugar; mix well. Let stand 10 minutes.

In small saucepan, combine liquid and powdered pectin. Heat to full rolling boil, stirring constantly; boil 1 minute. Pour hot pectin mixture into fruit mixture; stir vigorously 3 minutes. Ladle jam into clean jelly glasses or moisture-vaporproof freezer containers leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Cover with tight-fitting lids; label. Let stand for several hours at room temperature or until set. Store jam in refrigerator up to 3 weeks or in freezer up to 3 months. Makes 8 cups. (Free jam labels here.)

I love this stuff. I think I’ll use it in that Raspberry Almond Bar recipe — Yum oh Yummy Yum.

Have a good weekend!
XOXO,
Anna

Giant Snickerdoodles

43 Comments / May 6, 2010 February 22, 2011 / Recipes

How is your week going? Not even a teeny tiny bit of sewing going on around here — too many other things going on. Tonight, after work, I mowed the lawn for 2 hours, tidied up the house and loaded up the truck with a bunch of stuff for TheSecondChild. I’m headed to Nashville to see him in the morning. He’ll be moving to a new apartment next week, so we’d planned for me to visit this weekend. He’s managed to stay high and dry through all the flooding, so we’re feeling very fortunate.

So, with nothing crafty going on, I’m going to add to my online recipe collection. If you’ve been around here very long, you know that we love cookies. TheManoftheHouse has pretty boring tastes, and he likes his goodies plain. It’s always a battle between us because I love lots of nuts or oatmeal or cranberries or most anything. Two cookies we can agree on are chocolate chip and snickerdoodles. So, over the weekend, I made him a big batch of snickerdoodles.

These are jumbo cookies and they’re pretty darn good. I’ve tried snickerdoodles with all butter (not crispy enough) or all crisco*(not enough flavor), but I prefer a good mix of butter AND crisco. I can’t remember how many cookies this recipe made, but it seems like it was around 40.

Giant Snickerdoodles

5 cups flour
4 teaspoons cream of tartar
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsalted butter
1 cup vegetable shortening
3 cups sugar
4 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cinnamon Sugar (mix together in small bowl and set aside):
1/3 cup sugar
2 tablespoons sugar

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In medium bowl, whisk together flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and salt and set aside.

With mixer, beat the butter, shortening and sugar at medium speed until light and creamy, 4 to 5 minutes. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Add vanilla.

With mixer on low, slowly add the flour mixture until combined.

With cookie scoop, scoop a ball of dough into hand.

Roll dough into a smooth ball.

Roll dough ball in the cinnamon sugar mixture.

Place cookies on cookie sheet, leaving plenty of room for spreading.

Bake until lightly browned and puffy, 10 – 12 minutes. Remove from oven when middle of cookie looks just slightly under-done. Let cookies cool on cookie sheet for 2 to 3 minutes and then cool on wire cookie rack.

Shortly before I got to the end of the batch of cookie dough, I decided to try to speed things up by putting the dough on parchment paper. (I just purchased a silpat mat for when I was trying the macarons, so I haven’t tried it with any other cookies.) Here is the difference between parchment paper and the silpat mat.

Can you tell which is which? The cookie on the right is traditionally what a Snickerdoodle should look like (although MeMum likes the cookie on the left better), and it was baked on the parchment paper! So much for silpat mat superiority!

Either way, they still taste good — Pour yourself a cold glass of milk, take Big Bites and Enjoy!

XOXO,
Anna

* – Crisco is vegetable shortening, for those of you not in the US.

Houston, We Have … a Recipe

64 Comments / April 18, 2010 February 22, 2011 / Family, Recipes

We’ve had a lovely, relaxing weekend here in ThimbleannaLand and I hope it’s been the same at your home! On Saturday, I dropped in on MeMum and BigDaddy, and MeMum was sitting at her kitchen table, attempting to weed out a few of the recipes from her out-of-control collection. She was sorting them into piles — the various stages of “keep” and a throw-out pile. The throw-out pile was pretty much empty, which prompted lots of laughing and joking about her little obsession.

We thought you might like to see the depths of the problem. (Or, rather, you might like to see my inheritance. The family joke is that MyDadLovesMeBestSister gets everything — but I get the recipes.) Here’s the cupboard under the telephone desk. Nice and neat and tidy — the two books contain recipes that MeMum has clipped and deemed good enough to keep and make again. The box under the books contains clipped recipes.

And, before we continue, you should just see the contents of the average dress box in the collection. Full of clipped recipes.

Here we have a drawer in the kitchen. I think these are the most recent recipe clippings.

This is the pile in the pantry. The manilla envelopes are all full of clippings too. The clear plastic box is typical of what’s inside all of the other boxes.

In MeMum’s defense, she’s an amazing cook. She tries new recipes ALL the time. I’m typically stuck in a menu rut and I’m always amazed that when I talk to her, she’s trying a new recipe. BigDaddy is a VERY lucky guy.

Back to the collection, here’s the pile on top of the microwave. (Excuse the torn wallpaper, a kitchen re-do is in progress.) I think these are recipes that MeMum currently has on audition.

But wait! Just like the ginsu knives, there’s more.

There are probably more boxes in the basement, but you get the idea. Am I lucky or what? Do you think this is a problem? Hoarding? OCD??? We think it’s pretty funny. And, at least it’s kept us all well fed over the years. While we were sitting at the table laughing about this “problem” I happened to notice a recipe for Almond Bars that caught my eye. I had some raspberry jam and almonds left over from the macaron experiments, and I needed to use them, so I brought the recipe home to try.

Hey — did you notice the date on the recipe?

June 27th, 1966. We were living in Lancaster, California and I wonder if it all started with the LA Times. I’ll bet there are hundreds of SOS and My Best Recipes in the collection. At any rate, the obsession runs long and deep. Back to the Almond-Raspberry Bars, this recipe is a keeper. Thank you Mrs. John De Groot, wherever you are.

You can click on the recipe to make it more readable. Just in case you’d like to try Mrs. De Groot’s recipe too.

I’m glad I could do my part and save this recipe from the dark depths of a cardboard dress box. Every little bit helps. If you have any suggestions or organizing tips for MeMum’s collection — we’re all ears!

XOXO,
Anna

Adventures in Baking

53 Comments / April 12, 2010 February 22, 2011 / Family, Recipes

Before I say anything else, I just want to thank ALL of you, from the bottom of my heart, for your very kind words about my little store. People who read and write blogs are the nicest people EVER! And a special thanks to all of you who supported my store too!

So, did you all have a good weekend? Between my store opening duties, I decided to have a baking adventure. I’m sure you’ve noticed that macarons, those beautiful little french cookies have been popping up all over. I was driving somewhere a few months ago, and I heard on an NPR moment, that macarons are to this decade of the 21st century, what cupcakes have been to the first decade. Well hell-lo! You know how I feel about cupcakes, so those little macarons must be something else!

And on top of that, there’s this:

Holy Cow! McDonald’s in France are selling Macarons! After I saw the picture above, and watched the video in this article (go check it out — it’s funny and it shows you what the French think of McDonald’s and their macarons) I decided that I really must try these little cookies out.

I searched blogs and read as much as I could before I started. One of my new favorite blog crushes in the food world is Not So Humble Pie. She has a gorgeous blog and she’s done some very thorough posts on the making of macarons. She has a really good three part series (part 1, part 2, and part 3) to help navigate the possible pitfalls in macaron making. So, armed with her basic recipe, on Friday, I set out to make her Lemon Marscarpone Macarons. First I tested one little cookie:

Not too bad! Not too bad at all. Problem was that it was as hollow as a cave inside that little macaron, and they’re not supposed to be that way. So, I decided maybe they were cooking too fast and I dropped the oven temp by ten degrees, to 325:

Nope. Not as good — theses cookies were pretty flat and still hollow. I bumped the temp back up and decided to just bake them in all their hollow goodness and be done with this batch. They tasted fine and at least they looked ok:

For my second attempt, I decided to try Ms. Humble’s Blueberry Macarons. On this recipe, I was short 5 grams of egg whites and decided not to crack open another egg just for five little grams. I’ll just cut this story short right here and tell you that they looked awful. They tasted ok, but that 5 grams made a huge difference in the moisture. These cookies were dense and heavy. And they were still hollow! (Those spots are bits of blueberry — these were goooood!)

So I gave up for the day. On Saturday, I had a wonderful outing with the quilty peeps — it was a great break and it gave me the energy to try again on Sunday. Once again I used Ms. Humble’s basic recipe (being sure to measure more carefully) and decided to go with pink this time.

In the meantime, I’d had a little e-mail conversation with Lisa and decided to let the egg whites “age” for 24 hours (I didn’t do this with the first batches) and let the cookies rest for an hour before baking (the first batches only rested for 15 minutes). Here they are looking all sweet and innocent while resting:

And here they are after they baked:

What. The. Hey!!! They’re lopsided. That was totally unexpected. I have NO clue what caused that and just to check if it was the resting time, I only rested the second batch for 20 minutes. Still crooked. And guess what? They were STILL hollow! These are some VERY. FUSSY. LITTLE. SUCKERS!!! At this point, I threw in the towel and “frosted” them with raspberry jam (they tasted great).

So, I’ve been beaten by a cookie! Any macaron experts out there? I’d love to hear from you. I do love the taste of the macarons, although, for me they’ll NEVER replace a cupcake. (And it’s not just because I can make a pretty good cupcake LOL!) I feel like I’m trapped in a game of paper-rock-scissors. Me-cupcake-macaron. Paper kicks rock, rock kicks scissors, scissors kicks paper. I kick cupcake, cupcake kicks macaron, macaron kicks ME!

OUCH!!!

XOXO,
Anna