Bacon Cheddar Chive Scones

These scones were SO good after shoveling snow up to my knees outside, with flakes still falling everywhere.  I trudged back in, chilly and worn out, and baked these up.  They were delicious warm out of the oven, flaky but slightly gooey with the cheese.  I've only eaten sweet scones before, but this savory recipe has won me over.  Salty bacon, sharp cheddar, and fresh chives make the perfect wintry breakfast.

Christmas Cookies, Take 2

My second try with royal icing came out a zillion times better!  It dried up hard and shiny in about an hour, unlike that goopy mess from the first batch.  The keys to my success: a new recipe and gel food coloring.

The liquid food coloring just thins out the icing so much that it takes forever to dry.  And when it did dry, the icing became separated and grainy.  These gels worked out great, along with the squeeze bottle with piping tip.

I let the base coats dry before piping decorations on top.

The green set.

This time, I went to Baking911's page on Royal Icing and used the recipe for Outline Consistency.  Here's how I adapted it:

2½ tbs meringue powder (in the baking aisle, or at party or craft stores)

8 oz. confectioners sugar

¼ cup lukewarm water

Mix for 10 minutes on high speed with the paddle attachment.  Spoon out a third of the mixture into an airtight container -- this will be your portion for piping.  Turn the mixer back on and add 2 tbs water.  Scrape that into other airtight containers and stir in colorings.  If it's too stiff for your needs, add a tiny amount of water; if it's too runny, add confectioners sugar until it gets to the right consistency.

Decorated Christmas Cookies

To kick-start the spirit of the season at home, we made these decorated butter cookies in ornament shapes.  The dough was easy to make and we took turns rolling it and cutting out the shapes, assembly-line style.  I like it more than the standard sugar cookie, which often has no flavor except plain old sugar.  These have a sweetness offset by just a hint of saltiness and a nice buttery flavor.  Decorating them was a pain.  If you use royal icing, set aside a lot of time to dry, and know that colors darken as they sit.  Using half a bottle of red coloring was an error!  And use powdered or gel coloring if you can -- I have a feeling the liquid coloring added lots of hours to the drying time.  More on that later.  I had planned to mail these out to someone, but 24 hours later some still were not dry.  Oh well, more cookies for us!

Daring Bakers Challenge: Cannoli

Except this month we're the Daring Fryers! I missed the challenge deadline by a day, but better late than never, right? Who sets a deadline for the day after Thanksgiving anyway? I was still recovering from cooking, eating, and baking two of these!

So this was my rush job. I rarely deep-fry, but you might not believe me if you saw the applesauce doughnuts I made earlier this month. Making the cannoli was easy except for the rolling -- the dough has a knack for springing back so the square never seemed to get bigger. But the shells came out crispy and delicious, and I flavored the ricotta filling with vanilla bean and some maple syrup, for that touch of autumn.  A lot of people aren't familiar with cannoli, which used to stun me. I grew up in an Italian neighborhood where they were readily available, but when I moved to other states people would ask, "Is that like ravioli?" If you're one of these people, don't get put off by the strange concept of filling deep-fried pastry with cheese. It whips up light and is so good when sweetened.

The November 2009 Daring Bakers Challenge was chosen and hosted by Lisa Michele of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives. She chose the Italian Pastry, Cannolo (Cannoli is plural), using the cookbooks Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and The Sopranos Family Cookbook by Allen Rucker; recipes by Michelle Scicolone, as ingredient/direction guides. She added her own modifications/changes, so the recipe is not 100% verbatim from either book.

Applesauce Doughnuts

I've been bad.  I buy doughnuts maybe once a year, and have never made them at home.  I wasn't interested.  Why add more deep-fried fatty goodness to my diet?  But then King Arthur Flour sent me a trial issue of The Baking Sheet.  I shrugged at all the recipes until I got to the back cover, and the photo of the Applesauce Doughnuts was irresistible.  They looked real easy to make, and I love the fun look of the doughnut hole as opposed to the doughnut with the hole in it.  The insides are moist with a slight apple flavor and the outsides crisp.  Go ahead and make it . . . I'll feel less guilty if I have company!

Candied Sweet Potato Cupcakes

These cupcakes are just too cute.  They have a mild sweet potato flavor and are topped with toasted marshmallows.  They're a nice change of pace from frosting and faster to make.  If you're too busy during the holidays to make sweet potato pie, consider this quick treat.  Recipe after the jump.

The potatoes were a cinch to prepare.  I tossed them in my toaster oven for an hour the night before, and refrigerated them.

I don't recommend using the food processor to puree them, since you need a liquid to help the process along.  I ended up scraping them into a bowl, using a potato masher, and then back into the food processor for good measure, since I already dirtied the work bowl and blade.

Whipping up a creamy batter.

It looks curdly after adding the sweet potatoes, but it'll work itself out.

You can see flecks of sweet potato in the cups.  I used a cupcake pan instead of the muffin pan the recipe calls for, and ended up with 29 instead of 24 cupcakes.  The baking time and temperature remain the same.

Toasted marshmallow how-to: Group mounds of marshmallows, about 7 or 8 of them to a mound, on a silicone mat.

Stick them for a minute or two under the broiler, and watch carefully!  The marshmallows will swell and start to meld together.  Remove them when you get the desired coloring, and place atop cupcakes immediately. Recipe after the jump.

Rose's Banana Refrigerator Cake

A quickie post on Rose Levy Beranbaum's Banana Refrigerator Cake, since I'm playing catch-up.  This one is a lot like banana bread, but less dense and with a tender crumb, and topped with Rose's Dreamy Creamy White Chocolate Frosting (silly name).  I normally dislike white chocolate, but the thin layer was a nice and not-too-sweet accompaniment.

Rose writes that the cake stays soft even in the refrigerator because oil is used instead of butter, hence the name.  The cake is simple enough to make, although you may not have the white chocolate and turbinado sugar on hand, but it's nice for an occasional Sunday.  Think of it as a fancier banana bread.  If you want the recipe, shoot me a message or leave a comment!