The best cinnamon rolls you’ll ever taste is exactly what the recipe says. Were they? I don’t know, I don’t eat a lot of cinnamon rolls, to be honest, but they were very good. I was having a very small Superbowl get-together, ie, one friend came over to watch it with my wife and me. My wife had been wanting cinnamon rolls for a while, so having company seemed like a good excuse.
Single Cinnamon Roll
They were fluffy, cinnamony (is that a word?) and a little tangy, I guess from the cream cheese in the glaze. Everyone loved them, especially my wife, but I think that’s just because she had been craving them.
The Pan of Cinnamon Rolls
So while I can neither confirm nor deny that they were actually “The Best Cinnamon Rolls”, I can say I would definitely use this recipe again if I wanted to make cinnamon rolls.
I don’t remember why I decided to make homemade mallomars. I think it was the yearly realization that they are actually a seasonal product. This comes up every year around the holidays when they are “in season”. It made me think “maybe I could just make mallomars when they aren’t available”. Well, turns out you can.
Home Made Mallowmar
They are actually fairly simple, but labor-intensive, mostly because of making the marshmallow from scratch. I guess saying simple carries the caveat of assuming you’ve made marshmallows before. It seems really daunting if you’ve never done it before, but once you do it you’ll never want to eat store-bought marshmallows again.
Bitten Mallomar
I wasn’t thrilled with the cookie base I made, I think I embarrassingly misread the recipe and used too much sugar. The cookies were definitely overly sweet. That being said, because I used pretty dark chocolate the completed mallomars weren’t overly sweet, they were delicious.
I used this recipe from saveur magazine. Is it worth making home made mallomars? Well I would definitely make these again. They were delicious, and definitely elevates the store-bought treat. I’d just be more careful making the cookie base next time.
My Christmas Bakes for 2021. I mostly made cookies. Five kinds to be exact. A mix of “regular” cookies..
Cookie Platter
Along with some decorated sugar cookies…
Decorated Sugar CookiesChristmas Tree Cookie
Making the Sweet Christmas Bakes
Royal icing is something I’ve never been particularly good at, or comfortable with, so I’ve been practicing. I’d love to take a live class, but the world being what it is, I decided to do an online workshop. I purchased ‘Cookie 101’ from Arlo’s Cookies. Watching the videos really helped me understand icing consistency and decorating techniques better than I had. Now instead of being limited by technical problems, I’m mostly limited by my terrible artistic abilities. I am pretty proud of the trees and stockings I made though.
All the recipes I used for the non-sugar cookies came from Once Upon a Chef. I made Snickerdoodles (my wife’s favorite), Peanut Butter Blossoms (my favorite), Nutty Jam Thumbprints, and Coconut-Lime Mexican Wedding Cookies. They were all delicious. My only regret is that I followed the suggestion to use the handle of a wooden spoon to make the impression in the thumbprint cookies instead of an actual thumbprint. This led to a small hole that only took about a 1/4 teaspoon to fill, and I feel like more jam would have made the cookies better.
The Main Course – Beef Wellington
All my Christmas bakes couldn’t be cookies.. so I made a Beef Wellingting. Technically a bake, right? Of course, I cheated and used store-bought puff pastry because with all the other cooking and baking going on aint nobody got time to make puff pastry on Christmas morning. I followed Alton Brown’s recipe. It came out delicious but definitely won’t win any awards. I think there were 2 (maybe 3) problems. First, the tenderloin we got was probably too big. This led to the pastry being too thin and getting a bit soggy with all the juices. I also think I chopped the mushrooms too small and didn’t get enough moisture out, also leading to sogginess. As you can see in the picture of the sliced wellington, the bottom pastry fell away and was a soggy mess. The top and sides stayed decently crusty though. It’s definitely something I’d love to try again on another special occasion. I also repeated my Potato, Onion, and Gruyere galette as a side dish.. and totally forgot to get a single photo of it this time arround.
I made a Pumpkin Cheesecake with candied pecans and cranberry whipped cream for Thanksgiving this year. I’m a bit of a Thanksgiving dessert purist. I want pumpkin pie, that’s pretty much all I want. It’s probably the second most important must-have dish for me, and no, the first is not Turkey. The first is candied yams with marshmallows on top. But back to dessert. My in-laws all love cheesecake. It’s my usual go-to for any cake I back for them. (See: Chocolate Chip Cookie Crust Cheesecake and Strawberry Rhubarb Cheesecake). This year when I asked if anyone had any requests for thanksgiving the answer (jokingly?) was “Cheesecake!”. So I figured, challenge accepted. I’ll make a cheesecake, but it’s got to be pumpkin cheesecake.
Pumpkin Cheesecake from the top
I didn’t want to just make a plain cheesecake, so I thought about ideas to dress it up a bit. We had a container of fresh cranberries from our farm share, so I came up with the idea of a cranberry whipped cream. I still wanted something a bit more, it’s thanksgiving after all, so I settled on some candied pecans to decorate with.
I never made a flavored cheesecake before, and I have to say, the addition of the pumpkin puree, other than obviously giving a pumpkin flavor (just a hint really) seemed to have a really great effect on the testure. This was the creamiest cheesecake I’ve made.
I have to give credit to Jamie from My Baking Addiction for the recipe, and also for getting me to try the water bath method which I’ve never done before. It resulted in my first ever crackless cheesecake.
Did it satisfy my need for a pumpkin pie? Honestly, no. Everyone else loved it, but I still needed pumpkin pie. Luckily I also had a regular pumpkin pie as a backup.
Pumpkin CheesecakeA Slice of the CheesecakeThe Sliced Cake
A potato onion and gruyere galette. This was another farm-share driven bake. We had a ton of onions and potatoes and my wife was desperate for some to get used and make room in our pantry. I did a little research and found a Sur La Table recipe for this galette and thought, why not? I’d never made a galette before and frankly might not have really known what it was. It’s essentially a rustic tart where you don’t bother with a tart pan. It was perfect in this case because the two tart pans I have are small and shallow and would never have worked for this monster savory tart.
This is the recipe I used. I already had everything I needed except the gruyere so I picked up a half-pound of a 6 month aged one. The recipe calls for a quarter-pound but I think cheese follows the same rule as garlic and chocolate chips. Always use more than it says!
The Unbaked Potato Onion and Gruyere Galette
Yes, it looks messy, but that’s the beauty of a ‘rustic bake’. It’s supposed to! Sort of. It came out tasting amazing. I was pretty happy that the form held together even though I had overstuffed the galette by doubling the cheese and using a bit more potatoes than called for. The family loved it. I’ll have to try some more galettes, they are less finicky than doing a tart in a tin but are still quite impressive in their own way.
Potato Onion and Gruyere GaletteSliced potato onion gruyere galette
