We’ve just put our girls to bed after a fun day at home. Tomorrow we head up north to visit family where Mom has told me that it’s too warm to snow. Mmmhmmm. We’ll see if that holds out. *grins*
Like last year, I spent part of today baking. Only this year, I took one of my gifts for a test run. I got a French rolling pin! The marble one I had been using for urm… more years than I can remember was becoming problematic in my dotage, so I asked for a new one and whattya know… it was under the tree!
One of the family’s favorite cookie types is, of course, the kind you have to roll and cut out with cookie cutters. This stems from their beloved great-great grandmother known fondly as “Nanny.” I never had the honor of meeting her in her prime, but from all of the stories I have heard, I would have adored her. She was a fantastic cook and an amazing baker. She happened to make some amazing sugar cookies and sand tarts. Both of which require rolling and cookie-cutting. I have her recipes and have become the family baker. Sooooooo… after spending years rolling and rolling and cutting and cutting and ending up covered in flour (and seeing the occasional cat covered in flour because she didn’t see where she was jumping up onto the counter *giggle*), I have finally come up with a method to ease the triple and quadruple recipes of sugar cookies and sand tarts that are churned out of my kitchen every December.
My savior? Silpats! They’re silicon-based and food doesn’t stick to them. Specifically, the burned-on sugar that results after my girls have finished “decorating” cut-out sugar cookies. So what do I do now? I roll out my cookie dough on the Silpat, cut in the shapes (gently, of course!), remove the excess dough, decorate (sugar cookies) or brush with an egg white and cinnamon wash (sand tarts), pick up the whole shebang and plop it onto my cookie sheet and voila! It’s ready for the oven. I rinse and dry the Silpats between rollouts… but it’s a breeze to do as nothing sticks.
It still takes me a few days to get all of the cut out-type cookies done and it is hard on my hands, but it’s a gift to my family. The compliment that warms my heart the most is, “These taste just like Nanny’s!”
Happy Thanksgiving!
Here I sit quite full of food. After clean up it’s time for dessert… and here is the promised picture of the pie dough I conquered and the resulting French Apple Tart. 
Heat up your slice for a few seconds and add some whipped cream and YUM! The crust is nice and flaky and buttery and the apples are just the right combination of tartness and sweetness. Since it’s been a few years since I’ve made this, I was pleasantly surprised that it came out after my first pie dough err… flop.
I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!
There are only two kinds of books that I write in: craft books and cookbooks. In this particular case, I neglected to note in my baking book which method I used to make my pie dough. My brain cell thought that I mixed things up in the food processor – so I did. After having eyed this first batch of dough warily, I stuck it in the fridge for a good five hours to let the glutens do their thing and then brought it out for a roll. I can roll cookies so thin that you can see through them. So when this pie dough came out like soft shredded mush before rolling, I knew that something was wrong. But, I’m stubborn, so I tried anyway. It all ended up in the trash and I had to dig out more shortening and stuff it in the fridge to chill.
I promptly grabbed a pencil and wrote in my cookbook, “Don’t use the food processor! Very bad things happen!”
It is now 11pm and I have just finished making a lovely batch of pie dough using my mixer. I’ll roll it out tomorrow morning, stick it back in the fridge and work on the apple compote. Then make some pretty apple slices and put them on top and then caramelize and voila! One French apple tart! (I hope.)
Pictures forthcoming. (I hope.)
For now… I’m off to bed and wish my pie dough happy glutenizing.
Tomorrow our daughters are celebrating their 7th birthday with a party at Ajax Amusements. They’re looking forward to it, some of their parents are looking forward to it, some of our friends are looking forward to it and we are too. While I do occasionally enjoy setting up games and such, this year we’ve got *gasp* boys at the party and doing all girly-type stuff just won’t do! It turns out that I also occasionally enjoy just having to show up with cake, plates-et-all and goodie bags and leaving the rest to others.
Sooooo, this year I decided that I’d make the cake. Not from a box… from scratch. I can pick out a boxed cake in a single nibble and they just aren’t what I grew up with. Icing is the same thing. So, aside from the bit of chocolate icing I used, the cake and icing is all home made.
Lots of thank you hugs to Kat for coming over today to help with the decoration and assembly!
Here’s the cake (click right)… and it’s all based on the game Candyland. The idea was not mine, we saw it in a cooking magazine while at our stitching weekend in WVa.
The pathway is Starbursts, with a Halloween forest, then a forest of Twizzlers topped with Kissables, then a sea of mini marshmallows, followed by a gumdrop forest, a fruit rollup walkway outlined in yellow Dots, a forest of Dum Dums, then a mud bog of peanut butter cups covered in chocolate fudge icing and then finally you make it to the ice cream cone castle complete with a blue rock candy moat! Aside from the sticks in the lollipops, everything else on and in the cake is edible. Here’s hoping that we get it to the party in one piece!
Happy Birthday, my little darlings! *smoochies*
