Decorated Sugar Cookies

It's that time of year to make the cookies for Santa. And Kirah wanted to make decorated shapes. We have several cookie cutters, but decided for decorating purposes the tree, star, candy cane, stocking, and snowflake would give us the best palate to display our creativity. 

Here our the ingredients for the cookies. I've put the recipe here before. My grandmother's sugar cookie recipe is versatile and delicious. Margarine, sugar, egg, vanilla, vinegar, flour, baking soda and a pinch of salt.
Making cookies is pretty straight forward; creaming butter and sugar together - adding rest of wet ingredients. Mixing dry together and adding to wet without over beating. Then roll out on floured surface, cut, cook and enjoy!

Whisking dry ingredients

Creaming butter and sugar

After adding dry to wet

All rolled out to begin cutting

Cookie cutters laid out

Cutting the cookies

Baking at 425 for 8 mins

Cooling on wire wracks

Ready to frost

The finished product

We decided to use Royal Icing which is made of powdered sugar and egg whites. I used meringue powder as it is easier to work with and seems safer to me to leave out of the fridge. Last time we decorated the cookies were moist and awesome. This year somehow the cookies were dry and the frosting got very hard. I assume our house was a lot dryer this year. But if you held the bit of cookie in your mouth for a moment to dissolve the frosting - they ended up tasting pretty good. But I think the final product was more about the beauty! And the time I got to spend with Kirah and her decorating skills. (some how I completely forgot to take pictures of that process...oh well - there's always next year!)

Pumpkin Bread

So ever since we carved our pumpkins and I mentioned to Kirah that we could eat almost everything a pumpkin gives us, I had to make good on my pronouncement. I successfully managed to make Honey Mustard and Buffalo pumpkin seeds and now we were set to make some pumpkin bread.

I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin pie - I usually have a little pie with my whip cream, but I LOVE pumpkin bread - I like the cake consistency of the bread and the milder taste of the spices in the bread application.

I found this recipe on a blog and completely forgot to favorite the page so I could link it here. Then I remembered when you do a google search, it shows you the pages you've been to before. Hah! Big Brother win! So here's the website; 

Kirah took a picture of the ingredients - but blogger flipped it on its side. I'm going to include it because it makes me laugh.

Teaching Kirah how to grease the pan;

I mixed my own pumpkin spice just like the blogger told me to... even grated my own nutmeg.

Kirah mixing the dry ingredients (the sore between her eyes was a run-in with the playground equipment)

The wet ingredients waiting to be mixed

Pouring dry onto wet;

Kirah mixing gently to incorporate;

Dividing into the pans;

Here is the second loaf cut and ready to enjoy;

I didn't get pictures of  the loaves in the oven or when it was cooling or when we ate it because I was preparing for Thanksgiving too - but it was delish. Try it with some orange cream cheese. Let some cream cheese soften and then zest an orange into it, whip that up and let it chill a bit. SO GOOD!

Roasted Seasoned Potatoes

Our farm share this year has given us plenty of potatoes and we love them any which way, but this is our favorite lately and so easy!

3-4 lbs favorite potatoes, cut up in bite size pieces
3 Tbs. Olive Oil
4 Tbs. Butter
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 tsp Thyme
1/2 tsp Rosemarry
1/2 tsp. Marjoram
Salt and pepper to taste
Preheat oven to 450 degrees F.

Mix the dry seasoning together in small bowl and cut up potatoes. Pour olive oil in 9x 13" baking dish and add potatoes.

Sprinkle herbs over potatoes,

Stir the potatoes and herbs sprinkling in the minced garlic, 

Add cut up butter,

Tightly cover with foil and roast covered for 20 mins, uncover and roast another 20 mins before serving.

We had pork chops and baked beans too...delish!

Chocolate Zucchini Cake or what to do with that crazy veggie from your garden

We have a farm share this year and we've gotten a plethora of zucchini. I specifically didn't plant any this year because we could barely keep up with it last year - but of course our CSA has given us plenty of them. And since I'm already tired of the sauteed version and am too timid to try the fried version (I don't have a good fry thermometer) I thought we could have a cake or bread using the shredded veggie.
So onto the interweb I went and found a recipe on All Recipes DOT com and found several versions of zucchini bread, muffins and cakes.  This is the recipe I found that matched what I had in my cupboard - so we were off!
The ingredients: This picture was taken by Kirah as she expressed her desire to take on more production in this episode.

For this recipe we needed three cups of shredded zucchini - the zucchini pictured gave us over four cups - but it was the smallest one we had on hand (!)

And here is Kirah beating the eggs - she got this really cute whisk from her Oma and wants to use it every chance she gets.

And now I realize in this picture you can't see the whisk at all - so this next picture is from when we made banana bread (I didn't post that episode yet because I totally forgot to take a picture of the finished product)

She really likes the whisk.

While she beat the eggs we had the mixer stir the dry ingredients together;

I'll let Kirah explain the next step;

Here are the last two ingredients to go into the cake;

Unfortunately the next video is too long to load - but I put the last two ingredients in the mixer and then poured the whole thing into a greased and floured 9X13" cake pan. And then;

Here is what the cake looks like fresh out of the oven;

After letting the cake cool completely, we made my favorite frosting for chocolate cake. 

1 8oz brick cream cheese, room temp

1 8oz tub of cool whip, defrosted

1 cup sugar

Whip the cream cheese to a soft consistancy and add sugar creaming to help the sugar dissolve. Fold in thawed whip cream and spread on cake. Store cake in fridge once frosted.

The lighting in my kitchen is horrible and I haven't quite figured out my camera's light settings - but you get the idea. The cake is moist and chocolaty delicious - Enjoy!

Watermelon Cookies Part 2

Okay, after a couple days of the dough chillin' in the fridge my little cook and I finally had a chance to finish the cookies. It helped that Daddy was there to keep the baby company. First we had to get the dough a chance to warm up a bit and then we could roll the white part of the dough into a rectangle, then we placed the red dough (in a log shape) on the plain rectangle and rolled it up. Then we had to take the green dough and roll it out to a slightly larger rectangle to place the log of dough into.

One thing we learned while making these cookies is that sleep deprivation makes for a confused chef. I read the recipe incorrectly and we should have refrigerated the dough overnight after this process - however, we pressed on and let this dough chill before slicing.

I didn't get a picture of the slicing of the cookies, mainly because Kirah's hands were too greasy to hold my camera and I couldn't slice and take a picture at the same time...
But after slicing, we started the decoration with small chopped up raisins and sesame seeds to simulate the watermelon seeds.

Ack! I just noticed my knife perilously close to the edge of the counter. Not the best mom/chef move!

Waiting for the cookies to bake...

Here they are fresh out of the oven,

And Kirah presenting her amazing cookies,

And serving them to Daddy,

And the results,

Watermelon Cookies Pt. 1

I am finally getting back into cooking for fun rather than just for sustenance and part of that is stemming from Kirah's love of watching cooking shows with me on that network dedicated to Food. She has asked recently to help me with dinner and while we are doing it she wants to pretend we are doing our own cooking show. And it dawned on me that I have this great blog I started and never update - why not resurrect it and get Kirah involved?! 

So we pulled out my numerous recipe magazines to pick our first cooking show selection. I thought having Kirah pick something out would make it more fun for her to participate. So I grabbed all my Taste Of Home magazines from the June/July issues and let her at it. She picked the Watermelon Cookies from the 2003 issue, and having all the ingredients already in the house, I thought it was the perfect reentry into the blog. Not to mention something fun I could do with my kid. She's been getting the short end of the attention stick lately as the baby takes up most of mine. But that's another blog ;)  http://twelveoheighterm.blogspot.com

This will be a picture heavy blog as our videographer was at work ;)

The ingredients:

Butter - already in mixer bowl, flour, sugar, etc. I think you can read the rest. But since this is a blog involving my daughter and her adventures in cooking with me - here's a better picture of the ingredients we need for a successful cooking show!

Not to mention the cute apron too ("Mom, make sure you see my feet")

So we started our cookie dough by creaming the sugar into the softened butter,

After we added the egg and the almond extract, and Kirah wanted a picture of herself with our mixer;

Then we combined the dry ingredients and began to add them slowly to our butter mixture;

Then once that was all incorporated (Kirah's favorite cooking word) we had to tint part of the douhg red;

And in the spirit of sharing the air time, Kirah wanted to take a picture of me... (two things about this photo - 1. I'm not naked. 2. I used to work for the siren of coffee and I kept the apron.) I am tinting part of the dough green for the outside of the 'watermelon slice'.

We did learn something partway through, or rather I realized too late in my sleep deprived haze that we need to put Kirah's hair up BEFORE we start... here she is with our dough bundles;

Then all the dough needed to be refrigerated overnight to firm up before making the cookies - I debated posting this photo as you can see my messy fridge - but I'm going for reality here, so;

Now we have dough chilling and will be waiting for a break in Mommy/infant duties to finsh the cookies and

bring you part two of this episode.