Week Two

I need to pace myself better than I did last week -- I didn't realize how tired I was until I returned home from a few errands on Sunday morning and had to lie down. I slept a lot on Sunday, left work early on Monday to sleep more, and didn't really "snap to" again until Wednesday. By then, Michael had a crazed look in his eye, the clean, unfolded laundry was snarling from its corner*, the dog was stealing bits of said laundry in frantic bids for Attention, Please!, and the kids were in danger of going to camp Thursday morning in their all-togethers. So yesterday evening was dedicated to Putting Things to Rights, and now here I am, a mere 2 days from Week! Three! and I'm blogging instead of baking.

(*My wonderful husband cooks dinner every night, makes school lunches, cleans the parrot's cage, and rubs my back. He even still buys me flowers, after 17 years of marriage. But appropriate methodology for dealing with clean laundry -- with the exceptions of sock and underwear -- still eludes him.)

So! For the second week of the bake sale, we decided on 3 recipes from Dorie Greenspan's excellent book "Baking from My Home to Yours." If you bake at all, you need a copy of this book. Go over to Amazon and put it in your cart;I'll wait. This is what you're looking for:


For this week we chose chocolate chocolate cupcakes, applesauce spice bars, and peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chippers. If you've been following along, you know that I believe that the peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chippers are quite simply the best cookie ever. 'Nuff said. Needless to say, the pic does not do them justice. These cookies are best appreciated with a nice, cold glass of milk. And of course, we sold most of them and had very few leftovers, dang it.

One full recipe of this dough yielded 36 jumbo (6 per half-sheet) cookies. When portioning the cookies for home use, I go a bit smaller and end up with close to 5 dozen pieces. In other words, this is a LOT of dough, but the good news is that you can leave the unbaked dough in the fridge for several days and simply scoop and bake when the urge strikes you. In fact, I do highly recommend following Dorie's recommendation to chill the dough before baking to avoid super-flat cookies.

The chocolate chocolate cupcakes went together beautifully, but I must admit with embarrasment that somehow I did not actually taste one. Terrible oversight. My Quality Control team gave them enthusiastic thumbs up, though.



I'm sorry I don't have a better picture of the decorations, such as they were -- swirls of vanilla and chocolate buttercream with a bit of sprinkle on top was the most I could manage. (Maybe that was the point at which it should have dawned on me that I was seriously fatigued?) Out of 24 cupcakes, I think we sold all but 6.

The applesauce spice bars get raaaaaaaaaaaves from everyone who tries them. They were quite good, but -- I think I'm going to need to try them again. The base was very moist, to the point of gooey, but the sides had started to shrink from the sides of the pan, so I took them out of the oven....... I think next time I'll let them go a little longer. Here is the base au naturel


and here it is with the glaze.



You can see in the unglazed pic that I should have chopped the apple smaller. The glaze is a thing of beauty, but! There wasn't enough of it. I had doubled the recipe and made 2 pans of the base. When I made a double recipe of the glaze, however, I needed the whole batch to adequately cover one pan of base. So I advise making double the glaze for each pan of bars you make.

The glaze is very rich and sweet. In combination with the gooeyness of the bars, it just wasn't doing it for me. My taste buds were overpowered. I'm thinking a pinch of salt or a glug of lemon juice in the glaze next time to provide a bit of contrast. If any of you (legions of readers! okay, handful of readers) have tried this recipe, I'm eager to hear what you thought.

I must add that the customers who bought the applesauce spice bars -- including my young Mennonite friend! -- loved them, sticky fingers and all. So maybe I'm the only one who finds them too rich? We brought 32 bars, and it was too many -- I still have 18 or so in the fridge. I have a feeling that a container will find its way down the street to Mimi's house in the morning.... do you think she'd notice if I hide some garden zucchini in there as well?

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It was another lovely day -- sunny, mid-80's, and a bit of a breeze. Much less foot traffic than for Week One, and I consider we did well to earn the $67 that we did -- again, with no pre-publicity. We had some repeat customers, which was really nice, and a few people who were really interested in learning more about PKD.







It also happened to be Michael's and my 17th (!!!) anniversary on Saturday, and he surprised the heck out of me by showing up at the cookie booth with this in tow:







Isn't that pretty?