Week Five was notable for two reasons: the Co-Op's patio was hotter than the surface of the sun, and we got what I refer to (with tongue firmly in cheek) as our first catering gig.
[There are only 3 more weeks of the baking project, and I am vacillating wildly between regretful advance-nostalgia and overwhelming relief. For I have loved the baking and the selling and the community of it all, except when I haven't. The fatigue is creeping up and up and I threw out my shoulder yesterday -- almost surely a result of all the time I'm spending on my feet baking. {I have a bad back.} But but but there are still about eleventy-million recipes I still want to have an excuse to try, and old favorites I want to go back to, and I'll miss our weekly visits with the Mennonite farmers and the neighborhood kids and the retirees who gather for lunch and buy lemonade. It's very complicated, this finishing-up of it all.]
[I nearly gave Michael a coronary last week, at a moment when the advance-nostalgia was winning out over the relief, by musing aloud about finding ways to keep the baking going after August. Special orders around the holidays, maybe? Michael very gently pointed out that I bake for about 6 weeks non-stop around the holidays just for our own parties and dinners and family occasions, and he kindly did not call me crazy and point at me and laugh hysterically, which he certainly would be justified in doing, but asked whether I had taken complete leave of what remains of my senses? Ooooookay, not the December holidays. Easter, maybe? Valentine's Day? Work with me, here.]
So I'm very much in count-down mode and missing it all already, but just really didn't feel much like baking this week, so there are not a lot of process pictures. (I'm nothing if not self-contradictory.) This week's offerings included Sugar Bush Softies and Cranberry Chews (both from The Joy of Cookies), and Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops and Lenox Almond Biscotti (both from Dorie).
Now, y'all may remember the trauma of the overly-spreading molasses-ginger cookies from a few weeks back, and the resulting creation of Molasses-Ginger Lemon Buttercream Whoopie Pies. (Yum, buttercream.) In all my years of baking, I have assumed that cookies that spread too much do so for one or more of these reasons: dough being placed directly on a hot baking sheet, overly-buttery dough, too-hot oven, too soft/warm dough. Well, I learned something new last week. We've been chatting about over at CooksTalk about overly-spreading cookies, and it turns out that increasing the oven temp will actually arrest the spreading, as the edges of each cookie will set faster, preventing spreading and resulting in a nice, puffy cookie. Eureka! Check it out:
These are the Sugar Bush Softies, baked at 375* (which, to the recipe's credit, is what it calls for). It's an exceedingly soft dough, with lots of butter, toasted walnuts, and sweetened entirely by maple syrup -- no granulated or brown sugar at all. Very, very soft dough and soft resultant cookie. But look how nice and puffy! We are definitely on to something with the higher oven temp, here, and I can see this little tidbit making a huge difference in my baking.
Here are the Sugar Bush Softies with their crown of shiny glaze (simply 10x sugar, maple syrup, and milk). They have a tactile appeal that makes them hard to resist, yet are a little tooth-achingly sweet. Customers did love them, though.
I had some trouble with the Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. These are essentially a chocolate butter drop cookie with chocolate chips and malted milk balls mixed into the very very soft batter. There is a typo in the cookbook resulting in the omission of oven temp. Since the dough is so soft, and took a guess and started at 375*. Here's what I got:
It would appear that malted milk balls will indeed melt at 375*.
I knocked the oven back to 350* for the next round, and back to 325* for the last cycle. At 325* I got decent results, but was by then gnashing my teeth and trying to muffle my curses to keep from waking the children. When Garrick saw these the next morning, he was quite definitive in his opinion that we could not sell them as Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops -- in Garrick's world, "drops" must be round, or at least oval, in shape. So, Chocolate Malted Whopper Mutants were born, and did indeed amuse the customers.
Garrick, undeterred by the mutant shape, bravely tested one for the benefit of humanity and pronounced them Good.
T
his is another soft cookie -- perhaps a smidge on the dry side -- with great chocolate flavor and a certain Unidentifiable Something from the addition of malted milk powder to the dough. Next time, I'll try not to melt the malted milk balls.
With all of these soft cookies flying about, at the last minute I decided we needed something crunchy, and I turned to Dorie's base recipe for almond biscotti. Dorie, as is her lovely habit, gives about a jillion ways to play with and vary the recipe, but I like to try to stick to the basics my first time out.
What is interesting about the base biscotti recipe is that it includes corn meal, which adds -- again -- a certain Unidentifiable Something in the finished product which is quite lovely. The other thing I like about her base recipe is that it results in a biscotti that you can bite into without breaking a crown. Still crunchy, still dunkable, but not a threat to your dental work. I can get behind that.
At the last minute I realized that the recipe called for sliced almonds and all I had was whole, but I went with it. It made the once-baked logs a little trickier to slice, but not impossible. They are a bit more fragile than the typical rock-hard biscotti, but I'm willing to pay that price. (Mr. I. was one of my first customers and grabbed up a handful to take home, and I got good reports from Mrs. I. on Saturday afternoon -- they don't seem to have lasted long.)
The week's final offering was Cranberry Chews. As I assembled this bar cookie, it occurred to me that it's essentially a home-made Nutri-Grain bar.
The crust is a crumbly oatmeal/brown sugar/butter affair, the center is whole cranberry sauce laced with orange marmalade and a few drops of vanilla (the recipe calls for canned sauce but I made some from scratch with cranberries from the freezer), and the topping is a bit of the reserved crust mixture with some chopped walnuts folded in. Really easy to make, and quite a delicious contrast between the buttery-sweet crust and the tart-puckery filling. My aunt Anita was here this weekend, visiting from Ann Arbor, and she claims that you'd pay $5 for one of these at her market back home.
***************************************
After last Saturday's Herculean efforts, I thought (in my innocence) that this Saturday would be easy by comparison. Ha. Did I mention it was hot? Good for lemonade sales, not so comfortable for the lemonade seller. Michael brought the kids out for a bit, and the heat just did them in, so I shooed them all back home and kept finding pretexts to go into the Co-Op and bask in the air conditioning for 15-second bursts. I think I lost about 10 pounds.
We did pretty well with sales despite the heat and general lack of foot traffic. Hey, it's August, after all, and it seems that half the town is away on vacation. But we pulled in $83 on direct sales and another $30 on our "catering" gig! A lady who has been by a few weeks in a row was having a party Saturday evening and asked whether we would make lemonade and iced tea for it, and could we bring it over (she lives 2 blocks from us) in our cool dispensers? I had no idea what to charge for this service, but figuring that we were providing 4 gallons of beverage, $20-25 sounded about right. Upon delivery, she insisted on paying $30, which was really quite lovely of her.
It was otherwise a fairly uneventful day, and I was glad to get home and unpack the car and lie down for a while with a tomato sandwich, and then to loll about at the pool with the kids and Michael in the late afternoon. This week I will be out of town for work Wednesday through Friday evening, so have made cookie doughs in advance and anticipate quite a tiring time of it baking everything off late Friday night.
***************************************
The next big push will be for the Cabaret on September 8! Have I mentioned the Cabaret? Michael is at his soul a song-and-dance man, and over the years has coordinated and hosted several wonderful (and popular) cabaret performances at our local theater, the Players Club of Swarthmore. The performances are held in the theater's intimate black box space set with small cafe tables and chairs, and audience members usually bring wine and/or snacks to augment the refreshments provided. The performers are quite expert and the entertainment ranges from favorites from old musicals to jazz standards and the occasional stand-up comedian. It's great stuff, and I have to start doing the PR for it this week. At $12 per ticket, we could net anywhere from $700 to over $1500, so I really need to get moving on it.
Sooooooooooo, if you're local and would like to come to the cabaret, email us at pkdcabaret (at) zmulls.com! Seating is limited, and we'll add a second performance that evening if the demand is high enough. There will be raffles! Surprise guest performers! Refreshments! Heart-warming speeches! Fun for all! Okay, enough with the exclamation points -- you get the idea.
If you're not local and would like to support the effort, you can still do so right here.
*******************************************
It's been a tough month, with major challenges at work adding to the pressure. I have a feeling I'm due for a major crash, but I just can't find room on the calendar to schedule it. Through the magic of sitemeter.com, I can tell that you are out there reading my wild musings. But you're all so quiet! Don't be shy; leave a comment, even if only to yell at me to get some rest. Thanks.
[There are only 3 more weeks of the baking project, and I am vacillating wildly between regretful advance-nostalgia and overwhelming relief. For I have loved the baking and the selling and the community of it all, except when I haven't. The fatigue is creeping up and up and I threw out my shoulder yesterday -- almost surely a result of all the time I'm spending on my feet baking. {I have a bad back.} But but but there are still about eleventy-million recipes I still want to have an excuse to try, and old favorites I want to go back to, and I'll miss our weekly visits with the Mennonite farmers and the neighborhood kids and the retirees who gather for lunch and buy lemonade. It's very complicated, this finishing-up of it all.]
[I nearly gave Michael a coronary last week, at a moment when the advance-nostalgia was winning out over the relief, by musing aloud about finding ways to keep the baking going after August. Special orders around the holidays, maybe? Michael very gently pointed out that I bake for about 6 weeks non-stop around the holidays just for our own parties and dinners and family occasions, and he kindly did not call me crazy and point at me and laugh hysterically, which he certainly would be justified in doing, but asked whether I had taken complete leave of what remains of my senses? Ooooookay, not the December holidays. Easter, maybe? Valentine's Day? Work with me, here.]
So I'm very much in count-down mode and missing it all already, but just really didn't feel much like baking this week, so there are not a lot of process pictures. (I'm nothing if not self-contradictory.) This week's offerings included Sugar Bush Softies and Cranberry Chews (both from The Joy of Cookies), and Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops and Lenox Almond Biscotti (both from Dorie).
Now, y'all may remember the trauma of the overly-spreading molasses-ginger cookies from a few weeks back, and the resulting creation of Molasses-Ginger Lemon Buttercream Whoopie Pies. (Yum, buttercream.) In all my years of baking, I have assumed that cookies that spread too much do so for one or more of these reasons: dough being placed directly on a hot baking sheet, overly-buttery dough, too-hot oven, too soft/warm dough. Well, I learned something new last week. We've been chatting about over at CooksTalk about overly-spreading cookies, and it turns out that increasing the oven temp will actually arrest the spreading, as the edges of each cookie will set faster, preventing spreading and resulting in a nice, puffy cookie. Eureka! Check it out:
These are the Sugar Bush Softies, baked at 375* (which, to the recipe's credit, is what it calls for). It's an exceedingly soft dough, with lots of butter, toasted walnuts, and sweetened entirely by maple syrup -- no granulated or brown sugar at all. Very, very soft dough and soft resultant cookie. But look how nice and puffy! We are definitely on to something with the higher oven temp, here, and I can see this little tidbit making a huge difference in my baking.
Here are the Sugar Bush Softies with their crown of shiny glaze (simply 10x sugar, maple syrup, and milk). They have a tactile appeal that makes them hard to resist, yet are a little tooth-achingly sweet. Customers did love them, though.
I had some trouble with the Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops. These are essentially a chocolate butter drop cookie with chocolate chips and malted milk balls mixed into the very very soft batter. There is a typo in the cookbook resulting in the omission of oven temp. Since the dough is so soft, and took a guess and started at 375*. Here's what I got:
It would appear that malted milk balls will indeed melt at 375*.
I knocked the oven back to 350* for the next round, and back to 325* for the last cycle. At 325* I got decent results, but was by then gnashing my teeth and trying to muffle my curses to keep from waking the children. When Garrick saw these the next morning, he was quite definitive in his opinion that we could not sell them as Chocolate Malted Whopper Drops -- in Garrick's world, "drops" must be round, or at least oval, in shape. So, Chocolate Malted Whopper Mutants were born, and did indeed amuse the customers.
Garrick, undeterred by the mutant shape, bravely tested one for the benefit of humanity and pronounced them Good.
T
his is another soft cookie -- perhaps a smidge on the dry side -- with great chocolate flavor and a certain Unidentifiable Something from the addition of malted milk powder to the dough. Next time, I'll try not to melt the malted milk balls.With all of these soft cookies flying about, at the last minute I decided we needed something crunchy, and I turned to Dorie's base recipe for almond biscotti. Dorie, as is her lovely habit, gives about a jillion ways to play with and vary the recipe, but I like to try to stick to the basics my first time out.
What is interesting about the base biscotti recipe is that it includes corn meal, which adds -- again -- a certain Unidentifiable Something in the finished product which is quite lovely. The other thing I like about her base recipe is that it results in a biscotti that you can bite into without breaking a crown. Still crunchy, still dunkable, but not a threat to your dental work. I can get behind that.
At the last minute I realized that the recipe called for sliced almonds and all I had was whole, but I went with it. It made the once-baked logs a little trickier to slice, but not impossible. They are a bit more fragile than the typical rock-hard biscotti, but I'm willing to pay that price. (Mr. I. was one of my first customers and grabbed up a handful to take home, and I got good reports from Mrs. I. on Saturday afternoon -- they don't seem to have lasted long.)
The week's final offering was Cranberry Chews. As I assembled this bar cookie, it occurred to me that it's essentially a home-made Nutri-Grain bar.
The crust is a crumbly oatmeal/brown sugar/butter affair, the center is whole cranberry sauce laced with orange marmalade and a few drops of vanilla (the recipe calls for canned sauce but I made some from scratch with cranberries from the freezer), and the topping is a bit of the reserved crust mixture with some chopped walnuts folded in. Really easy to make, and quite a delicious contrast between the buttery-sweet crust and the tart-puckery filling. My aunt Anita was here this weekend, visiting from Ann Arbor, and she claims that you'd pay $5 for one of these at her market back home.
***************************************
After last Saturday's Herculean efforts, I thought (in my innocence) that this Saturday would be easy by comparison. Ha. Did I mention it was hot? Good for lemonade sales, not so comfortable for the lemonade seller. Michael brought the kids out for a bit, and the heat just did them in, so I shooed them all back home and kept finding pretexts to go into the Co-Op and bask in the air conditioning for 15-second bursts. I think I lost about 10 pounds.
We did pretty well with sales despite the heat and general lack of foot traffic. Hey, it's August, after all, and it seems that half the town is away on vacation. But we pulled in $83 on direct sales and another $30 on our "catering" gig! A lady who has been by a few weeks in a row was having a party Saturday evening and asked whether we would make lemonade and iced tea for it, and could we bring it over (she lives 2 blocks from us) in our cool dispensers? I had no idea what to charge for this service, but figuring that we were providing 4 gallons of beverage, $20-25 sounded about right. Upon delivery, she insisted on paying $30, which was really quite lovely of her.
It was otherwise a fairly uneventful day, and I was glad to get home and unpack the car and lie down for a while with a tomato sandwich, and then to loll about at the pool with the kids and Michael in the late afternoon. This week I will be out of town for work Wednesday through Friday evening, so have made cookie doughs in advance and anticipate quite a tiring time of it baking everything off late Friday night.
***************************************
The next big push will be for the Cabaret on September 8! Have I mentioned the Cabaret? Michael is at his soul a song-and-dance man, and over the years has coordinated and hosted several wonderful (and popular) cabaret performances at our local theater, the Players Club of Swarthmore. The performances are held in the theater's intimate black box space set with small cafe tables and chairs, and audience members usually bring wine and/or snacks to augment the refreshments provided. The performers are quite expert and the entertainment ranges from favorites from old musicals to jazz standards and the occasional stand-up comedian. It's great stuff, and I have to start doing the PR for it this week. At $12 per ticket, we could net anywhere from $700 to over $1500, so I really need to get moving on it.
Sooooooooooo, if you're local and would like to come to the cabaret, email us at pkdcabaret (at) zmulls.com! Seating is limited, and we'll add a second performance that evening if the demand is high enough. There will be raffles! Surprise guest performers! Refreshments! Heart-warming speeches! Fun for all! Okay, enough with the exclamation points -- you get the idea.
If you're not local and would like to support the effort, you can still do so right here.
*******************************************
It's been a tough month, with major challenges at work adding to the pressure. I have a feeling I'm due for a major crash, but I just can't find room on the calendar to schedule it. Through the magic of sitemeter.com, I can tell that you are out there reading my wild musings. But you're all so quiet! Don't be shy; leave a comment, even if only to yell at me to get some rest. Thanks.
2 comments:
Only three more weeks? Well, what am I going to do if I can't follow your progress on this?
Ann
Ann
You'll have to tune in two weeks later for the report on the cabaret, and the week after that for the actual PKD walk.
(Not to mention we're eventually going to have another yard sale....)
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