A Valentine's Surprise and a Book Review

Hello all! And a happy belated Valentine's day! Let me preface this by saying that I am not a huge fan of Valentine's Day as a holiday at all. But in the spirit of doing something nice (and cheap) I decided to make the Amish Friendship Bread that my boyfriend loves so much. Followers of this blog will remember that I have talked about this recipe before. However, I didn't just think of baking this bread out of the blue. There's a backstory!

Recently, I read a novel called "Friendship Bread" by Darren Gee. It's your pretty standard chick lit but I needed something light to read to refocus my brain a bit. In the book, the characters receive bags of the Amish Friendship Bread and talk about how baking brings them together and changes lives and whatnot. It actually took some turns that I wasn't expecting so I was fairly impressed considering the genre. Overall, I would recommend the book as a light read and it was on the better side of mediocre. More importantly, when I was reading the book, I was overcome with the desire to bake this bread again. They kept talking about using the starter dough for variations on the original recipe and freezing the dough so you're not baking every 10 days (I didn't know you could do that!) and then, as an added bonus, included actual recipes at the end of the book! So that's all I needed for motivation.

Tidbits: Apparently the Amish Friendship Bread isn't actually Amish. It's an evil ploy by the Girl Scouts or something like that. Also, the novel has a website where people can contribute recipes and tips all about the friendship bread. So, that's where I got my recipe for the starter (www.friendshipbreadkitchen.com) and some tips about freezing the dough for later use.

So, in planning my Valentine's surprise, I had to subtract 10 days from Valentine's to allow the starter dough to do its whole starter dough-y thing. This was almost a problem because my yeast was actually dead (because it was super old) and I really didn't want to go out to the store in the snow to buy some. But I did because I am a good person. The other issue here was that since it was a surprise, I had to find places to hide my starter dough so my boyfriend wouldn't see what was going on. In hindsight, I probably could've left it on the kitchen table and he wouldn't have noticed. So for 10 days, I was hiding a bag of dough in a variety of places including (but not limited to) a big pot with a lid and the oven itself. The oven was a bit of a risk but he never turns it on anyway so I wasn't too concerned.

Things worked out perfectly because on Valentine's eve, my boyfriend had a hockey game that he left for at 9 pm so that gave me a solid three hours to bake the bread, make the house smell like cinnamon sugar, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. Let the baking commence! The last time I made this, I think I really screwed up the ratio of starter to ingredients. This time, I was very careful and did the good math and have 3 bags of starter now chilling in my freezer for future use. From there, it was a simple ingredient adding with no real problems. The dough was a little lumpy and hard to mix but otherwise, I'm practically a professional baker when it comes to this bread.

Observe where my confidence gets me. The bake time and temperature are wrong. After an hour of baking, the bottom was starting to burn but the center of the bread was not fully cooked. Keep in mind, it's nearly midnight at this point and I'm exhausted. Sadly, it took another 15-20 minutes of checking and rotating and generally trying to will my bread to bake properly and I still ended up with a slightly burned bottom. Sad. Also, one of the loaves got stuck to the pan (which has never, ever happened before!) so I lost the bottom of one of the pieces. On the bright side, this meant I got to taste it! So delicious. I used the variation that included French Vanilla pudding mix and chocolate chips and it was glorious. Moist and yummy and mmmmm.... I can't wait to try more variations with the starter dough. In a nutshell, my boyfriend was surprised and delighted and good bread was had by all. Here's some pictures of the final outcome for you to drool over:

Any tips on modifying cook times and temperatures to avoid my problem here would be much appreciated. Sadly, there will be no Disney moment this post because I want a chance to watch a few more before I post more. Don't worry though! Disney is still in my heart. I gave Disney stickers to my students who did well on a worksheet this week.

My Kitchen Smells Like Cinnamon and Sugar

Welcome back to another edition of "In the Kitchen with Jen"! In this installment we will watch as Jen attempts to make bread from scratch. Some background: There's this bread called Amish Friendship Bread. It basically works like this: After receiving some starter dough in a plastic bag from a friend (there's the Friendship part!), you mash the bag and add ingredients to feed the starter over 10 days before baking the most heavenly cinnamon bread ever. Before you bake it though, you have to separate out 4 bags of starter from your dough to give to your friends. That's right folks, it's a chain letter. With dough. Fascinating, right?

I received some starter several months ago and made this bread and it's really really good. It was so good that I saved a bag of starter for myself each time which meant that I was baking bread every 10 days. This was fun until it got too exhausting. My boyfriend, however, was extremely disappointed when I stopped baking the bread because he loves it. So, I decided to revisit this recipe mostly to make him happy and so I could bring home a loaf of cinnamon bread for Thanksgiving break.

One problem: I have no starter. According to the letter that comes with the starter, the recipe for the starter is an Amish secret and you can only obtain the starter from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from the Amish! Oh no! Aaaaaaaand I call bullshit on that one. A quick Google search revealed several recipes for the starter which were all pretty much identical. So much for your secret, Amish people. So I did a bit of planning ahead and 10 days ago, I went to the store to buy some yeast to make my starter.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble! Oh wait, wrong holiday. Anyway, I let the yeast dissolve in warm water (not hot, so as not to kill the yeast) and then added milk, flour, and sugar. Typically this starter is passed around in plastic bags but I felt like I had a bit more flexibility so I put it in a Pyrex bowl and loosely covered it with a kitchen towel for it to rise. One of the recipes I saw warned against using any metal bowls or spoons because it's bad for the yeast and the dough won't properly rise (?) so I was very careful to use only wooden spoons. I don't really know if this was necessary.

Anywho, here's my second problem. I don't want to have to pass starter dough to 4 people. It's exhausting. So, I found a comment in one of the recipes that shared my feeling on this. This person said that it's fine to just not add the ingredients during the 10 day cycle and just bake with what starter you have and it turns out just as good. So there's gonna be a bit of mystery attached to this cinnamon bread. I really hope it works.

So, for the past 10 days, I've been stirring my starter with a wooden spoon and it keeps rebubbling every time I stir it so I think that's good. Now on day 10, we're ready to bake! It looks like there's so much starter in that bowl. Hmm. I'm starting to really doubt my plan. It looks like almost a full cup too much starter. Too late now though! The recipe itself is really easy and they just list the ingredients all together and pretty much say "Add these." So I decided to use a little of my baking savvy and added all the wet ingredients to the starter first and then added all the dry ones. I don't know if I wasn't adding fast enough or what was going on but the batter got a bit lumpy. That's when I decided that the no-metal rule had expired and pulled out my hand blender. Things got a bit dicey here because seriously, the bowl was almost overflowing with batter. I started to feel better at this point though because I remember having that same problem the last time I made the bread so maybe the starter proportion is ok. I hope. :-/

So after mixing in all the ingredients (I should mention, there is some variability with this recipe. You can use either vanilla or chocolate instant pudding in the batter and you can add nuts or raisins or chocolate chips. I went with the vanilla pudding and can you guess? Chocolate chips, of course!), I had to prepare the pans for baking. What that meant was spraying them with Pam and then coating the sides of the pan with a cinnamon sugar mixture. I'm actually pretty good at that technique because I've had a good amount of practice and my mommy taught me how to tap the mixture around the pan. The final direction before baking was to pour the batter evenly in 2 loaf pans. Did I mention this makes 2 loaves of bread? I probably shouldn't blog when I'm this tired...

Where was I? Right, pouring batter. This is actually more challenging for me than it may seem. See, I have pretty tiny hands. So it's really hard to hold the big bowl with my tiny hands. I can pour two-handed no problem but when we get down to the end and I have to use one hand to hold the bowl and the other hand to scoop the remaining batter out, things get tricky. I could really use a third hand. Or like, 5 since I'm wishing for things. Might as well go all out. Anywho, after successfully pouring the batter (and by successfully, I mean that I finished but did get a bunch on my shirt), I sprinkled the remaining cinnamon/sugar mixture over the tops and stuck them in the oven for an hour.

Oh God, my house smells so good. Even if this bread tastes awful, it would be almost worth it just to experience this smell for a few hours.

So, after the specified hour, the middle still wasn't done so I left it for another 5 minutes or so. As a result the edges got a little crispy. Oh well. Doesn't matter, look how beautiful these things are:

Beautiful. Taste-wise, definitely delicious. It seems a little denser than I remember but maybe that's because I overcooked them a little bit or maybe the starter really was off or maybe my memory is useless. The last one is probably most accurate. In any case, mission accomplished. If anyone is interested in getting a bag of this starter, talk to me and I'll hook you up. I'm thinking that if I make this again, I'll follow the directions and then just freeze the starter I don't use for future use (apparently it keeps in the freezer for at least 6 months). Hehehe, it smells so good in here.

Critical Reception:
Well, the brownie cookies have been well, but not widely, received. I missed colloquium due to a bout of feeling miserably sick so I didn't get to share my brownie cookies. One of my office mates agrees that they're mysterious but thinks they're more cookie than brownie. I'll be taking some home this weekend so maybe my mommy can tell me what they are. Mommies know everything.

A Disney Moment: Saludos Amigos
Oh boy, we've entered into what I'll call the "Dark Times Disney Disasters". Ok, so maybe they're not that bad but the next 5 films in the sequence are not what I would call up to the Disney standard. The first of the next 5 films is Saludos Amigos or as I will call it "An Ode to South America". The very first thing of note about this film is that there are people in it! That doesn't seem right. If movies like Mary Poppins and Song of the South aren't included in the list of Disney animated films, why do we have to watch Walt Disney and his animators board a plane to South America? Crazy.

For those of you who don't know, Saludos Amigos is really just a series of shorts stuck together that all take place in South America. To give you historical context, these were made during WWII. That's all I'll say about that. The first segment is Donald Duck goes to Lake Titicaca. It's boring. The problem with this whole movie is that it seems like it's a Travel Channel special for all of South America with cartoons thrown in to make it more appealing. Except it's not. It's mostly just boring. Grr.

I don't even feel like talking about each of the segments. I will say that the segment about Pedro the airplane who carries the mail over the scary looking mountain was mean. We thought Pedro had crashed in the scary mountain! Jeez, even the narrator said "And Pedro was gone." Disney can be mean. The only other thing of note was that the last segment really just served as an introduction to one of the main characters in Three Caballeros (which is our next film on the list). It's hard to rank the next 5 because I think they're all mostly terrible but I think this one might be the worst. Pedro was the only redeeming quality of the film to me and that was iffy at best. So I guess it's 5/5 (over the next 5 movies). All uphill from here then, right?

Fall Baking with Friends!

Welcome back! So sorry for the excessive delay in posting but don't worry, there has still been baking happening! As a matter of fact, this post will be a double dose of baking! As in there were two projects being baked SIMULTANEOUSLY. Wow. And lest you think that I have that much skill, let me assure you, I had help. Two of my good friends from college came to visit last weekend and on Saturday we had a slight baking and cooking frenzy. So to all those people who think I live a lonely existence with nothing but baked goods to keep me company...nah, I can't make that leap. But I had company this weekend! Yay!

Not knowing if my friends want to be referred to by name, I shall henceforth refer to them as Thing 1 and Thing 2. Those names are more giggle worthy anyway. In a celebration of Fall, we all went apple picking on Saturday morning. We were going to go to the Merrow Corn Maze as well but alas, they're closed this season. Stupid not wanting the soil to erode and ruining my fun. Anyway, in anticipation of the many apples we'd be able to pick we knew we'd obviously have to bake something with apples. Thing 1 had a lovely family recipe for Cranberry Crisp with Autumn Fruit so we decided that would be appropriate for our Fall excursion. After consulting the recipe, we decided to also pick up a couple pears at the apple picking place for the recipe.

After picking some apples we went into the store/stand/whatever place to pay for our apples (and pears) and we browsed around the shop for a bit. Behold! There we found packs of three cookie cutters each. One such pack had a leaf shaped cookie cutter and a pumpkin shaped cookie cutter. After great debate over whether that pack was superior to the pack with a turkey and a maple leaf, Thing 1 decided to get the pumpkin cookie cutter which (obviously) meant we would have to make some pumpkin shaped pumpkin cookies as well. Once we arrived at home, we googled a recipe (because apparently none of my cookbooks like pumpkin cookies) and found one for Pumpkin Spiced Cutout Cookies. Since we already had our hearts set on the Cranberry Crisp, we decided to just make both, in addition to the dinner we were already planning. I'm still surprised we had enough bowls and tools for everything we cooked.

Let the baking/cooking commence!

I'm going to try to post chronologically because everything was kinda getting cooked/baked simultaneously and it was a bit confusing. So to start out, Thing 1 and Thing 2 began with chopping some veggies for our dinner. We decided on grilled cheese with white cheddar cheese, browned (but not quite carmelized) onions, green peppers and tomato. I'm not familiar with cooking any of that stuff, being less diverse with my tastes so I started in on the baking. First order of business was to peel a bunch of apples and the pears that we got. And, wonder of wonders, I had a peeler! Who knew? So with a happy music playlist we were chopping, slicing, and peeling happily in my kitchen. Doesn't that make for a lovely picture? The apple and pear peeling went pretty well for me. I didn't even slice any of my nails with the peeler (a common Thanksgiving potato-peeling hazard) so the next step was to chop 1.5 cups of cranberries. For those of you not familiar with cranberries, they're kinda tiny. So I'm not entirely sure how I was supposed to chop them (Thing 1 suggested not chopping them at all but I will not deviate from the recipe!) but I just sliced them in half and deemed them chopped. This took a pretty significant amount of time. By now, the stuff for the grilled cheeses was just about done cooking so it was almost dinner time. I decided to just finish the first step of the recipe and add the sugar, flour, and cinnamon to the fruit. Now, Thing 1 has made this recipe before so when she asked if I had added the 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, that should have been a good tip off that she was right and I was wrong. Instead I said, "No, the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons!" In my defense, I had just read the recipe and the wording was confusing. The directions say to add 2 tablespoons of the flour and cinnamon. I don't know why I took that to mean 2 tablespoons of cinnamon without checking the ingredient list but there you have it. So, we had extra cinnamon-y cranberry crisp and Thing 1, I apologize for thinking you were wrong. Silly me.

Here we pause to eat a delicious dinner. Yum. Thank you Things 1 and 2 for cooking me dinner in my own home.

Following our incredibly filling meal, we set to work on finishing up the Cranberry Crisp and starting on the pumpkin cookies. While I finished stirring up the fruit and sugar mixture, Thing 2 got to work on the crumb mixture to sprinkle over the fruit mixture. This involved rolled oats, brown sugar, and flour and then cutting butter into that mixture with a pastry fork, I mean, regular fork because I don't have a pastry fork. Oh, and nuts too. I almost forgot about the nuts. I can't really say much on this process because I was in no way involved in it. Which was probably good for me but bad for you, dear readers, because I bet you would've loved reading about me cutting butter into that mixture. While this was going on, Thing 1 was mixing together the dry ingredients for the pumpkin cookies. All of a sudden there were beautiful smells of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, etc. It was happy.

I transferred the fruit to the baking dish (which Thing 1 had graciously greased for me) and while I was waiting for the crumbly topping to go on top, I got to work on the wet ingredients for the cookies. I'm tellin ya, we were a well-oiled machine in the kitchen. Everybody was doing something. So I used my trusty mixer to cream the butter, add some (dark!) brown sugar, some sugar, an egg, vanilla, and of course, pumpkin. Thing 1 had finished her task by then and measured out the pumpkin for me, which included actually opening the can. Given my experiences with can openers, I felt very fortunate to have had help with the challenging tasks. The last step to preparing the dough for these cookies was to combine the spice mixture from earlier. Now you get some interesting directions, folks! I was supposed to swap out the wire whisk for the flat beater. Hahaha. Silly. Oh wait, but it has directions for if you had been using a hand mixer: You might want to mix the ingredients by hand with a wooden spoon. Well sure. Apparently I don't want to overmix at this stage. So fine, I got out a wooden spoon and mixed in the ingredients a third at a time. It wasn't so bad until the last third when the dough got pretty heavy and hard to mix. I eventually got it though. Mission accomplished. Now I just had to split the dough in half and wrap each half in plastic to chill in the fridge for about half an hour. At this point, the Cranberry Crisp was in the oven and we were left with nothing to do for half an hour.

Scrabble time!

After a rousing and challenging game of Scrabble (I should note, I bought Scrabble for $1.00 at a yard sale. Allow me to bask in that triumph for a moment.) we took the crisp out of the oven to cool and got to work rolling out the cookie dough to make delightful Fall shaped cookies. The dough gets really sticky once it starts to get even a little warm, which I learned the first time I rolled out the dough because I a) didn't use quite enough flour and b) didn't roll quite quickly enough. Lesson learned though: Thing 1 rolled the dough out the rest of the time and she's a pro. Sadly, I didn't have any cute Fall colored sprinkles or anything to put on the cookies but we did find sugar "in the raw" in my cabinet which was cute to decorate some of the cookies with. We all pitched in with cutting out the cookies so we had adorable leaf shaped and pumpkin shaped cookies baking in several batches. During this time, I learned of the magic of parchment paper and how it allows you to not make a mess on your baking pan while baking. There was a moment of hesitation and debate with the parchment paper over whether or not it would catch on fire if it was hanging over the edge of the pan but we solved that by just trimming the ends of the parchment paper. Yay! Then we had to actually bake them and put the remaining dough back in the fridge. While they baked, we deviated from Scrabble and played a lovely game of Yahtzee. Halfway through Yahtzee (which, by the way, was invented on a yacht, hence the name), we paused to make another batch of cookies. After the game, we tasted our lovely Cranberry Crisp pictured below:

It was very yummy but very sweet and as I was still full from dinner, I didn't eat a whole lot of it. There won't be a critical reception section on the Cranberry Crisp because it's one of those things that's kinda messy and I really didn't want to bring it anywhere but the counter of my kitchen. Suffice it to say that the Things and I enjoyed it and I sent a good chunk of it back home with them to share with other people who hopefully also enjoyed it.

And now some cookies:

The cookies were also good. We described them as "a hearty cookie" because they are certainly hearty, if not a bit heavy. I'm not crazy about pumpkin cookies myself so I had a small taste and it was good but not something I want to eat an entire cookie of. These cookies will definitely end up being shared with the stat dept though. They're currently sitting in my office so my office now smells of pumpkin, nutmeg, and delicious. Thanks again to the guest stars of this blog post and for bringing me back up after my miserable brownie cups from the previous week.

Critical Reception:
Oh yeah, speaking of those brownie cups... I still maintain that they weren't good. I brought them in to the tutoring center on the day of my midterm to share with people. Ok, fine, it's more like I just dumped them there and went to take my test. I had one person tell me that they were good but it's possible that she was just being nice. However, maybe I just think that because that's what I would say in that situation. Then again, maybe I'm being overly critical of the brownie cups. I mean, they weren't terrific but it was far from the worst thing I've ever tasted in my life. Maybe my bar is just too high. Indecision! So, the jury is still out on the brownie cups because I don't know what anyone else thought...when I got back after my exam, the bag of brownie cups had mysteriously disappeared! I guess I should take that as a good sign?

A Disney Moment: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
And now your Disney moment. The first film in the Disney animated classic canon is, of course, Snow White. A timeless film from 1933 that I have not seen in at least 10 years I'd say. I was first struck by the fact that the animation is just lovely. There's just such charm to it. And the wobbly quality of the old VHS really helps. Aside: this film watching project was delayed for several weeks because somehow my family's copy of Snow White has been lost to time. On the bright side, once I got back to CT I went to the Goodwill store and found an old VHS copy for $1.00. Cheaper than renting from Redbox, folks. I highly recommend getting a VCR for 5 bucks and then frequenting your neighborhood thrift store or Goodwill store or yard sales looking for movies because it's way cheap and there's a lot of selection. Aside over.

Early in watching this movie with my mom and my sister, my mom made the comment that Snow White is a simple girl. She meant that in the non-complimentary sense. However, if you view the movie through that lens, everything makes a lot more sense. Particularly when I was getting so annoyed that every single freakin dwarf warns Snow White against strangers and then she lets the witch in anyway (except Dopey. Because he's mute.) Other thoughts include: how rude Snow White is to just instantly ditch the dwarfs who kept vigil at her coffin for the prince who she's met once before, why is the prince's castle in a cloud?, Snow White's voice is still absurdly high pitched and fake sounding, and this movie is still pretty terrifying. Between the running through the woods scene and the witch brewing the apple and the transformation potion (and the creepy skeleton in her basement, who I half believe is the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White), and finally, the two vultures circling overhead being just enough to imply that the witch is surely dead, it's a pretty scary movie. Overall, still a classic and out of the first 5 Disney films, I rank it about a 2 or a 3.