Recipe #29, #30, #31: Scones, Pie, and Rolls

Recipe: Maple Pecan Scones
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hr 15 min
Ease: 6
Taste: 7
Leftover Value: 10
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer!

Recipe: Flat Apple Pie
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hour (does not include time to make pie crust)
Ease: 4
Taste: 5
Leftover Value: 2
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!

Recipe: Cinnamon Rolls
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 2 hrs 30 min
Ease: 10
Taste: 10
Leftover Value: 10
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep in the Strainer!

The following three recipes were made along with about ten other recipes for my Thanksgiving breakfast.  If you're just reading this blog for the first time, you may require an explanation for why our breakfast is comprised of dessert items.  This post or this post should help to explain the madness.

Scones baffle me.  Anytime I make them they seem that they will be a complete flop and yet in the end somehow wind up coming together beautifully.

Between cutting up the dough for the scones and rolling out dough for four different pies, my arms certainly got a workout!

The dough of scones is supposed to be stirred until "just combined".

Boy, do I hate that description.  What exactly does 'just combined' mean?  And where is the logic in stirring until 'just combined' when the next step is going to direct me to dump this mass out onto my cutting board only to combine it completely.

Thank goodness I had my favorite helper with me so that I didn't meditate on such nonsense for too long.

Watch and you'll see what I mean about the craziness that is scone.  The bowl of 'just combined' ingredients when dumped on the table couldn't look less combined.

This is the point where I cringe and begin to convince myself that I will be dumping my scone dough into the trash.

Then magically, this happens:

and suddenly all is right with the world.

I do realize that it has something to do with the chunks of cold butter that are cut into the dough.  Perhaps what I have difficulty understanding is how anyone ever decided to make a pastry this way.

Not that I'm really complaining. 

Because scones are awesome.

One complaint, which I realized as I pressed the dough to size, was that the scones were going to be monster huge.  I didn't want to stray away from the recipe's directions, so even though it would have been better for my breakfast to have them at half the size, I cut them into the eight pieces as PW instructs.*

*I did, however, break them up into quarters after Thanksgiving breakfast.

You can't tell from the picture, but these puppies are as big as my hand.

A scone is no good without icing, at least that's my theory.  Here is where the maple part comes in.  The icing is made or powdered sugar, whole milk, butter, a splash of coffee, a dash of salt, and a little maple extract.*

*I couldn't find maple extract anywhere so I used maple syrup--same thing, right?

It seemed like too much icing at first, but then I came to my senses and realized that you can never have too much icing.

It worked out nicely that three of the recipes I needed to make for my recipe challenge would fit perfectly with my Thanksgiving breakfast.

Pioneer Woman's Flat Apple Pie is such a great idea, but in the end, I'm not so sure it works.

At least for those of us who bake our pies the day ahead.

I used the same crust that I made for PW's chicken pot pie.  This made life pretty easy because I could just grab the crusts out of the freezer, let them thaw for 20 minutes, and then use them.

Although I wasn't in love with the final product of this recipe, I was in love with this:

The apple filling mixture was so delicious that my helpers and I could have eaten the entire bowl and skipped the whole pie part.  I equate it to caramel apples, just without all the stickiness.

Again, I think this is such a fantastic idea.  It makes life easy, and each pie requires only one pie crust.

We did run into an issue when I realized that I only had one cookie tray left to bake on (because, naturally we were baking other things at the same time).

So four spatulas were used to lift the pie and place it in a pie pan so that the second flat apple pie could be made on top of the cookie tray.*

*Note: The recipe makes two apple pies.  This is important because if you only want one and you peel and slice five apples, you will probably be upset.  Peeling and slicing apples is no joke.  Unless of course you own one of those fancy shmancy apple peeler/corers.  Then I'm sure life is awesome for you. 

Here is where the problem occurred.  Though the apple mixture was delicious, it was also messy.  With both pies I made, the mixture oozed out of the crust and onto the pan.  This made cutting and scooping the pie quite difficult, especially for the pie that we saved to eat on Thanksgiving morning.*

*The pie baked on the cookie tray basically crumbled apart when I tried to move it from the tray.  This was partially due to the stickiness of the insides that had spilled out onto the tray and partially due to the flaky crust.

I've saved the very best for last.  These cinnamon rolls are out of this world--but they are incredibly hard work.  My sister-in-law usually comes over to make these with me and we have it down to a science.

I've already blogged about these before so if you'd like to read about the process go here.

Or, just stare and drool at the below picture.

Thanksgiving Delights: Part Four, Cinnamon Rolls

Recipe: Cinnamon Rolls

Source: The Pioneer Woman

http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2007/06/cinammon_rolls_/

Time: 3 hours

Ease: 10

Taste: 10

Leftover Value: 10

Down the Drain or Keep it in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!

I've saved the piece de resistance for last.

Every single time I make these, something seemingly terrible happens and I fear the worst.

Something like, I double the batch instead of halving it.  Or, I forget to let the buns rise before shoving them into the oven.

You do things like this too, right?  Please say you do.

But in the end, they always come out looking like this:

and all my fears subside.

Before I carry on, I want to take this moment to mention the star of my Thanksgiving breakfast:

Dear dear butter.  How could we exist without the goodness you add to cakes and pastries?

I'm sure my thighs could still exist, but my heart would have an empty butter shaped hole.

Alright, enough of the sentimental stuff.

These cinnamon buns start out friendly.  The first steps require combining a warm liquid mixture with yeast.  Then, mixing it all together with flour.

A lot of flour.

Hence why I desired to cut the recipe in half a few years ago to no avail.

The dough sits for an hour.  I spend this hour trying to throw together one of my easier Thanksgiving breakfast recipes.  This year I spent this time making the Mini Cherry Pecan Pie 'dough'.

I always use this pot and I'm always annoyed when after an hour is up I realize I meant to use my larger pot.

The moral of this story is: use a large pot.  And of course, don't be like me.

After the hour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt are sprinkled on top of the mixture.  They are then mixed into the dough along with another cup of flour.*

*Note: You will more than likely need to add even more flour.  I always knead the dough and then think, "Gee, this seems a little moist but I think it will work" and then I'm filled with regret later.

Because the step that follows is going to make your cinnamon rolls even more moist, gooey, and messy.  It's what takes this recipe from fun and friendly to painful agony.

Okay, I'm a little dramatic.  It isn't quite that bad.

What you're looking at, dear friends, is what I imagine the entryway of heaven must look like.  Golden and delicious.

Alright, I'm not sure about the delicious part, but a girl can dream, can't she?

Because in the recipe she says you can use even more butter for the filling, I use exactly how much the recipe states (because even that seems a bit excessive considering the looks of the above picture).  This is followed by covering the butter with cinnamon and sugar.  The dough is then rolled towards you into one long luscious log of liberty.*

*This makes sense, I promise.

Because I like to give you the cold hard truth here about the recipes I try out, I am going to tell you the mixture of issues I always have at this step.  First of all, my cinnamon rolls always end up oozing buttery pools mixed with cinnamon sugar by the end of the roll.  The next problem is the dough isn't firm.  This doesn't create the perfectly formed cinnamon buns you see in all the Pillsbury commercials.  Instead my buns look like Pillsbury blobs.

Yet, once I assemble my blobs into their pans, bake them, and ice them, they always end up looking like this:



So for all the faults I have encountered in making these gorgeous globs of goodness, I suppose if they always come out tasting delicious, that's all that matters in the end.

Last Day of Summer Break Brunch

Today is my last day of freedom.  Thank goodness my good friend Megan suggested coming over for brunch instead of me wasting this day crying the blues about going back to the daily grind.

P.S. Thanks for putting up listening to me complain about going back to the daily grind.  Especially to those of you who haven't been able to take a break from it.  We teachers are spoiled beyond reason!

I wanted to make something either on the sweet savory side or a fruity muffin delight.  Since I had already made blueberry muffins this summer (I promise, I will post it....eventually) and though strawberry cupcakes looked tempting, I couldn't rationalize them as proper brunch food.  I went with Pioneer Woman's Pull Apart Bread.

Sometimes I completely forget that I am human and imagine that I can complete tasks at superhuman speed.  In other words, I really needed three and a half hours to completely make my bread, and I only had three.

This might seem like nothing to you, but it made my brain turn sideways and my eyes start to spin uncontrollably.  True story.

This pull apart bread was quite interesting.  It wasn't until I was hands deep in butter and cinnamon sugar that I realized I was basically making cinnamon rolls.  Pioneer Woman states at least once, but probably twice, in the recipe how it is simply her cinnamon roll recipe but just delivered a different way, but I refused to believe it.

Cinnamon rolls are complicated and this, I reasoned, was not.

Instead of rolling the butter and cinnamon sugar coated dough, you are supposed to cut it into eight strips.  The strips are then stacked on top of one another and sliced into squares.  The squares are placed in a buttered bread pan and then baked.

The problem I faced was that in her pictures she did not melt the butter, but she smeared it onto the dough.  The recipe, however, said to melt the butter.  So I, of course, followed the recipe.  This, and a very sticky dough, made it difficult to simply lift the squares up off the table, let alone stack them on top of one another.

Somehow I managed, but I concluded that pull apart bread was just as complicated as cinnamon rolls.

My bread still had twenty minutes to go once Megan had arrived.

She didn't want to be in the picture, but I insisted.

I love Megan.  When I taught third grade, she worked in my classroom during the first period of the day.  My students loved her, and I loved her being there.  I miss my daily dose of Megan.

As much as I love her, she also makes me feel old.  Because before she ever worked in my classroom, before we ever enjoyed delicious brunch together, I used to babysit her and her older sister, Emily.

Now Emily is married and Megan is in college and I want to cry.

Good thing I have this picture to take my mind off of that.  Pioneer Woman does recommend cutting the recipe in half, but of course I had already poured and combined my first three ingredients when I remembered that I meant to remind myself to cut everything in half.

Goodness.

Now I have a loaf of pull apart bread in my freezer, a loaf on the table, and Megan has half a loaf with her at home.

Megan brought breakfast squares.  These weren't any ordinary breakfast squares (though, I'm not sure if I've ever had a breakfast square to date).  They were sausage, egg, and cheese with croissant holding the entire thing together.  Here's what she did to make it extremely delectable: she cooked the sausage, then put it through the food processor.

Brilliant.  Here's my beef with sausage.  I don't like the crumbly texture of link sausage, and those sausage patties aren't much better.  But thrown through the food processor?  It's like a completely different animal.

She gave me the leftovers and I may or may not have already heated up a square to snack on.

Since I didn't make anything fruity, I decided to throw some fruit on the side to add a little color to our plates.

But these....these breakfast squares were where it's at.  I'm not exactly sure where that is, but it's a real happening place that everyone should go to.

While in Shoprite earlier this week I saw this and my ever compulsive need to try new things took over.  I knew it would be perfect for our brunch.

If you haven't seen this yet, run to your local grocery store and search for it today.  Though it could never be the real thing (fresh is fresh, am I right?), it was close enough.

Going back to work is tough, but sharing my last day off brunching with a friend like Megan makes it just a tad easier.

We'll see how I feel Monday morning....

Apples and Buns

I love box mixes.  Especially ones that taste like I slaved for hours and hours in the kitchen, but in reality took about half a minute to mix together.

I had accumulated a few mixes and decided to make them all this weekend (don't worry, I had company over to eat them).  You've already heard about my awesome donuts.  I ordered two boxes of them online and decided this was the weekend to make one of them. 

The other two mixes I had never made before: Nana's Apple Cake Mix and Dove Cinnamon Roll Mix.

My friend Lisa bought me the cinnamon roll mix as a Christmas present along with two boxes of truffle fudge brownie mix.  Lisa is one of my favorite people in the world, not only because she buys me delicious treats that she knows I will love, but because she would never judge me for sitting down and eating the whole tray of cinnamon rolls all by myself.

It's a good thing I had friends to share them with, because otherwise that would be the tale I have to tell you.

They were that good.

They were also that good that they were being devoured so quickly that I had to grab one and put it in hiding for my husband who hadn't come home from work yet.

I do have to tell you that making these cinnamon rolls is not for wimps.  This was not your typical throw-some-water-in-with-the mix-and-it's-done situation.  But I loved it.  It made me feel like I was earning the credit I would receive later for how delicious they were.

And if only I had taken a picture when they were first out of the oven and not half demolished.  That would have been nice.  On the other hand, it is a testament to how scrumptious these cinnamon rolls were.

By the way, that's cream cheese frosting on there and I could eat it by the bowlful, shamelessly.

Now I'd like to introduce you to Nana's Apple Cake Mix.  This was one of those blink-and-you're-done-preparing-it mixes.  Three ingredients: chopped apples, water, and the mix.  I got a little fancy and drizzled caramel on top of my piece and then microwaved it a little.  

I'm wild, I know.

In closing, I think you should know I'm a big advocate of box mixes despite my love for making things from scratch.  After all, every girl needs a break every once in a while.