In the bakery

One of our friends from church, Ronnie, owns a bakery with his brother, who is a bread maker by trade.   It's just a few blocks from us in an affluent (more of less) part of the city.   Another friend, Kenneth, is working for him and is in charge of managing all aspects of the business.  Because the business is new and small, with only one location, Kenneth decided to try to negotiate a contract with a newly opened convenience store.  Success--as of last week, the store began selling their breads and pastries.  

Beyond this, Kenneth also wants to do something that will differentiate their bakery from the myriad of other bakeries here in the city.  He talked with me about whether I had any recipes that they might try.  He was specifically looking for some different types of cookies, healthy muffins and other kinds of sweet breads.   Friday we had a baking day here in my kitchen!  He left with a loaf of poppy seed bread, healthy whole wheat blueberry muffins and craisin oatmeal cookies.  He shared the samples with Ronnie and his brother and said that they both loved them.  For now, he is going to start the search for the ingredients, which will likely be no small task.  For example, we don't know if he can find poppy seeds and I've never seen applesauce (it's a main ingredient for the muffins), except snack size with sugar and/or cinnamon. 

We've got another baking sample day planned soon.  They would like to have 2-3 healthy muffin options so next time we'll be making carrot/apple muffins and whole wheat banana muffins.  We're also thinking about some good bar recipes and maybe peanut butter cookies and a chocolate, chocolate chip cookie.  We'll see . . . sounds like fun to me.

Stay tuned and I'll keep you posted on whether or not these goodies end up in the bakery!

  

Candy, Cookies and Best Friends

There's nothing like time spent with your best girl friend!  Stephen is in West Plains visiting his parents, so I've been staying with the Guenthers to get in some extra girl friend time.  Terisa went to work early so she could come home early and we could get started on Christmas treats.  
Last night's cooled strawberry cake was the foundation for cake balls!  Love those little sweet morsels of goodness.  

Also on the agenda was "never-fail" microwave peanut brittle.  The recipe sounded too good to be true since my memory of making peanut brittle is of stirring the mixture forever while using the candy thermometer to be sure it gets to the correct "hard-ball" stage (about 305 degrees.)   In fact, the first batch proved the recipe title wrong!  Guess the old saying that the power of microwave ovens varies is true because the 4-, 4-, 2-minute recipe resulted in over cooked peanut brittle which just tasted burned.  We had enough stuff for a second batch, but the dilemma--how long to cook it?  We found some other recipes which suggested a 4-, 3-, 2-minute cooking time so we opted for that.  Success!  It really tasted amazing and is very easy.  Here's the link--same recipe works for all kinds of nuts, including cashews, almond, pecan, macadamia, etc.  Just be sure to adjust the time for your microwave!

The sugar cookie dough chilled while we made these treats and ate dinner, which was a delicious homemade chicken pot pie!  We tried the sour cream sugar cookie recipe that's been all over Facebook for the last month.  It is supposed to render very soft, not crispy sugar cookies.  Ethan and Chloe helped us cut them out (Michael took pictures, but I don't have them.)  Chloe loved adding the sprinkles after they were frosted.  They turned out cute, the dough was easy to work with, the frosting is simple, but I'm not convinced they are the best tasting sugar cookies.  

However, baking was just the medium to spend time together and that was a rousing success.  Love how God has knitted our lives together so that even though we've been apart for 5+ months, we can pick up right where we left off.