baking action 8/9/09

I wasn't cooking most of the week because I was on vacation, but I hate to admit that I missed it. I didn't miss not doing dishes, though.

This week in the brownie baking, I used the "standard" Hershey recipe but I melted the butter and mixed the cocoa with it. I like the taste and texture of that particular procedure. Everything else was the usual except I substituted 1 very ripe banana for 1 egg. The brownies have a slight banana taste and a fudgey texture. I also just remembered I forgot to put the vanilla extract in. Oh well, it worked anyway.

My yeast experiment this week did not go so well. I tried to make yeasted doughnuts from Favorite Breads from Rose Lane Farm but I must have done something wrong or it was just too hot. The dough smelled more like alcohol and I didn't bake with it. I think the yeast bloomed out too quick or I made a mistake in the directions. I buried it in the back yard;) I will try again next weekend to make the doughnuts. Not a good batting average on doughnuts so far - two strikes. I made the fried kind quite a few years ago. They turned out horrible looking and tasting. I was going to toss them but my younger son wasn't home yet and he knew I was making doughnuts. He saw them and thought they were chocolate covered, that's how bad they looked. My dad used to make doughnuts in a huge cast iron skillet. Our dog, King, would stay in the kitchen watching the doughnut production. Once in a while, Dad's fork (that's what he used to pick up the doughnuts) would slip and a doughnut would hit the floor. King would run over, grab the doughnut and take it back to his original spot. He'd wait patiently for the doughnut to cool off enough so he could eat it. He had more sense than my siblings and I - we'd try to eat it hot.

As for the cake this week, I had thought about making a pineapple pound cake. But there was a good price on strawberries at the grocery store, so I bought them. Now, my idea of strawberry shortcake is as follows - mashed sweetened berries, a biscuit/scone like flat piece and having the biscuit soak up the strawberry juice. Yummers.
But I was making a cake for my beloved and that's not what he's used to. So I made the vanilla cake, sliced up strawberries and put them on top. I did make a major error on that, too. I over filled the cake pan I was using. Luckily, I had enough sense to put a cookie sheet under the pan. I thought I would need the "jaws of life" to get the cake out of the pan, but it came out easily once the overflow part was cut away. Even the overflow part tasted good.

That's it for this week.I thought Iwas going to bake more, but I sort of pooped out (it is August, after all).
Have a good week.