Christmas and Lessons in Baking: Nutella Christmas Tree and Sugar Cookies

We had a really fun Christmas this year because we knew Sophie wouldn't "get" it yet, and she didn't, so we were very happy with our decision to not go hard on presents for her and instead wrapped some of her favorite things, like vegetable pouches from Costco and Goldfish crackers. And she was delighted! It was fun to have her be a little more interactive on Christmas morning though.

We had family over on Christmas Day to decorate sugar cookies and boy did we decorate sugar cookies. I still can't look at the small stash that I still have3 because I ate way too many of them on the day.

Christmas morning Sophie

New Cocomelon blanket!

One of my crown jewels

My other crown jewel

I had also decided to try this Nutella pull-about Christmas tree. It wasn't until after I made the dough (challah) that I realize - wtf was I doing? I should have made a pastry sheet. I was in a bit of a bad mood after that because I knew that it wouldn't turn out the way it was supposed to. I expected it to be a total disaster but instead it was just a minor one. I'm probably lucky because the taste of Nutella covers a multitude of errors!

I'll try again someday with the right kind of dough and try to critique it then.

This week has been a bit of a struggle since AJ is working, I'm off and Sophie's daycare is closed, so a lot of trying to find things to do during the day, which is challenging in the winter when not only is it colder, but it's been raining?? What?? We don't know how to operate in the rain out here! We did have a day at the zoo, which was great cause we hadn't been there in awhile and she really seemed more attentive to it and what was going on, and then my mom and Jim got us in to Knott's with them and that was fun (especially after AJ showed up and could help with Sophie, especially in the lines ughhhh) but she had a great time!

The ultimate hit was the carousel - she was wary of it until she saw the giraffe and then that was all she could talk about. She had to have the giraffe, and she had to keep riding it. She went on it 3 times I think, once with AJ, once with me and once with my mom, and she also got the hang of waving as she passed by us which was the most darling part ever!

 

 

 

It's New Year's Eve today which is a bit secondary for us, because we have the somewhat misfortune of having a very close friend (and one of Sophie's 2 godmothers) having a birthday on December 30, which means that we tend to go hard on December 30 and then we feel like December 31 is actually New Year's Day because we're so dead. It's not so bad today, but we'll probably have (yet another) lowkey New Year's Eve.

Happy New Year's!

Lessons in Baking: Mini Top Shelf Rolls

I still had pie crust and custard left over and I had the idea to try to make Em's Honey Custard Tarts as tiny, bite-sized pieces, both to use up the ingredients and also to just attempt those.

In short: turned out just fine.

What I've learned is to be more generous with the dough. I was worried in such a small area that too much dough would either not cook thoroughly enough, or fill too much of the space and not leave room for any of the filling. But, that wasn't the case and they got flake and hard to pull out of the dish without them crumbling.

Still, not too bad and the presentation was even a little nicer with the scalloped tops. I even tried some raspberry preserve filling for a few of them too.

Filling with pie beads before baking

Before going in the oven

Baked and completed

I still need to work on presentation but again, that's not really my focus lately. They turned out fine though.

Lessons in Baking: Top Shelf Rolls

On the advice of Aunt Judee to explore some Top Shelf Rolls recipes, I finally had the chance to explore it (and this comes after me having made pie crust for it weeks ago and freezing it... we've just been so busy lately!) and we chose Em's Honey Custard Tarts, which was a serendipitous way to honor sweet Midna.

I even played around and made my first Instagram reel with this experience. Those things are tedious! And also kinda addicting haha.

So what did I learn this time around... I think my pie crusts were a little thick for the ramekins. To be fair, the recipes calls for a muffin pan, but I wanted to try out the ramekins. I felt they were a great mix of sweet and not (I don't make the pie crusts sweet in any way) and the custard turned out pretty good for a first pass! It needs to be either made thicker or baked longer though, so you could cut it without it running, which wasn't quite the case. And also, garnish goes a long way! Of course, I just made these for us so wasn't too concerned about that, but for future reference. Need to get better at making these prettier.

But, a great first pass at a Top Shelf Roll!

Lessons in Baking: (Individual) Cream Cheese Danishes

The recipe for raspberry/cheese danish I made last week made dough for two (huge!) pastries, so I saved half of it, and remembered I still had that dough and needed something to do with it... maybe too late. I decided to try making a few smaller, individual-sized versions.

Despite storing it appropriately (I think?? I'm still new around here) the dough became kinda difficult to work with. It was almost spongey, just really hard to mold, and that's what I blame on how half of these turned out hahaha

Pre-baking

Post-baking

It was fun to try to think of new shapes or way to make them, but they just were not working with the dough being so dough-y and not keeping, so, lesson learned. Any dough saved for later shouldn't be utilized for anything intricate. Only boring old loaves.

Lessons in Baking: Raspberry Cheese Danish

This recipe I found for a raspberry cheese danish seemed completely innocuous. I thought it was a normal amount (I mean, only 3 cups of flour...) but as a sweet bread, it apparently is a lot lighter and airier with a lot more to go around. It wasn't until the dough was prepared and ready to get into crafting the danish that it instructed me to divide the dough into two and each one would be rolled out to a 10x12 inch rectangle! That's massive! So I set half aside (which I am now realizing that second half probably needs to be baked today, but I am way too tired) and decided to just make one.

Just making one meant that I needed to halve the filling recipe, which seemed simple enough, but I feel like I must have messed it up somehow, because the cream cheese filling ended up very runny, which didn't necessarily ruin it, but it was a bit of a problem. So, next time I think it'll call for more cream cheese than it's asking for.

With how runny it was, it was a bit difficult to evenly spread the raspberry preserves on top, but funny enough the final product seems primarily raspberry preserves.

The way the instructions said to assemble the danish made sense and I could see it in my head, but as I was doing it, it wasn't turning out at all like I was expecting. I was thinking it would be a rectangle with X's across it, but instead it became more of a loaf with a braided appearance. Maybe that's how it was supposed to be. I don't really mind, but it was difficult to work it with the filling spilling out everywhere.

Nevertheless, the finished product turned out nice I think!

It spread out a lot more than I thought it would, so for future reference, I should probably hit the center harder with any pre-baking toppings I use (instead of the vanilla glaze I just used Swedish pearl sugar here).

It is HUGE but I think I'd like to try to make more individual-sized ones in the future rather than this big ol' loaf (at least when it's just three adults here in this house and I am limiting my sugar as much as possible).

This was one of the funnest things to make so far though.