Post for Emily

Not Emily Post, this Emily!

Emi has decided to take up baking and I'm sure she's going to be excellent at it. She recently asked about recommendations for baking gear. I was putting together an email for her about all of my favorites, but I decided to put it on here instead. So here you go, Emi, here's what my

perfect dream kitchen would contain:

For cookies and almost all other baking needs:

I like a heavy aluminum half-sheet. I get all worried about the non-stick stuff that comes on a lot of cookie sheets, so I prefer this plain, non-treated kind. Besides, most cookies don't need greased sheets anyway. If you need to make your pan non-stick (for candy or biscuits, etc.) you could use a silpat:

These silicon baking sheets prevent things from sticking, but they are essentially made of woven glass, not scary chemicals, so I think they're probably safer. Plus, they make cookies cook really evenly and they turn out fluffy and perfect. I also use my silpat to roll out bread dough and pastry. Speaking of pastry, I'm sure it's familiarity with what my mom taught me to use, but I don't think there's a better kitchen tool than the pastry knife:

I use mine for pastry (duh), for making crumbs for apple pie and struesel, for mashing small amounts of mashed potatoes and for crushing up basil before I put it in the blender when I make pesto.

For cakes, which I cannot stop making entirely too often, I use my beloved mixer. It is a Sunbeam Mixmaster. While I would dearly love a pale blue Kitchen Aid, my Mixmaster kicks a lot of ass. It's a powerful mixer and it never ever shoots dough across the kitchen and it never ever gets clogged up beaters. I especially love that I have a mixer that is the same brand and the same design as the one my mom has and the one my grandmom used. Can't beat that!

My cake pans are really cool, but I couldn't find pictures of them. They are 9" dark metal (think calphalon dark) and have silicon handles so you can hold them almost right out of the oven. I'm suggesting these pans for Emily:

They are the same heavy aluminum as the half sheet. I think I would buy the 8" diameter instead for a couple of reasons. First, I think that a smaller pan yields a taller cake, and I think that looks better than a wider cake. Second, I'm not sure if it is my oven or the elevation here in Tucson, but I find that the edges burn less and the cake cooks more evenly in a deeper pan.

In case you're worried about your own oven, get one of these:

For bread, roasts, and soups with fry starts, I love love love these enameled cast iron dutch ovens:

Emily totally called it on these, Lodge makes the nicest and prettiest version. They are heavy and seem to last a long time, I've had a lodge pan since I first went to college and it looks brand new.

The last thing I can think of that I really use a lot is a metal spatula.

It is perfect for icing (which I absolutely suck at) but I also use it for picking up fragile things off of baking pans (fiddly brownies, candy, etc.). You could also use it for fish in a frying pan, since it's nice and long.

Oh, and there's also my silver fork. I couldn't make a thing if it weren't for my favorite silver fork.

I hope this helps Emily! You know, even though all this stuff is cool, and I would love to have a whole kitchen full of perfect tools, you can make delicious awesome looking food without any of it.

The most important thing I use when I bake is experience. If it weren't for my mom letting me bake with her for so long, I wouldn't know how to do anything. She's the best baker there is. Maybe she has some gear suggestions?

Countdown

I forgot to mention earlier how excited we are here for football season....
We created a countdown on the chalkboard in the kitchen. Every day for the next twelve (looooong) days, we will cross off one gator tail until the happy morning of September 5th. It's Game Day eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve eve!

Baking

Well well well. It seems like once again, all I blog about is food.

This weekend I decided it was high time to make some more tiny cakes. I whipped up some plain old buttery, rich yellow cake in my tiny cake pans that I bought for Kacy's shower last year.

Then I baked them all together on a tray. I let them cool and then was free to experiment. Each cake has three layers, so there was plenty of room for icing and flavoring. On the first one, I spread lemon curd between the layers (oh how I love lemon curd) and then iced it with cream cheese vanilla icing. I decorated it with my favorite little fake daisies. Annnnd, I might have eaten a slice for breakfast. shhh.The other cake was for Rob. In between the layers is blackberry preserves. Then I mixed the preserves with the cream cheese icing and iced the whole cake with the purpleish mixture. I stuck it in the fridge for a while to set, then I iced over that with normal, non berry icing.

Of course I covered it with sprinkles. Rob hearts sprinkles more than cake.

I can't get enough of tiny cakes. I wish I lived back east so I could hand deliver one to my lovely niece who just had her first birthday!!! Happy Birthday sweetie!

This is a little candle holder that I made for her for her birthday. Well, it's like the one that I made her. The real one is hopefully on a USPS plane speeding its way toward her right now.

Return from Obscurity

Ahhh. I'm home. Home home home. It has been a really long field season this year. We left for Mule Creek in late May, and here I am, finally reunited with my dear computer on August 18.
I have hiked more than 60 miles, driven 15000 miles, seen a moose, a marmot, a bear, a ringtail, bighorn sheep, and lots of pronghorn. I've been to 26 states and 34 national parks and monuments.
I have been nearly killed by rain, lightning, wind, raccoons, and one giant spider in Louisiana.

Now that I am back, I plan to enjoy:
1. a bed. and a pillow. and a roof
2. showering in bare feet
3. using the bathroom in bare feet
4. not waiting in line for breakfast/lunch/dinner
5. getting up after dawn

and most importantly, the company of my awesome husband, our friends, and all of you.

I'm BACK!!!!!

Mischief Managed

All of yesterday's projects were total successes!

The chocolate chocolate chip cookies are outrageously good. They are going to be added to next year's cookie party for sure. I'm currently eating them for breakfast because R. isn't up yet and I can't get in trouble. hee hee.

The trickier project was the new chalkboard in the kitchen. This was much harder than I thought it would be. I planned to just yank it down and spray paint it a few times, but R. made sure we did it right.
He was very careful about how we took it down, so we didn't hurt the wall or the board. pah!. Oh, you know what? There's nothing at all under the board. I fully expected a hole or an old utility box, or at least a portal to another dimension, but there was nothing! I guess somebody put it up so they wouldn't have to drill holes in the adobe to hang the towel bar. Now I feel kind of bad that I've been making fun of it for so long.
I sanded the board and took out all the old nails and screws. Then I spackled all the holes and sanded it again. Then I put on the first coat of chalkboard paint and actually waited to put on the next two. My patience and maturity are astounding.
After four coats, it's very smooth and looks just like a real chalkboard. I can't write on it yet. Sigh. It has to cure for a whole 24 hours. Tonight at exactly 9:16 I'm going to write all over it. Yay!

I'm up to something

I have big ambitious plans for today. The first involves this really awkward corner in my kitchen. It's right by the stove. Some genius patched some kind of problem with the wall with a giant piece of wood that sticks out about an inch. It used to be sort of off white and dingy, but I painted it bright orange to make it blend in. That sounds kind of funny. You generally don't paint things bright orange to make them more subtle. Anyway, it's very ugly and very weird. There are all kinds of nail holes and screws in it. There are two towel bars right on top of eachother- everything about it sucks.
So, I'm thinking about making it into a chalkboard! I bought the chalkboard paint, now all I have to do is take down the huge scary piece of wood, sand it, and remove the dozens of tiny nails and screws. I can't wait. We can write our menu on it, or write recipes on it while we cook, or keep the shopping list up there. I can hardly make it worse, right? I mean, it's a giant orange eyesore now, the worst that can happen is I make it a giant black eyesore.


The other thing I have up my sleeve for the afternoon is this:


hell yes.

What is this?

Dear Ashley,
I'm very sorry that you've been stuck eating cupcakes for so long. Here's a new post just for you.

I bought this at the antique store the other day. I'm very excited about it and I can't wait to use it....except for one little thing. I don't know what it is!

It's a flower-shaped tube with little metal caps on both ends.



I don't generally buy stuff just because it's flower shaped or anything, but this was only a dollar and I saw big potential. I suspect that it is a kitchen utensil, so I'm pretty sure it's food-safe (I washed it about eighty times). My first thought was molded jello- that you could slice up and have little flower-shaped chunks of jello. Well, ok, that wasn't really my first thought. My first plan for it is probably not very practical (or possible). I want to bake cake in it. Chocolate cake, that I will slice up and then ice. Ooo! Or brownies that could be sliced with blobs of ice-cream on them!

On the boring side of experimentation, we could just freeze ice or juice in it and then float it in a pitcher of iced tea or something. Or punch. More awesome (and less likely) options include molding ice cream and then refreezing it . Wouldn't little flower-shaped ice cream cakes be delicious and pretty? You could potentially also use this like a big cookie cutter. You could make a sandwich, and then jam this into it, cutting out a flower-shaped sandwich and then move on to the next sandwich, filling the tube with a stack of pretty sandwiches. Unfortunately, I think only me and Katie would appreciate such fussy sandwiches. It kind of makes me want to find someone to throw a shower for!
What else could I use this for? Does anybody know what this thing is actually supposed to be? Aunt Joan? Ever seen anything like this? The store also had star shapes and heart shapes, so if this works, I'm going back to get more. Normally, I would have been all over the star shape, but I'm playing it safe with no tight corners. It's very hard to get a failed attempt at molded cake out of little star points.