Outpost 505

We were supposed to get together for our regular bakefest the other weekend, but after helping Shannon and Matt move, we were more inclined to eat pizza and drink beer than to do anything useful. Which is what we did. And then I took a nap. And we didn’t get around to making these delicious [...]

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As I understand it, the holiday of Purim celebrates the Jews’ narrow avoidance of extermination at the hands of an evil man named Hamen. How the holiday came to involve also eating Hamen’s hat, I’m not sure, but it’s delicious and I’ll take it. I’ll also take any excuse to bake delicious pastries: After a [...]

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For our first baking brunch of the year, we took on cinnamon rolls. Ooey, gooey, sticky, nutty cinnamon rolls. Two and a half sticks of butter cinnamon rolls. Cinnamon perfection cinnamon rolls Cinnamon roll recipes fit into a funny category between sweet treats and yeast breads. Since they typically use a yeast dough, at least [...]

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So see, we had these for breakfast: That’s right. Homemade donuts. And a lot of them, including this beauty that I dipped myself: All made by the usual bakefest crew while we ate breakfast burritos and Matt and Shane stoked the fire in Olivia’s woodburning stove. So you can imagine that we were on a [...]

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Who would’ve thought you could go from this: to this: with really not THAT much effort? OK, it did involve ten minutes of kneading. And also clearing out my fridge so that 2 1/2 dozen bagels could do their thing: 2 minutes boiling in the pot, a bit of an egg wash, and some expert [...]

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Olivia has already done a great job of documenting what we baked, so I’ll focus on the rest of this morning’s bakefest: brunch.  Also the Leland Palmer, featured in this month’s Bon Appetit. I can’t fairly say that I was a Twin Peaks fan ‘back in the day’, as I didn’t discover the show until [...]

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I had good intentions for tonight.  They involved sitting on the couch with my knitting and watching The Straight Story or maybe The Jerk and a leetle bit of prep for the Saturday bakefest.  Instead I spent literally the entire evening in the kitchen, save the 15 minutes when I ran cookies over to SELMA.  [...]

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Shane left in the wee hours to drive to Indiana for Dark Lord Day, which, along with the drizzly spring weather, made it a perfect morning for brunch and baking – or, as I like to think of it, Fancy Lady Baking Brunch. After last month’s relatively successful batch of Twinkies, we settled on pop-tarts [...]

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I realized, in going through old posts, that I still owe you a post about my magical birthday confection, a croquembouche! Shane did a marvelous job of taking pictures, and Olivia has already posted a fantastic summary from imagination to execution to consumption.  I did an excellent job of making a sugar volcano when the [...]

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Today started with an outstanding breakfast and carried on full-bore to homemade Twinkies.  Pretty damned amazing. Breakfast: ruby-red grapefruit broiled with a bit of sugar.  Fresh squeezed orange juice for Shane from 2nds produce we found at Meijer.  Soft scrambled eggs with wheat toast and slices of avocado.  A pot of  Ethiopian Sidamo from Zingerman’s.  [...]

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