French Fridays with Dorie: Bubble Brioche

Yay, I joined the French Fridays with Dorie group!! I missed this weeks, too late to make the Brioche, but can't wait to make next weeks recipe!

Christmas presents

For Christmas I got 2 cookbooks, both by Dorie Greenspan, Around My French Table and Baking: From my house to yours. I made my first recipe yesterday, the chocolate chip cookies.... I made 2 different types, double chocolate with coconut and chocolate with caramel. The double chocolate are amazing, so rich and perfect! The chocolate chip with caramel are very tasty, but I kept the caramel pieces too big and they are a bit hard. Lessons for next time: keep caramel pieces small.

Anyway, I found a great online cooking group called French Fridays with Dorie that is cooking their way through Around My French Table, I am very excited about this!!

Happy New Year!!!

Happy New Year!! Well, it has been a crazy busy 2 months, between the holidays, trying to get the house ready to put on the market, and losing a full blown battle with a sidewalk (injuries: ankle sprain, scraped elbow and knee), I cannot believe that it is January already!

The holidays were wonderful, Christmas with a toddler is magical, everything was so exciting for him and us by extension. I worked on Christmas, but we had a big dinner at the fire station with everyone's family. It was a very nice day, lots of cooking. I made vanilla cupcakes with buttercream for Christmas Eve, New York style crumb cake for Christmas morning, and sweet potato casserole for dinner. Also helped a coworker make Salted Nutella Fudge (amazing!). Everything turned out awesome and we were all in a food coma before 1800!

Ughhh...

I am sick, thought at first I was just fighting a cold, now, starting to believe it might have morphed into a sinus infection. Ughhhh..... I can't taste or smell anything. Being sick sucks.

Happy Halloween!!!

It is going to be a fun sugar filled night of trick or treating! The highlight of my day will be dressing little man and taking him out tonight, he gets so excited! Until then, it will be hang out at home and cook soup. I am trying to fight off a major cold and am thinking some wonderful hot soup will help. I am taking a sausage and kale soup recipe from www.prouditaliancook.com and adding a few things that need to be used out of the frig. It should make a yummy and comforting lunch! If it is good, I will post the recipe.

Right now, I am eating what I believe is the child of a navel orange and a ruby red grapefruit. They are delicious!

Heavenly world of pumpkin

I made what started out as pumpkin chocolate bars (I added cranberries and walnuts also), but I over mixed them and was too lazy to get the 9x13 pan down, so they became cake cookie things....they are amazing, I can't stop eating them. My only problem is that they are falling apart! But the broken ones are just as yummy as the whole ones!

Also made some amazing roasted sweet potato soup (added a bit of squash and pumpkin), I have only tasted a little, waiting for dinner to have a bowl with marscapone and bacon on top!

Food, food, and more food

Still on a baking roll this week, so far I made cream cheese banana bread (amazing), more roasted chickpeas, pumpkin donut holes (from www.twopeasandtheirpod.com, so yummy!), pumpkin bread (from www.mybakingaddiction.com, oh yeah pumpkin heaven), chocolate chip bars, roasted acorn squash risotto, and roasted tomato soup (from www.smittenkitchen.com, so good on a cool day!). Hubby and I also made sausage gravy and biscuits yesterday for breakfast.... so it has been a quite a culinary couple of weeks. I have really enjoyed baking and cooking, it has been a nice stress reliever and a lot of fun getting my little angel to help. The key that I have to start doing, is not to eat everything I bake.... it is making maintaining weight a bit challenging if I eat three servings of the yummies I am baking! That is the goal for next week!