An Oven Update

I called maintenance, and they came by on Friday to test the oven.  It turned out that runs over 50 degrees hotter than it is supposed to, so it needed a new thermostat.  The oven is 15-20 years old, however, and they don't make that model of thermostat anymore.  The end result?  Our landlord/property management company will be buying a new(er) oven for our unit.  So, for the second week in a row I do not have a baked good.  I'm not entirely sure if the oven situation will be fixed by the end of next week either (I'm heading out of town next Wednesday), but it should be by the week after.  See you in 2011! 

What a Mess

As you may recall, my farmhouse biscuits were first turned to pancakes.  Boyfriend made some cookies last week, which were also turned to pancakes.  Today Boyfriend and I made some sugar cookies, and they, too, spread out to cover the whole cookie sheet.  A cheesecake that Boyfriend made today was burnt on the top after only a few minutes in the oven.  We have come to the conclusion that the thermostat in our oven is broken.  It gets way too hot for only being told to go to 350 degrees.  Thus, I have no baked good for this week.  :(  They were all crap.  Sorry. 

Coolrise Yeast Baking Basic Bread Dough

This is a recipe I got from a cooking class in sixth or seventh grade.  I have no idea who made the recipe, and if it was my teacher, I can't remember her name.  :(  Sorry, teacher.  Anyhow, this bread was the second baked good prepared by a cobalt blue stand mixer given to boyfriend as an early Christmas present from his grandma.  I'll have to take a picture of the mixer sometime, it's quite a beauty! 

If you are using a stand mixer for your bread baking, the recipe and instruction guide has rules for how many cups of flour you should use for certain size mixers, which you should, of course, adhere to.  Most recipes for bread have a range of flour to use in the recipe, and you always start with only a couple cups of flour, adding more as you mix the ingredients.  Technically, speed 2 on a stand mixer counts as kneading, but I just mixed it enough to make it a solid-ish lump, then kneaded it myself (because that's the funnest part!). 

A word of advice: if you are kneading bread, do not plunge your fingers straight into the dough.  You will never get them back until you have dumped half a bag of flour onto them.  Although, my dough did not have enough flour in it, hence the glopishness, and adding flour made it manageable. 

After the kneading and the rising, I popped it in the oven for forty-five minutes, and it came out beautifully!  I have never seen, smelled, nor touched something so perfect in all my years.  We enjoyed it with a pot roast boyfriend made in the crock pot.  It was, and still is delicious.  And it was easy.  There are easy bread recipes out there.  I recommend giving it a try, I guarantee that you will have fun and feel good afterward. 

Farmhouse Biscuits from Baking by Martha Day

My very first baked good of the challenge was called Farmhouse Biscuits, and the main ingredients were peanut butter and something called muesli, which I had never heard of before this recipe.  It is apparently a mixture of different kinds of grains like wheat, rye and oats and sometimes there is dried fruit like raisins in it.  I found muesli cereal at Safeway with the Eat Right brand; it came in a box from the cereal aisle.  I wasn't sure that the corn-flake style of the cereal was quite right for the recipe, so I looked around the rest of the store but did not see anything similar in any way.  Maybe if I had more time to shop (or more money) then I would try looking somewhere like Whole Foods or Sunflower Market. 

Anyway, I come home with my muesli, preheat the oven, grease a baking sheet, look at the recipe to begin.  All the measurements are in ounces.  Uh-oh.  I'm not used to measuring in ounces, but I have a liquid measuring glass that measured in both ounces and cups (and maybe milliliters, too?), so I used that to get my bearings with the dry ingredient cups.  I thought I had it figured out, but halfway through I looked back at the glass.  It seems I had doubled the recipe on everything but the butter.  "That's alright," I told myself, "just double the rest of the recipe."  Unfortunately, I did not have another half cup of butter, so I ended up being about an eighth of a cup short.  This fiasco should have served as some foreshadowing for me, but I kept going.  After all, I was not about to waste a cup of peanut butter, amongst other ingredients. 

I tried to plug along with the rest of the recipe, making sure to double everything from now on.  I crunched the muesli cereal to break the flakes when I was measuring it so that they wouldn't look or taste weird later and so there was less air between chunks in order to get a better measurement.  I mixed everything for the last time before plopping mounds of it on the baking sheet.  I noticed mine looked a little goopier than the picture's, but I put it in the oven anyway.  I did not know what to expect, but I certainly was not expecting it to turn out well.

I checked on the first batch after about seven minutes (they are supposed to cook for about fifteen).  To my horror, they had all spread out as thin as crepes and the burnt edges were bubbling in protest.  I pulled the sheet out and stared at them, wondering what to do.  I grabbed a spoon and took a nibble out of the center of one of the "biscuits."  The taste was...okay.  The texture was not.  I carried the sheet to the garbage can and scooped them in there.  They wouldn't hurt anyone anymore.

To make my creation thicker (Panic!  "What happened?  Why did it do this?  What should I do?  What can I do?  What's going on?"), I added less than a quarter of a teaspoon baking powder, less than a quarter cup of flour, and a small handful more of the muesli.  I set these up on the sheet again, and this time they looked a little bit more like the picture from the book.  However, I  think the universe just had it out for me that day, because I checked the timer on the oven after a while, and it hadn't moved.  A little desensitized at that point, I pulled the sheet out of the oven.  The edges were slightly burnt, but the middles were a little gelatinous.  I let them cool on the sheet in hopes that they would set up a little better.

I came back to the biscuits a little later to find the middles had indeed solidified.  I scooped them off the sheet and onto a plate, which is when I discovered that the bottoms were much more burnt than I expected: they were completely black.  I tasted one.  It was better than the failures that came out earlier.  They were pretty dense, and felt heavy and full in my stomach.  I expect they are called "farmhouse" biscuits because they are really filling so you eat little and go a lot further, thus completing more work on the farm.  That, or because every ingredient on the farm gets dumped into this recipe.

My biscuits compared to the book's biscuits (top of page in tin)

I'd say this was a fairly interesting, if not comical, way to start out my challenge.  I definitely learned a lot.  Hopefully, the rest of my experiments turn out a little better than this one did, but I'm glad it happened.