Baking

Since cooking is one of my passions I thought I’d create a category for the blog. Here are items I made in the last week to take to Utica for the holidays.

I love to make sourdough bread. Recently in Cook’s Illustrated cooking magazine I learned a new trick–raising the loaves on parchment paper and then picking up the whole thing and depositing it in a heated cloche (thanks again Gavin and Jill) or Dutch oven. It works beautifully and produces the nice dark crust that the French think is so important

Here are pralines made in the microwave–very easy. One time I had no light brown sugar so had to substitute dark brown. Then I had the inspiration to replace the vanilla and small amount of water with bourbon. So now I call these “dark bourbon pralines” and they sell well at the Strafford library sale.

These are Florentines that Alison requested. Be very careful about starting holiday traditions or you’ll wind up having to make the same thing every year! Actually, these are kind of fun. The cookie part, essentially a lace cookie, is not hard, but then you have to temper chocolate to coat the bottom.

And speaking of tempering chocolate–here are the truffles I made at the same time I was coating the Florentines. I think I have the tempering part down pat but have not really mastered the dipping part. I have a special fork but still I wind up with some really ugly truffles. Anyway, they taste just as good. This year I made raspberry, Earl Grey tea, cognac and coconut/almond. I had plans to pipe a little symbol on each one to tell them apart but things got so frantic–chocolate all over everything, rushing back and forth to the stove to keep the melted chocolate at the right temperature–I never got around to marking them except for the ones with coconut. As a result my grandchildren ate a few of the ones with brandy and I hope that doesn’t start them on the road to perdition.. The plate the chocolates are resting on is a beautiful piece of an art deco tea set our son-in-law John brought us from Russia the last time he took a tour group there.

And finally, here is a Jamaican black cake. I had read about it years ago in Laurie Colwin’s “Home Cooking” but never got around to making it. It’s a fruitcake with all kinds of dried fruits marinated in a combination of madeira and black rum for three weeks, baked for three hours and then covered with a layer of marzipan and fondant icing. The burnt sugar flavoring that’s required never arrived so I had to substitute molasses. (My guess is that since the UPS truck can’t get up our snowy driveway they left it hanging on a tree branch as usual and it fell into the snow.) Anyway, it wasn’t so good that it’s going to start any tradition–Whew!

Have a great holiday and remember–holidays are free-fire zones where calories don’t count!

Wet Snow

It snowed all day yesterday and into the night. Here’s the view from our living room window this morning–every branch and twig draped. Of course it’s not all wonderful. Yesterday the Subaru couldn’t make it up our long steep driveway and wound up in a ditch. So Ed finally broke down and bought an expensive set of snow tires that work like a charm. If we’d spent that kind of money on presents there would be a lot more under the tree!

Still Life

Things get so busy this time of year I haven’t had a chance to post lately.  I’ve also spent a lot of time painting a Christmas present but I don’t want to put it in the blog before it’s presented.   Here’s a still life I’ve just finished, ready for a group show in January.  I love the look of dried hydrangeas but wasn’t satisfied with the background.  So I painted in trees and a moon and changed the shape of the vase to echo the roundness of the moon.

Hydrangea Moon      17 x 24  oil on canvas   $500

Homestead

I completely forgot a painting I finished some time ago–the end of October– right before I plunged into the DrawMo! project. It’s Strafford’s famous historic site, the home of Sen. Justin Morrill who served as a U.S. Senator from 1867-1898. He authored the Morrill Act which established federal funding for higher education in every state. The homestead is a Gothic Revival cottage, built in 1855. The exterior looks like plaster but is really board. And yes, it is pink. I painted this on a beautiful morning with the sun shining on the roof and fall foliage on the hills across the road. It was the last plein air landscape I got to do before cold weather arrived. Some hardy souls paint outside in the winter but I am not among them!

Morrill Homestead 9 x 12 oil on birch panel $250     SOLD

Snow!

We had the first big snowfall of the season this week and got out for our first snowshoe this morning.  It was a beautiful day and we went to a relatively flat spot for our first time out. A skier had already broken trail, making our job much easier, and the path went up behind the village of Strafford.  That’s the  beautiful white Townhouse on the left.  Not a single building in the picture was built later than the 19th century–altogether a New England postcard.   Since I grew up in Georgia and lived in Houston for nearly 40 years, snow is still a thrill (unless I have to get out and drive in it).   When we first  moved here someone told us that we  had to “embrace the winter” which we make a real effort to do by trying to get outside every day.    Fortunately there are quite a few snowmobile trails around for snowshoeing and sometimes we just go up into our woods–good for burning all those extra calories we seem to want when the weather is cold.  Once all the streams freeze over we can get to places that aren’t accessible during the warmer months.