52 Weeks of Baking week 7 (5 for me)

I vowed to make something savory this week. So I an effort to come up with some more vegetarian lunches for myself that are easily portable I decided to experiment with mini quiches. Since I wanted to experiment before I made too many lunches I decided to do them for super. I figured this was a dinner that easily customizable to the individual.

I was in a hurry and didn’t want to make a crust so I decided that I would use hash-brown potatoes as a crust but also gave my kids the option of no crust.

I used a standard muffin/cupcake pan too make the quiches. Besides eggs hash browns and a little milk, the chosen fillings were onion, tomatoes, artichoke hearts, chicken, bacon, spinach, mushrooms, and cheese.

I sprayed and floured the muffin cups. I then put approximately 1 to 1 ½  tablespoons of hash-browns on the bottom each cup that was going to have a hash-brown crust for the adults I added about a half tablespoon of chopped onion and I also added some seeded  chopped tomatoes (about I teaspoon). I put this in the oven at 450 for 5 minutes.

Meanwhile I cut up the cooked bacon, the cooked chicken, the artichoke hearts, spinach and mushrooms. I mixed 1 egg per “muffin” with a little milk. I was using shredded cheese left over from a meal earlier in the week. Once the five minutes was up I took the muffin tin out of the oven and started to layer the ingredients in the cups as per the requests of the various members of my family. In the end before I put in the egg mixture there was ¼ to ⅓ cup of fillings in each muffin cup. I lowered the temperature on the oven to 350.

I filled each muffin cup so each cup was about ¾ of the way full. I then sprinkled more cheese on the top of each eggy cup. I put it in the oven for 20-30 minutes.

My son declared his crustless chicken and cheese quiche superb. My daughter said her bacon and cheese potato crust ones were delicious. My husband and I both enjoyed ours. Mine was veggies and cheese his was veggies (no artichoke hearts) and bacon.

In the future I think we will brown the onion and the hash browns before putting them in the oven skipping the step. I thin the flouring of the pan was essential as the quiche muffins did release well.

We also think that more fillings might be a good idea and possibly a little seasoning.


I am really enjoying this adventure of baking something every week. Next up baked custard.

52 Weeks of Baking week 6 (4 for me)

I baked a bunch of cookies again this time my sons school bake sale in conjunction with the rummage sale and a cookies exchange here on Swap-Bot.
I like a little challenge and my swap partner wrote that she loves bar style cookies. My attempt at a bar cookie years go resulted on burned edges and uncooked middle. So I decided that I would try again.

I looked at all the recipes I had in my specialty cookie books and they all required refrigeration for storage and that would not work for either the bake sale or sending the cookies out. I finally grabbed my Better Homes and Garden book and found 2 recipes for bar cookies that seemed to fit the bill.

The first I made was a simple bar, called Terrific Toffee bars, I omitted the nuts as the school requests that all baked goods be nut free. Personally I think the nuts would have distracted from the toffee flavor.  I found the recipe quick easy and painless. I made the spreading of the chocolate chips easier by putting it in the warm oven for 30 seconds. The toffee bits I used were pre-broken heath bars that I found next to the chocolate chips at my local grocery store.

I found the bars that I made following the recipe closely were tasty but thin. I wanted something a little thicker. I decided to make another batch this time in a smaller pan. I also added ½ cup of chocolate chips to the dough. The resulted in a chewer and thicker bar but with little taste difference. The bars were interchangeable really.

Next up was the oatmeal bars I wanted to make something fruity. I had a vision of a blueberry cookie bar. What I found was a recipe called Fruit Filled Oatmeal Bars. I have attached a copy of that one as well. It gave me four filling options I first chose to do the raisin filling using regular raisins instead of golden raisins. I found it quite tasty but I felt that not having a pastry blender was hard to work.

After some thought I decided to employ my pastry method for the second batch. I put the ingredients, except the oatmeal, for the oatmeal layer to my food processor and pulsed it until it began to resemble crumbs. I then added the oatmeal pulsed about 5 more times until it was well combined but not ground. I then followed the rest of the written directions. For this second batch I wanted to make it blueberry and I used dried blueberries and the same method for filling as the raisin filling with half the sugar knowing that dried blueberries are very sweet. This second batch was definitely a better batch although still quite sweet. I probably could use even less sugar next time.

So my swap partner for the cookie exchange has already gotten the package (so nice when she is only one state away) and loved them all saying that the toffee were her favorite. I watched all my bars get sold at the bake sale on Saturday and the few left for my family are gone. My kids would not eat them My husband liked them all but said that the toffee was his favorite as well.

52 Weeks of Baking week 5 (3 for me)

This is definitely a long write up of my baking session WOW I hope I don’t loose you in the details.
In my house Thursday is becoming “Baking day”. But It has taken a while for me to get this all written up because I was so tired after all of it.

This week I had to make 10 dozen cookies for a swim-meet. My daughter is a swimmer on a swim team and they are hosting their spring meet this weekend. Yea I did volunteer. In the end I got the most wonderful thank you’s both by email and in person.

So I chose to make 3 basic cookies an oatmeal raisin, a Snickerdoodle, and of course Chocolate Chip.

I decided to use different recipes than I have in the past. And I decided I needed to double each of them

For the Oatmeal raisin and the Sinckerdoodles I enlisted my fun cookbook that recipe from "Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar", I am not vegan but I was introduced to some of these cookies at Christmas time. I received a box of cookies at Christmas from a good friend who is vegan and they were great I wrote about it here. The two recipes are “City Girl Sinckerdoodles” on page 46 and Oatmeal Raisin on Page 75

For the Chocolate Chip I decided to go high tech I have an iPod touch and it goes everywhere with me. A good friend of mine let me know that one of my favorite cook book now had an app. Mark Bittman’s How to cook everything. It has the whole book. I have the book it is really big.

So I paid the $1.99 and checked it out. It makes the book more searchable by ingredient and for me vegetarian. So I decided I should test it out. I chose the Classic Chocolate cookies recipe.

I did some math and came up with 7 dozen from single batches of each and that is not accounting for dropped, burned and taste-tested cookies and other manners of reducing donation count.

OK so I had some other thing I needed to do on Thursday besides bake cookies and so I shopped for the extras I needed and planned out the attack. I decided that I would work by oven temp starting with the low temp and working up and then by simplicity.

First up were the oatmeal cookies, I loved the caramel color that the dough was before adding oatmeal and raisins. These ended up a with darker undertones visually that I am used to with Oatmeal cookies. I hoped then for some caramel undertone which they sadly lacked. Don’t get me wrong they were good.

Next up was the City Girl Snickerdoodles, as I double this recipe I miscalculated how much margarine I had in the house and had to replace with some vegan shortening and a little butter.

I was so surprised at how fluffy the dough was. The making the balls was a lot easier when I put a couple table spoons of the Cinnamon and sugar mix on a small plate and rolled the balls that way. Holly loved these cookies. I will be making them again for her. Unfortunately I burned one sheet full. It was sad as I had hoped to keep more than one for the family.

Lastly at the end of the day was the Chocolate Chip cookies. So very traditional. It it is in the print version as well as the iPhone/iPod Touch app.

This is a flat chewy chocolate cookie recipe. Not a cake style one. Alton brown has a long segment on the differences in chocolate chip cookies on his good eats show. Every one in my house loved them.

I was so busy making the cookies (180 in the end that proved my insanity this week) That I didn’t take as many pictures as I would have liked.

This is my HUGE box of cookies. 10 1/2 Dozen! What a day of baking!