These pretzels are making me thirsty.

A couple of weeks ago, there was one of my favorite Good Eat's episode on. Mr Alton Brown was making pretzels. I made these a few years ago and they tasted awesome, but they didn't look very pretty. I thought I was give them another shot. These ones came out looking OK. I made the traditional salted pretzel and then I made some garlic parmesan preztels. Next time, I would like to try to do a nice cinnamon sugar pretzel.

My finished pretzels

Combine warm water, sugar, salt and yeast.

Your gonna need to use the hook kitchen aid attachment and don't forget to tease your dog with the tool.

Hehehehe.

Add your flour and melted butter to your water yeast mixture.

Mix until the mixture comes together.

Then beat on high speed for about 5 minutes.

Cover with a tea towell and stash in a warm place for about an hour. Your dough will double in size.

Devide into 8 equal size balls. Mine are a little uneven. I need a food scale.

Make your traditional pretzel shape or whatever shape you want.

Your gonna soak these raw preztels in boiling water and baking soda for about 30 seconds and then transfer the pretzels to parchment paper covered cookie sheets, and then coat with egg yolk, water and salt. Then bake.

Microwave brownies.

So, you wanna make brownies but you don't have a working oven? Apparently, you can microwave brownie mix in a microwave safe container. The other day, I was left oven-less. I was craving to bake something. So I tried making microwave brownies. I made this amazing frosting, started off with your basic butter creme frosting and added some of this amazing chocolate honey fudge. Came out prettay good.

Apple of my eye.

I'm not sure why I made pie.

oatmeal chocolate chip and cranberry cookies

I decided to make some cookies, I had some cranberries in the house along with some oats, so I decided to make some oatmeal chocolate chip and cranberry cookies. I wasn't allowed to really have any because I started my diet, but I tried a little corner or one and they were pretty good.

Boredom turns to baking

So I learned how to make Pate A Choux. For losing all of my pasrty bag tips and half of my baking stuff in one of the moves this year, I think they came out pretty good.

Eclairs in 40 minutes!

When I was a kid, me, my bros and my sister would all go over my Nana and Grampy's house every weekend. We would stay there from Friday night to Saturday night. On most Friday nights, my Nana would order pizza from the best pizza place in the world, Papa Ginos. (Boston pizza is the best pizza ever). Then when we didn't order pizza on Fridays, my nana would make her famous Mac and cheees or American Chop Suey. Alot of the time, we would have these Eclairs for dessert. So me and my brother's and sister all grew up with these eclairs. So when we moved here to Florida and ordered an eclair somewhere, to our suprise, these eclairs were filled with this fake wannabe custard. So I've always wanted to make my own.

So tonight for dinner, pain in the ass. I was making pasta for about 2 hours and then in 5 minutes had to make my chicken, while everyone else had beef. Had to make my sauce and everything in like 5 minutes. By the time we ended up eating, it was pretty late and I remembered that I wanted to try out this awesome eclair recipe I found on this amazing bread site.

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/eclairs. But I was extremely limited on time. I wanted to make these tonight because a bunch of people were over for dinner, so what a perfect time to make them eh? For the time I was given, I think that they came out pretty good. They don't look super pretty, but for sure next time they will.

Fresh Pasta, the only way to pasta.

So we got a pasta maker!!!! Finally and its awesome. Tonight I'm gonna make some fresh pasta with mushrooms, shallots and peas. A few nights away we decided to try to make some fresh ravioli. I made a champagin cream sauce to go along with it and our ravioli were stuffed with regatta and mushrooms with garlic, they were good, but there was too much egg in the regatta mixture. And my sauce was perfect until my step father decided to ruin it by adding olive oil to it and broke my sauce. So thats why it doesn't look that great. I also made fresh bruschetta that came out awesome.

Banana bread!

So I bought some bananas the other day, when I bought them, they were actually not even quite ripe yet. I come to find out yesterday that they were getting brown, so I decided to make banana bread with no walnuts. I found the most amazing bread site in the world! ttp://www.thefreshloaf.com . Tonight I'm gonna make eclairs. Good stuff.

3rd anual cookie cook off

So today was our 3rd Anual cookie cook off. This year we did 6 different kind of cookies, all made from scatch. So from 11am to 5pm there was non stop baking. All in all cookie day was a success.

What makes the cookies


Magic in a bottle, real Italian Anise

All of our cookies

A platter of cookies

Sugar Cookie

Gingerbread Cookie

Snowball Melt Away Cookie

Anisette Cookie

Kolache Cookie

Chcolate Chip Cookie

Homemade nougat anyone?

So I've moved again, I'm in Delray Beach now. To break in the house I decided to make some homemade nougat. I had never made it before and I think it came out pretty awesome, it's like marshmallow, but doesn't have that gross marshmallow taste and there is no gelatin in it yay. So the process was a bit of a pain, because it's not baking, it's cooking candy, which means you have to cook it just right, with different stages, ex: hard ball stage, soft ball stage.. tempatures. Then you have to whip egg whites to a certain texture, then cool for about an hour and then finally are allow to cover the nougat in chocolate. I would do them differently next time, not whats in them, but the way i coated them in chocolate, but they taste amazing.

Cake Auction

So at my step father's work there was a cake auction. All the money made from the auction is going towards breast cancer research, so I had to make a cake for my Nana.

Pumpkin fudge

So, whats Halloween without some good old fashion pumpkin fudge? I used the basic fudge recipe thats on the back of a fluff jar, but i added pumpkin and some nice pumpkin spices and used white chocolate instead of milk chocolate or semi sweet, bring on the fudge!!!