Monday, August 7, 2017

I’ve been in the kitchen almost all day testing my recipes. First up were my Cranberry Almond cookies. They were quick to make and I got almost three dozen from the batter. I played around a bit with the cooking time and temperature. The recipe called for the cookies to bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes. Since I know I always have to cook things a bit longer in our oven I baked them for the full 12 minutes. They were good but seemed a bit undone in the centre. For the next sheet I added a couple more minutes to the baking time, and for the third sheet I upped the temperature to 375° and baked them for 14 minutes. The batch at 350° for 14 minutes were the winner. My cookie sheets are relatively large so I can only fit one in the oven at a time; with the quantity I’m making it would take forever so Pat went out this afternoon and bought a couple more sheets. I’ll be able to fit three sheets in the oven at a time now so that will speed things up, although I’ll still have to stop in between batches to fill the sheets.

When the cookies were done I headed out to do a bit of shopping. There were still a few things that we needed for the celebration that didn’t involve the concession but that I said I would pick up. After that was done I headed to the grocery store for my baking supplies.

Next on the test board were my Cranberry Tarts. The frozen cranberries were to be cooked, put through a colander and then cooked again. This was a lot of work for about 15 tarts; the colour wasn’t that great (it reminded me of play dough as it was cooking) but they taste quite good. But I thought there should be an easier way. Pat didn’t think putting the cranberries through the blender would work so I tried changing the lemon juice in my lemon curd  recipe to cranberry juice – the rest of the ingredients and quantities were the same as the recipe I was using. The colour is even worse (brownish, and not even a golden brown) and I don’t think it is going set the way the lemon curd did; I guess the cranberry juice doesn’t have as much pectin as the lemon juice does.

I refuse to give up though as the tarts have gone into some of the promotional material, so I’ve found another recipe that uses canned cranberry sauce and marshmallows – that sounds like my kind of recipe. So I’ll go out to the store and buy a can of cranberry sauce (hopefully I can find some) and give it another go.