Making Bread In a KitchenAid

This post is for my fabulous Sister-In-Law who just got a KitchenAid stand mixer.  She knows I use my mixer to make bread all the time, so she asked for a how-to.  I almost always use my KitchenAid to do the hard part of bread making.  When you make all the bread your family eats for 3 years in while living in Africa, you will take what short-cuts modern technology can offer. 

I am making overnight cinnamon rolls using this recipe I found on Pinterest.  It's a nice basic sweet roll recipe. You can use this technique with pretty much any bread recipe, as long as isn't too much dough for your mixer.

See how it is all bubbly and foamy?  Live yeast!  

With any bread recipe I always start by proofing the yeast.  This just means checking to see if the yeast is alive.  Mix the yeast with a bit of warm water and a pinch of sugar. Let it sit for about 10 minutes.  If the yeast is alive it will foam up.  If nothing happens, throw it out, buy new yeast and try again.

Batter paddle doing its thing.

Since I am using my KitchenAid at this point I begin ignoring the instructions as written and do my own thing.  I dump in all the milk, sugar, eggs, butter, salt, egg, and 2 cups of flour. Basically everything but half of the flour. Using the batter paddle I let the machine mix everything up for me. You do want to make sure that any liquid ingredients are warm, not hot. Think about the temp of a baby bottle.  You don't want to kill all that lovely yeast. 

I let it mix for a good 3 or 4 minutes to get the gluten development going.  In yeast breads gluten is what makes it all stretchy, and what you are trying to develop by kneading the dough.  At this point it should be about the consistency of a cake batter. 

Now it is time to switch to the hook and add the rest of the flour. At first it will look shaggy and rough but after a few minutes, it will begin to look smooth and start to pull away from the sides.  If if doesn't pull away you can add a little extra flour a couple of tablespoons at a time. When the dough is kneaded enough it will be almost shiny and not so sticky any more. 

The dough starts of a bit shaggy.

5 minutes later and all done. Notice how it has pulled from the sides a bit. 

At this point if you are going to need your mixer for something else transfer the dough to a greased bowl, turn the dough once to coat with oil, cover and let rise. If you aren't going to need the mixer again take a piece of plastic wrap, smear with a little butter or spray with a bit of Pam, cover your mixing bowl and let rise.  Why make more dishes?? 

Covered dough waiting to rise. 

A bit over an hour later and the dough is all risen.

Now you can go back the recipe and follow the instructions as written to form the cinnamon rolls.  Roll out the dough on a floured surface, smear with butter, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, slice and put in the pan.  You should end up with something like this. Cover with a bit of buttered (or sprayed with Pam) plastic wrap and pop in the fridge overnight. 

I cut it into 16 rolls instead of 12.
Sorry it's blurry, at some point I put a buttery finger on the lens.  Sigh! 

In the morning pull the rolls out of the fridge, they will have risen slightly overnight, but will still need to rise for about 30 minutes or so.  Since the dough is cold you can put it in the oven with the light on, that will give just enough warmth to bring the dough back to life. Or you can just stick them on top of the range while the oven preheats.  Either way.  Just be sure to take the rolls out of the oven BEFORE you preheat the oven.  It's a bit irritating to ruin everything at this point by baking the rolls with plastic wrap still on them.  Trust me. While the rolls are rising you can go ahead and enjoy your coffee since you did all the hard work last night. 

Risen and ready to bake. 

Bake the rolls 25 minutes or so. They will be lovely and golden brown. 

Yum!

Actually my rolls should be slightly browner.  I was making them for a brunch later in the morning and was going to be reheating them, so I pulled them out about 5 minutes early.  I forgot to take a picture after I reheated them and they were browned the rest of the way. 

Time to make the frosting, just follow the recipe.  Use the whisk attachment to make the frosting.  I use the whisk for frosting, whipped cream, whipping egg whites, and making marshmallows.  Not much else.  You can make the frosting ahead and store covered in the fridge so that the morning is easy-peasy, and nothing interferes with the coffee. 

Frosting, so much frosting. 

The cream cheese frosting recipe that is included with the recipe makes an awesome frosting but it made a heck of a lot.  I used what I needed and tossed the rest in a ziploc and froze it until next time.

Hints:

1. If you are doing a larger recipe you can still use the KitchenAid until it is time to switch to the bread hook, then finish up by hand.  It will make kneading go a lot faster. 

2.  If you don't want to do this recipe as an overnight don't put the rolls in the fridge, just let rise and  bake. 

3. If you are going to reheat the rolls like I did cover them with tin foil until warmed through then uncover just long enough to brown. 

Teri - If I left anything out, or you have any questions Leave a comment.  Good luck! 

Stuffed Peppers

In our family, and among our extended family and friends, I am known as the cook of the family. A reputation that comes mostly from being able to accurately follow written directions (i.e. recipe) and the total confidence if someone else can cook something there is absolutely no reason I can't as long as I have directions. Gnocchi? Sure. Pot Stickers? Why not? There are a few things I hate cooking. Lasagna for instance. All that work for something that usually tastes just as good, maybe better, if I buy it already made in the freezer section. Lasagna just isn't my thing, what can I say?

 David has a deep dark secret. He is at least as good a cook as I am, probably better since he rarely uses a recipe and it still comes out great. His specialty is stuffed peppers. They are to die for. Those of you in Malawi, next time we have a potluck anything feel free to gush to Dave that you have heard great things about his stuffed peppers, maybe he will make those. I think it is only fair after the number of pans of cinnamon rolls I have brought to various brunch type get-togethers.

 There's been a pack of peppers in the fridge just crying out to be stuffed for the last week. This weekend was one those weekends we never stopped moving, so no peppers were stuffed. Today I decided to get the recipe from Dave before the peppers went bad. David, who of course doesn't use a recipe, so he gave me the general idea of how to do it. I figured if he could do it, so could I. Yeah, famous last words. The peppers are stuffed but I am putting this on the record right now, I AM NEVER DOING THAT AGAIN. Holy cow what a lot of work. Make the sauce, brown the meat, cook the rice, char and peel the peppers, grate the cheese, then assemble everything. The only thing good I can say is at least I didn't have to make the cheese. I sincerely hope the peppers taste good, because I can make ricotta gnocchi, including making the ricotta cheese with less effort. Sadly, I really don't have a great feeling about it. I think it is going to be a lot like my lasagna: Meh, just OK. Sigh.

Yogurt Success!

Yesterday I tried AGAIN to make yogurt. Yogurt, which countless websites assure me is beyond easy, has long eluded me. Every blessed time I try it instead of a thick creamy yogurt I end up with nasty sour milk. WHY? I follow the instructions carefully, checking temperatures, measuring everything meticulously, water baths, crock pots, doing pretty much everything but ordering one of those fancy make your own yogurt kit. I am (supposed to be) a good cook, why can't I make yogurt?

I prefer plain yogurt that I top with fresh fruit and a drizzle of honey. I don't like the flavored, too sweet yogurts available here. There is one brand of plain yogurt that one store stocks that I really like, but I am not alone. It always sells out quickly whenever a shipment comes in. Half the time I hear there is yogurt then get to the store only to find out there WAS yogurt but now it is sold out. It would be really great if I could figure out this yogurt thing so I could have a regular supply of the stuff.

Yesterday I tried again. And yes I used UHT milk because that's what I have. I started with a basic recipe but after doing a bunch of reading, I decided to make up my own procedure, no thermometer (good thing since the kids broke mine last month), no water baths, no fussing. And do you know what? It worked! This morning I had lovely, thick, fresh homemade yogurt for breakfast. Yummmm!

I'm not sure if I finally figured it out or if this was just a fluke. If it's a fluke it's a very tasty fluke. I will try it again and if it works I will post my instructions complete with pictures.

In the mean time tomorrow is the first day of Spring/Easter Break. For the next week and half the kiddos will be out of school and running wild. This morning I am putting my feet up, pretending I don't see the wallpaper spider, watching television, and drinking a cup of tea. Ahhh relaxation!

What's a wallpaper spider you ask? It's a remarkably flat spider, I have no idea what it is really called, the kids dubbed it a wallpaper spider. It's so flat the first time I saw one I thought it was a sticker, until it moved, then I screamed. They are incredible fast. There is one running laps between the TV, the cuckoo clock, and the curtains. I tried to make a video but the darn thing is too fast. Ignoring it seems the best bet. Meanwhile there is an HGTV program on the Home channel. HGTV is my secret vice and one of the things I miss most about home. So I am going to sign off now, go grab a cup of English breakfast tea and put my feet up. Have a great day, I intend to!

P.S. I have a post up on how to make ricotta cheese from scratch over on Hardship Homemaking. I find it's a lot more foolproof than making yogurt. Click on over and check it out!

Ain't Worth the Clean-up

What does making bread in a food processor have in common with Christmas? You got it! Right now I'm thinking both things just ain't worth the clean-up.

We have officailly reached the point where I am sick of all the Christmas decorations and they really gotta come down. Soon. Like yesterday. Traditionally we leave the stuff up until the kids go back to school. This year the kids don't head back until the 9th. I don't think I can hang in there that long. However trying to pack up all those breakable things with three wild children trying to help guarantees something, usually something of great sentimental value, will be broken beyond repair. So I guess Christmas stays for one more week, but I am really looking forward to having it all packed away, and the house cleaned, and put back to rights. I am not looking forward to all the work. No matter how I look at it I have at least two days of work getting it all boxed up. Sigh. Currently I'm not convinced that it was all worth it, that's a lot of cleaning up to do.

One of the best presents I received this year was a much longed for food processor. It's a thing of beauty. A sliver Cuisinart all shiny and new just waiting for me to try out everything it can do. Most things it does wonderfully. Nearly instant strawberry ice cream, fantastic. Bread crumbs, perfect! Chopping vegetables to make the mirepoix for the black-eyed peas for our New Year's Day party, so easy and so fast. I can't wait to make a carrot cake just to see how well it does shredding all those carrots. The one thing I have found that it doesn't do well well is knead bread dough.

Now I know this seems obvious to some, it is after all a food processor, not a bread machine. But here's the thing. It came with a dough blade, and there are recipes for bread in the cookbook that came with it. It should make bread dough. I figured I had to try it out at least once. In fairness it did seem to do a good job of kneading the dough, but holy cow what a mess. That was the first and last time I'm trying that. It just ain't worth the clean up. The dough managed to work itself into every hard to clean crack of that machine, I spent more time cleaning that thing than if I had just mixed and kneaded the dough by hand. And to top it off I had to hold the base while it was kneading the dough or it started to walk across the counter.

Now unless I am really in the mood to mess with bread dough all I want to do is dump all the ingredients in a machine and go have a cup of coffee while the machine does the hard stuff. Then I can just yank the dough out, shape into a loaf, and bake it up. I do not want to have to baby sit the machine to keep it from committing suicide by walking off the edge of the counter. Sadly my bread machine disappeared during our first international move 6 years ago, I really miss that machine. Happily my KitchenAid stand mixer does a pretty good job of handing the messy part of making bread. I guess I will stick with the KitchenAid unless of course I get a bread machine for Mother's Day. (Yes Babe, that was a hint!)

Sweet Treat

I have started about a dozen blog posts this last week but abandoned all of them because they seemed too whiney, even for me. I still need to post the follow up to the soup dumplings, which did come out pretty well. I never did finish posting about safari or do a Christmas post. Maybe next week I will get to it. Today though I did something it never occurred to me to do, I made syrup.

I don't know why I never thought of making syrup before. When I was a kid and still lived at home, Mom and I would make jelly. Every once in a while a batch wouldn't gel but we didn't get upset, we would just label the jars syrup instead of jelly. Those fruit syrups were really good on pancakes, waffles, french toast, ice cream, a spoon. I have a bit of a sweet tooth, can you tell?

Most weeks a guy that sells strawberries shows up at the gate with a basket full of strawberries. I fork over 500 kwacha and he fills my bowl up and we have fresh fruit. Fruit here is very seasonal. For two weeks there were mulberries in the market then they were just gone. The selection of fruit is much more limited than I expected so I never turn away the strawberry man unless I simply don't have enough money in my purse to pay. That means that I usually end up putting a ziplock full of the uneaten strawberries in the freezer each week. The kids can only eat so many strawberries before they go bad. The strawberries, not the kids. I've made strawberry popsicles, strawberry sorbet, strawberry stuffed crepes, strawberry sherbet and when I suggested making strawberry ice cream this week the kids said "How about chocolate? Or vanilla?" So what to do with the left over strawberries that are starting to get a bit squishy? Make syrup!

My all time favorite syrup is boysenberry syrup, or as the boys prefer to call it poison-berry syrup. For some inexplicable reason I failed to include any in our consumables shipment and since it is a liquid in glass I can't exactly have any shipped to me at post. Arrrgh! The only thing I have to put on my pancakes is Aunt Jemima's or honey. I choose honey, but I'm not too happy about it.

Today I combined a cup of sugar, a cup of water, about 2 cups of strawberries, and a dash of lemon juice then boiled the heck out of it until the berries fell apart and the whole thing got thick. I decided that straining the mess was too much work so I just ran an immersion blender through the syrup to make sure there were no lumps left. It turned out fabulous. It's not boysenberry, but it is darn good, and I can hardly wait until this weekend for pancakes. What is a boysenberry anyway? Does anyone know? Next I am going to try making mango syrup. Yumm.

Experimantal Cooking

Many of my friends think I am fantastic cook. I'm really not. I'm simply good at following instructions. When I try to throw stuff together without a recipe the results are usually pretty bad, so I stick with following recipes. I think what gives me a reputation for being a good cook is two fold. 1. I am pretty good about selecting recipes that I am sure will work, or at least I try out recipes on my family before cooking anything for people not related to me. 2. I will try almost anything, even really complicated looking recipes. Creme brule, no problem! Homemade marshmallows? Sounds like fun. Making my own pasta? It's just eggs and flour! How hard can that be?

There is one type of recipe that I always hesitate to try. I am completely intimidated by Asian cooking. Any kind of Asian cooking scares the pants off of me. Don't know why, maybe because it is just so different from the kind of cooking I grew up with. I have decided to in the last year or so to start experimenting. So am I content with simple relatively easy recipes for fried rice, stir fries, and spring rolls? No of course not. I have decided to try out the mother of all complicated recipe, xiao long bao! I might have mentioned a time or 20 how much I love these little bundles of joy. Too bad there are no Din Tai Fung restaurants on the continent of Africa. So I am going to make some of my own. I hope my kitchen survives. The recipe says it takes two days to make. Yikes! Wish me luck.

Deviled Eggs

Today I wasn't feeling well, so I spent most of the morning curled up on the couch trying to ignore the fact the kids were totally trashing the house. Grayson was the only one I was really worried about, Alonzo and Colin are big kids and capable of entertaining themselves, so I wasn't really worried when Colin disappeared for a while.

I did start to worry when Colin asked if he could use a knife to cut some pickles up for a snack. Kinda thought it was a weird snack but whatever, so I reminded him to be careful and let him go. A while later he came back out and asked where I kept the "pepper-ika". I heaved myself off the couch and went to see why he needed paprika. Turns out that David had showed him how to make deviled eggs on Sunday. Colin wanted a snack and found the rest of the Easter eggs in the fridge and decided he wanted a deviled egg for a snack so he made one. He couldn't find any pickle relish so he just chopped some pickles to make relish and of course the paprika was the finishing touch. I tasted a little of the filling that was left in the cup he used to mix it. He did a good job. Pretty yummy!

Don't you know he is thinking take the picture already so I can eat my snack.

Hey Mikey He Likes It

I decided to make something fun and healthy for the boys to go with lunch. This week is spring break so I have a full house and I am trying to keep them happy, not easy since many of their friends have gone out the country for the break, and they are stuck here with me. I grabbed some frozen peaches out of the freezer, some milk and peach yogurt out of the fridge and dumped it all in the blender.

A few minutes later I had a peach smoothie, although I said it was a peach milkshake. That just sounded less healthy, the kids are wise to me trying to feed them healthy stuff. They would much rather have pop-tarts. Grayson took a cautious sip and announced, "Yum yum that is delicious!"  Success! Next time banana-choco-smothies!

Events of Christmas Eve

Today was full of fun and excitement. As promised I am providing an update on how the tamales and houses building went. Well… actually it all went really well. We got the masa and the meat all done yesterday so all we had to do today was assemble, cook, and eat.




I didn’t get any pictures eating them because… well, we were all too busy eating them. These tamales would give “Rubens Homemade Tamales” on Rigsby Ave in San Antonio a run for their money.


Today we found the best way to get rid of the candy you still have from Halloween is to have the kids decorate gingerbread houses, or in our case graham cracker houses. We all had a blast with our decorating. I am not sure how we made such a big mess and to tell the truth I am not sure how much the candy actually made it on the houses. From the sounds I am hearing from the kids, the ones that are suppose to be asleep upstairs; I would say a good portion made it in the kids.




Have a wonderful Christmas!

The night before Christmas Eve

The boys are all tucked in to bed and Shannon is hard at work in the kitchen getting the fixings ready for tomorrow. If all goes well we will be having tamales with chili con carne and beans for lunch and the boys will be decorating their gingerbread (aka graham cracker) houses. Next year Shannon swears that we will get the gingerbread made and frozen by November.



Check back tomorrow so you can see the finished results of the house decorating and the fruits of our hard labor in the making of the tamales. If all goes well perhaps we will be able to have them more often, you know like once a year instead of once every time we go back to Texas.