Apple Hazelnut Dessert Buns with Rum Sauce (Recipe)

Just a couple of weeks ago, I posted a recipe created by my wife and the response was overwhelmingly positive.  Her wholesome mushroom soup was just the thing for the bleak weather we've been having, and not one person minded her guest spot.  Seeing the potential to stay out of the kitchen and prepare for the new Magic: The Gathering set release, I decided to let her do the cooking and steal from her once again, although this time it's a dessert I wanted to highlight. 

Other People's Recipes: Lemon Cocoa Panforte

Although the poll I posted in last week's blog doesn't close until the 10th, one thing is clear.  Mary Engelbreit's 'Tis the Season Holiday Cookbook is dominating the competition for what "Other People's Recipes" should focus on next.  Rather than wait for the poll to close, I thought I'd dive right in and start exploring.  This is a wonderful looking cookbook, with great pictures and intricate art throughout, but I haven't really used it for cooking in the two years since my Mother-in-Law gave it to me.  Wife made the Chocolate Raspberry Truffle Torte during a mock "Iron Chef" battle we had with the kids, but until now that was it.

Other People's Recipes: Sausage, Spinach and Onion Turnovers

Now that school has started, Wife and have finally had to abandon the debauchery of summer.  Boy and Girl spent the middle of summer break at their other parents' houses, and so we abandoned our aspirations of health to eat at restaurants, order pizzas, grill meat, and drink beer and/or rum every night of the week.  It was a great time, but we are both ready to get back on track.  We have a pretty good collection of recipes building up that have calorie counts included, and I've gotten back in the habit of crafting menus designed to get my family healthy food without working too hard or spending too much.  Most of the recipes are designed with dinner in mind; while I was working nights I just packed sandwiches and left my wife to fend for herself during lunch.  Since switching shifts, however, we've tried experimenting with more interesting food.  For the first few weeks it was just soup--easy to make and easy to portion-control--but Wife gets bored easily.  After a couple of casseroles, it was looking like time to retreat to the ease of sandwiches until I stumbled across a delicious looking savory turnover in the pages of Cooking Light.

Spiced Pumpkin Blondies

     With as much cooking as I do, it should come as no surprise to anyone that I love cookbooks.  I like to admire the pictures (and imagine how successful my blog might be if I had access to their photographers,) I like to look for interesting flavor combinations that I can work into other dishes.  I like to do lots of things with cookbooks.  I just don't like to cook with them. 

     That isn't to say that I don't use recipes out of cookbooks--I do.  I just don't like having the book in my kitchen, inviting splatters.  Well--that's a lie as well.  I think splatters on a cookbook makes a cook look accomplished.  My Joy of Cooking has bits of cookie dough on it from over a decade ago, and every time I look at it I get a sense of just how far I have come.  What I dislike is the organization.  Recipes tend to list ingredients, and then explain how to use them, which is fine when you are trying to imagine the dish, but not so handy when you are trying to cook it. 

An Accidental Discovery: Tangerine Dream Rolls

I had never imagined, when first I set out to write about food, that I would ever say the words "it all started with a box of prepackaged Pillsbury mix," but here we are.



Who knew?

To be honest, I don't even know where the stuff came from.  I was cleaning out the cramped cupboard that houses my "baking only" ingredients and found this guy crammed in the back with some boxed cake mixes, from some long ago time when I must have not really given a damn.  The first impulse was to chuck it.  I've been enjoying baking more and more, and cooking alongside Poppin' Fresh seemed like a setback. However, I'm cheap and it's wasteful.  I knew from the start that I didn't want to make the hot rolls that were the main focus of the product.  The "great pizza crust" touted in the lower left corner was tempting, but once again I'd already locked in my menu for the week, and I wanted the dough boy gone.  (I needed room for cake flour, so that I could eventually make these.)  As anyone who even periodically reads this blogs knows, one area where I do have room to tamper is with dessert.  The two years I spent working at a cinnamon roll factory  had ruined me off of the sticky treats for most of my adult life, but with one caveat.  Orange rolls.  Perhaps it was because they only made them sporadically, perhaps they were just better, but while the cinnamon rolls I bagged each day grew to disgust me, orange rolls were a highlight of my day whenever the test pan ended up in the break room. 

Chocolate Cranberry Chunk Cookies

I started this week off with a dilemma.  Although I got behind a bit during the holidays, I feel like I need to post at least once a week to remain a viable blog.  After all, I'm making money now-my first payment from the mucky-mucks who provide the advertising that frames this page will be here by the end of this month.  But there can be no clicks without content.  Problem is, I don't just write about food.  I read about it as well.  I've already gushed about Macheesmo on these pages but there is also Kayln's Kitchen, which has food so delectable I looked at it off and on for a month before I realized it was dedicated to the South Beach Diet, and The Food in My Beard, whose author must really take the whole "a picture is worth a thousand words" thing to heart-his step by step photos make any recipe seem easy.  I could easily list a dozen more, but I'm worried if I gave you that many great blogs to read you wouldn't come back.  The point of all this is that I ended up with a cooking conundrum.  I need content, but on all the days I allot to creative cooking (three days a week are for leftovers or such challenging meals as potatoes topped with chilli,) I filled the menu with other blogger's dishes.  Had they been written any length of time in the past I could have filed them under "Other People's Recipes" and hoped any slight modifications I made might make it worth reading about the process, but the things I am cooking are from recent enough posts that even fairly heavy modifications would still feel like theft.  Obviously, I could have scrapped one of the meals and replaced it with something of my own, but that isn't what I wanted to do.  African peanut stew sounds great.  Chicken tortilla soup simmering all day in the crock pot sounds wonderful.  I decided I would have to bite the bullet and find the cash to finish my half written review of the Salt Tears Coffeehouse and Noshery some lunch hour, and headed to the store.

Other People's Recipes: New Mexico Chocolate Cookie Crinkles

One of the nicest things about the fall and winter months is all the attention paid to tradition; while my family has rituals for the Fourth of July and the whole month of August is pretty much a party (with both mine and Wife's birthdays bracketing our anniversary over a three week period,) none of these things really stands up to the feelings generated between Halloween and the first week of the new year. Some of these traditions, like the yearly Zombie Walk I posted a picture of on Halloween, involve an activity, but whether it is roasting pumpkin seeds as a family or the deliciously unhealthy "sausage biscuits" Wife makes every Christmas morning, many of them revolve around the kitchen. 

That's why when my friend Mouse talked about the cookies her mom used to make for her, I knew I should try and make them myself.  I had been looking for something tasty to make for a friend who was in town, but even when that didn't pan out it I decided I would like to try and replicate the cookies Mouse had grown up on for her sake.  I had already tried to replicate her nostalgia once, on her birthday, with mixed results.  The candied apples I made in lieu of a cake looked beautiful, tasted wonderful, and played hell on your teeth.  My inexperience with candy thermometers made what could have been a perfect treat more reminiscent of the glass Christmas ornaments my punk friends used to eat to freak people out.  I wasn't going to let one mistake in the kitchen discourage me, however, so I set out to find a recipe.