Category Archives: baking

Thanks for giving my Fiancé the Heimlich Maneuver

My fiancé, Ben, almost choked on his lunch last week at work. Kurt came to the rescue and delivered the Heimlich Maneuver just in time!

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This is the note that I am sending along with some chocolate chip cookies (and a bottle of wine) to Kurt. It is a very sincere note, but I couldn’t help but make a little joke with this thank you card. I mean, how often does someone save your fiancé’s life at work! He works in social media… it’s not really a high risk environment.

Hilarious right? and thank goodness these tiny spiraea florets came in today to further my “beyond hipster tongue in cheek” but still very very serious note.

Here are the cookies… they are really good too… My secret recipe and Ben’s FAVORITE!

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A dinner for The Hollywood Farmers’ Market

When the production of The Cooking Channel series “He Cooks She Cooks” asked me to create a printed menu for a benefit dinner cooked by Suzanne Goin and David Lentz, I jumped at the opportunity.

I LOVE cooking (well, baking mostly but more top of the stove lately) and I LOVE the Hollywood Farmer’s Market. So it was an easy “YES”. They gave me the menu which was based on locally available ingredients, and I typset and printed the menu in a jiffy. Hopefully the letterpress was helpful in raising money for the Farmers Market!

The show aired this past Sunday, but hopefully will repeat so everyone can see it!

Oh, follow this link to a better description of the show and the recipes for some of their creations….

How to cook a bees, a coon, or a possum the Cherokee way.

I KNOW that everyone checks this blog daily for photos of new roadkill cakes and sundaes and such. I know that it’s a very popular subject because I can tell when you’uns search for Hillbilly Cakes or Road Kill Ice Cream. It’s just a subject that isn’t covered very often. So I am making a commitment to inform the interweb users that these desserts that I have such a love of creating are based on real recipes.

Just to be clear, I don’t actually put possum or pole cat in the ice cream cakes. They are just SHAPES. Inspirations from nature.

cherokee coverHowever, I was just in New Orleans and I stumbled in a delightful little shop in the French Quarter called the Kitchen Witch. It was a book store specializing in vintage eclectic cookbooks. I LOVED walking around and scanning the silly local cookbooks from all over the world. Right in front of me was this Cherokee Cooklore book. It was published in 1951 and is full of photographs of a Cherokee Chief’s daughter making bean bread from scratch. They even show the field where the get the corn for the meal.

As I turned the pages, looking for familiar recipes (I am 1/12 Cherokee and my family was from North Carolina where this book was published) and I found my very favorite hillbilly treat, Leather Breeches, which is basically dried green beans that are re-warmed and turned yummy again, but sort of leathery, like the name.

Then I looked further and found this recipe for Yellow Jacket Soup. Ok. I am NOT going to be attempting this one. I walked into a nest of yellow jackets when I was 12 and got stung 30 times, barely making it to the hospital. I don’t think so.

But you guys can try!

Also, on the other page is the recipes for Coon, Groundhog, and Possum.cherokeerecipes

Let me know if you can’t read these. I would be happy to transcribe them for you adventurous chefs.

Really Adventurous.

An English Breakfast

I invited a friend over for morning tea today.  I got up and drank some pre-tea to get enough caffeine to un-morningize enough to bake scones for us.

I LOVE scones. But not always. I remember tasting them at a coffee shop and be confused about why someone would want to eat dry crumbly flour with their hot beverage.

My momma used to bake biscuits all the time. Biscuits are just the yummiest at all times of the day, with jelly or tomatoes or just by themselves with butter. (ohhh butter biscuits) and once I figured out that scones were just sweet biscuits, well, I found my new favorite treat. I can bake a batch and have them all week for breakfast or toss them around to friends and then everyone is smiling. Which is a goal. Smiles via baked goods are so sincere.

Ok, the point of this post is this… I realize there are lots of cooks out there who are afraid of baking because it involves measuring and commitment and timing and chemistry and mostly that once those dry ingredients get mixed with the wet, well, there’s no going back…………

So, say you got up this morning with the intention of baking some blueberry scones for your friend who thinks of you as a really great “bakestress” already. and then you are sort of tired because usually you drink coffee instead of tea and maybe you are used to MORE caffeine than that. and you get distracted doing the substitution for double acting baking powder, that you FORGET to put in the baking soda. all together. 1/2 tablespoon baking soda missing totally from the recipe. hmmmm.

this happens 15 minutes before the friend is due. the friend that thinks you bake so well… too late to make a new batch. the blueberries are in short supply. there are some clementines? what to do? what to do?????

scones

you cross your fingers and hope hope hope that because you remembered the baking powder….. maybe that will be enough to rise them a little. OR you will get blueberry biscotti rounds…..

Guess what. in the end, these were delicious and they aren’t perfect. a little life lesson on a lovely morning.

polecat ice cream cake

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So Anne, of Card Tricks Designs, ‘s daughter came back from a summer trip and had requested another roadkill cake upon her arrival home. We were happy to oblige her. I gave her a few choices…. Coon, Groundhog or Polecat…
She chose polecat.

So we made a plan. I baked a devil’s food loaf pan body, a large cupcake head and 7 small cupcake tail. Anne was then instrumental in the construction… mint chip ice cream for the body layer and then icing to make the pole cat come to life…

upon further research we realized that the term polecat covers many types of critters including ferrets… so this is technically a striped pole cat. and it sure did taste good!!

All I have to say is you might be a hillbilly if all you want to eat is possum and polecat….n707219468_2034034_6255611

New business idea… Rodent ICE CREAM!

Yesterday not a lot of work got done. Well, maybe brainstorming for a new business should count as work!
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I share studio space with Anne Muller – Card Tricks Designs – and it was the last day of school for her kids… And so we decided to make Possum ice cream. 

I should clarify. In the past few months, whenever these teenagers, Ruby and Wilson, may complain about something like cell phones or computers then I go into a hillbilly rant about how I grew up miles and miles from anything and how we didn’t have a home phhone growing up and blah blah blah walking to school up hill in the snow both ways type stuff. (Anne can’t really  do those rants because she grew up in the city in Southern California, so I do it for her.)
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Basically, it was kind of a joke that we would have some “Hillbilly Ice Cream Social” (I am ALWAYS game for an ice cream social) “School’s OUT!” Party.  Then Anne went to the store and we surprised them with this lovely creation. 

I think it’s sooooo funny! i had a leg. We were civilized and ate it on plates though my Hillbilly instinct was to just dig in! Oh well, When in Rome……

Tiny Pine Scones

Today is Sunday. Often on Sunday, I like to not work… to reflect and such. Particularly I like to bake.  And lately I have been baking scones for the weekday breakfast treat…. just a little something for the belly in the morning that is already prepped and only needs to be heated a dash… you know. It’s hard to get out of bed these winter mornings. It’s easier to get out of bed when your breakfast is nearly ready already.

Well, today as I was starting to bake, I thought “there must be some pretty close similarities between printing and baking since I love the processes s much.” I set out to find out how they are the same. 

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The first thing is that these days, I start baking and printing projects on the computer. For baking, I like to look up a recipe on epicurious.com because I am not limited to what books or magazines I have here. The information super highway works really well for recipes! Today was the first time I have used my iphone in the kitchen. That was pretty funny…. flour on my fingers scrolling down to see what was next…. good thing I bought that screen protector! 

For letterpress the typesetting and artwork phase is all done in Illustrator and Photoshop. Don’t get me wrong, I like to be old school and all, but typesetting machines are big and require so much space and they melt down lead and there for some reason I don’t want lead all over my hands and everywhere. The true old old school method is handset type – but here again is a space situation. Fonts take up a LOT less space in the hard drive than little letters in all the different sizes and styles would take up in my studio!

Another similarity is the idea of substituting but knowing when and where. Baking is a chemical process – you can’t substitute self rising flour for cake flour. It WON”T work. But you can substitute yogurt for buttermilk and butter for margarine. Much the same in printing when mixing inks… Once I didn’t have a can of rhodamine red ink. – it’s like a bright pinky purple – and a ink recipe called for it. I examined the color, took a chance and substituted florescent pink and rubine red instead. The color was perfect. (the question is why did I have a can of florescent pink and not rhodamine red?!!)

Is this boring? I could go on all day. I can draw some more comparisons another day but let’s do one contrast for now….

You can’t eat the printed paper scone. 

Though I do have a source for vegetable paper and probably soy ink is even vegan??!? I’ll have to look into that… but there is hope!