Baking Round Up!

Holiday Bakes and Starting off 2024 with Pie

It might be too late to say happy New Year, but happy New Year!

When I last posted, I had just finished my first round of Christmas cookies.

I had a couple of bake sales that I needed to bake more cookies for. The first was a bake sale for the local cat rescue, so of course I did calico cat cookies. These were so fun to make and also every batch ended up a little different. The idea and recipe for these came from Kim Joy, who you may know from the Great British Bake Off in 2018.

Next up, we had a holiday party to go to that we needed a dessert for, and I decided to bring a Yule Log. I had never made one before, so I went with Smitten Kitchen’s Gingerbread Yule Log. It was very simple! I highly recommend this recipe as a first Yule Log/Swiss roll. The decor was also very simple, just some melted and rolled up white chocolate for the bark. The filling and frosting was heavy cream whipped with sour cream. She also has a video, which I found incredibly helpful with some of the steps around rolling and unrolling the cake.

For reasons that, in the cold light of late January, I cannot recall, on December 20th I decided I needed to bake more cookies. I made Smitten Kitchen’s Confetti Cookies. If you ever need cookies quick, I recommend these. They are so easy, so delicious, and are easily made festive with different color sprinkles.

And my last bake of the year was an apple cake. The recipe was from Sally’s Baking Recipes. This cake turned out great! It was very moist and had great apple flavor. The frosting was also from Sally’s Baking Recipes, but it was from her gingerbread cake recipe. Some sugared cranberries and rosemary made the cake very festive!

And with that, baking in 2023 came to an end, and I have to say that I was a little burned out.

I came into 2024 with one planned bake and that was two pies for a party my dad and stepmom were throwing. I did a Coconut Cream pie and a Lemon Custard pie. I’m sure the Coconut Cream pie was good, but there were a couple of things I wasn’t happy with. I stuck with the Serious Eats recipe I have always used. The cream scorched a little bit. Ultimately, I don’t think this impacted the filling too much, as I left that behind in the pot, but it was annoying. Also, the whipped cream topping was a little overbeaten, a problem I have occasionally, because I am usually multitasking at this point in the process. The Lemon Custard was a new-to-me recipe, still from Erin McDowell. I did not do the meringue, just mascarpone whipped cream. I didn’t like how the whipped cream looked, but it tasted good.

This past weekend, I made the Coconut Cream pie again for an auction winner and a Peanut Butter pie.

I corrected everything I was unhappy with on the previous Coconut Cream pie. I solved the scorching problem by cooking the custard on a slightly lower heat and cleaned out the pot in between simmering the milks and cooking the custard. I’ve been doing both stages in the same pot, but I think not having the milk residue already in the pot when I poured the pastry cream in was helpful in making a smoother cream. For the whipped cream, I beat it for less time at a higher speed, and it came out looking much creamier.

I may have a new favorite pie! I don’t know how I have gone this long without making Peanut Butter pie, but I made it for a friend and now I need to make it for me, because the filling was ridiculously good, I could not stop eating the leftover.

This pie did involve a major fail. I tried to make the King Arthur’s chocolate pie crust and it did not work out. However, I did bake some strips from the scrap dough, and they were very good. It’s worth trying again, but I need to call the King Arthur Baking Hotline and see what they suggest to successfully blind bake the chocolate dough. Since that didn’t work out, I did a chocolate cookie dough press in crust. This is the recipe I used for the pie. I didn’t do the meringue topping, just whipped cream. My cocoa got away from me when I was garnishing, but overall I thought this turned out great!

For 2024, my goals are to get better at piping and also to try different techniques that I haven’t yet, including meringue. I also plan on entering the county fair pie contest again. I would love to enter a successful spiced plum pie.