random thoughts – Day 2,098 (Sunday) – snowy bake off

Morning snowy skylight in a popcorn ceiling.

It was snowing at 7:00 when I got up and it snowed all morning and most of the day. It was the official fleece indoor-for-the-day pants and a fleece pullover. The fresh snow on the kitchen skylight looked a lot like the popcorn ceilings throughout the house. I have been imagining ways to change them. Old timey style tin ceiling tiles in the kitchen and laundry room are sounding appealing.

The snail’s progress in hanging the artwork continued. The walls are beginning to talk to me and today, one nail was pounded into a wall and one painting was hung in the living room. This brings the total of art hung in the past few days to five. Five! The place will look inhabited in no time.

The holiday cookie baking commenced. After reviewing all the potential cookie and appetizer recipes for the holidays a wild card not even in the original cut was pulled from the recipe box – oatmeal white chocolate cranberry cookies. I had all the ingredients, they didn’t involve making caramel or melting chocolate, and the recipe claimed to yield 30 to 40 cookies.

There was the creaming of butter and brown sugar which clogged the hand mixer and led to finishing the chore by hand. While “mixing in” the white chocolate chips and the dried cranberries it required the folding technique which conjured the memory of the hilarious scene from Schitt’s Creek when Moira Rose and David are making the alleged family recipe for enchilada which she says like “ahnchalahdas” and they get tot he step to “fold in the cheese” and I laughed in my kitchen while folding in my ingredients (which I learned to do in junior high school cooking class). 

Using the direction to “drop by rounded teaspoon” on to a cookie sheet and using the official measuring spoon teaspoon and not the not universally sized teaspoon used from the flatware set for tea/coffee led to many more cookies than the 30 to 40.

Cookie season has begun.

I usually bake four to six recipes and freeze what I can until it's time to make up plates and pastry boxes. New problems are coming to light. For instance, I donated a lot of plastic storage containers before I moved, and now I need some of those containers to store and freeze the cookies for the next week and a half. It took two containers to store tonight’s output, leaving two containers available for three to five more types of cookies. Oops.

The kitchen has counter space, but it isn’t all fully useful or convenient. Cooling baked goods requires cooling racks, which requires counter space, but the nearby counter was occupied by the bowl of cookie dough. Once the cookies could be moved to containers, those also required space which was hard to find. This is the first big bake since moving in and it’s weird still getting used to the kitchen. Baby steps.