Croissants

flaky deliciousness

flaky deliciousness

Ever since I saw Ina Garten going to the bakery and buying six croissants for a breakfast party (why she needed so many for so few people at her breakfast party I have no idea) I wondered how hard they would be to make. I googled “croissant recipes,” but really got no good instructions. Everyone I mentioned making croissants to told me I was crazy, just buy them. Instead, I bought a cookbook that happened to have really good instructions for folded pastry dough.

We planned to bake these on a day when we had lots of time, a fast day. We stayed up all night doing the first three turns and then shaped, proofed, and baked them the next day. It was hard to do this without just tasting the dough, but we had a delicious meal to break the fast with. We froze the leftovers and had them for Saturday lunch.

In the end we had 24 croissants. They weren’t giant like bakery croissants, but they were definitely delicious.

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Vanilla

vanilla

Real vanilla extract is so expensive, and imitation vanilla is no substitute for the real thing, so now we make our own.

All you need is some vanilla beans and some alcohol.

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The Best Oatmeal Cookies Ever

oatmealcookiesI can never make enough of these cookies, they always seem to go. I use this recipe and tweak it to my liking: butter instead of shortening (unless I need a pareve dessert), and chocolate chips instead of raisins and walnuts. Obviously you can but anything you want in them; I once tried dried cranberries.

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Raspberry Sorbet

It was Friday afternoon, we were having company for shabbat dinner, and we still had some leftover raspberries. Naturally, we broke out the ice cream maker in order to prepare a delicious pareve dessert; sorbet! We keep the bowl frozen for such emergencies.

Unfortunately, we didn’t take any pictures of this. But it was pretty.

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Raspberry Boy Bait

Sure, it’s a silly name, but don’t let that stop you from trying raspberry boy bait. We adapted it from this recipe, substituting the blueberries for raspberries, since we had more than enough fresh ones on hand.

boy bait

This cake, when it came out of the oven, smelled incredible. When we finally got to eat it, it tasted just as good. But really, We couldn’t get over how good it smelled. We should bottle and sell it; that’s sure to be a success!

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