In the immortal words of Cartman...

..."Get your ass in the kitchen and bake me some PIE!"

Fortunately, no one actually said that to me, and if they had, I surely wouldn't have baked them a pie.  Smacked 'em around, maybe.

It's cherry season!  I picked up a HUGE thing of cherries at Costco last week, and they were on sale even cheaper at the grocery store this week, so we have cherries coming out our ears right now.

Jon asked me to bake a cherry pie, and despite the fact that I've never made a pie of any sort, I agreed.

I found a recipe on this blog that seemed way too easy...just how I like my recipes to be.  Even better, I had all the ingredients save one on hand.

Since the recipe for the crust was included as well, I figured I'd give that a whack too.  Only 4 ingredients?  I'm in.

Pitting the cherries was the hardest (?) part.  I don't have a pitter, so I was just using a paring knife to cut them in half and remove the pit.  I figured since they were just going in the pie, they didn't have to look particularly pretty.

The filling itself was super-easy to make.  I let Ella help -- it was her first time helping me in the kitchen, and I think she was tickled.  She totally enjoyed adding the ingredients to the bowl and (sort of) mixing everything up.

Here's what the filling looked like after it was all stirred up and ready to throw in the pie:

The crust was really easy as well, which I was pleasantly surprised about.  I've heard plenty of horror stories about pie crust.

(I guess technically there were five ingredients instead of the four I mentioned earlier -- I forgot to mention the water.)

The dough for the crust came together really quickly, and while I thought it was really sticky, a little flour on the counter handled it easily.  It rolled out nicely, and I even decided to get all fancy-pants and do a lattice on top of the pie.  I cut my lattice strips a little wider than I would have really liked, but oh well.

Just before going in the oven.

And here's the finished product:

Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum.

I had a bit of an issue with the filling boiling out of the pie when it was in the oven, but luckily, the baking stone down on the next rack caught the overflow, and I just scraped it up when it cooled a bit.

When Jon tried it after he got home from work, he declared that it was a "damn good pie."  And, not to toot my own horn, but it WAS.  The crust came out really good -- nice and flaky, and not sweet at all.  Even the pie itself wasn't overly sweet.  

I'll definitely be trying this recipe with other fruit -- I think it'll adapt really well.  And it was SO EASY!

Flag Cake!

Yes, I've been gone awhile.  I've still been baking, but not much new stuff.  Now that I'm in a new house with loads more counter space and a double oven (!), I plan on baking a lot more.

I'd seen a couple of Fourth of July cakes on Pinterest:  this flag cake, which used a box mix, and this red, white, and blue made-from scratch number.

Since making a cake that looked like a flag apparently wasn't enough of a challenge for me, I decided to use the recipe for the homemade cake -- something I'd never attempted before.

It actually was easier than I anticipated, both in terms of baking and assembling the flag.  The main problem I ran into was walking into the kitchen to find my cat with his head stuck in the bowl of red batter. Yeah, yuck.  So that batch got chucked -- no issues w/the re-do, though, I'm happy to report.

Here's the end result that I came up with...what do you think?

Pita bread.

I love Jon's homemade hummus -- the way he makes it, it's more like garlic with a little bit of ground chickpeas, rather than the other way around.  I've tried making it myself, but it just doesn't come out as yummy.

Since my hummus kind of stinks (and not 'cause of the garlic), I figured I'd try making pita bread to go with it.  I found a recipe on this blog that seemed easy enough.  However, in all my baking wisdom, I decided that since I didn't have any whole wheat flour on hand, I'd just use all white flour instead.  Should work, right?  I mean, flour is flour!

Um, no.

Turns out, wheat flour is a lot denser than white, and so by using all white flour, I ended up with a gloppy mess of dough that never came together.  Yuck.  I even kept adding more flour in the hopes that it would form up, but it didn't, and I eventually threw in the towel.  So my first attempt was a bust.

The next time I tried, though, I actually followed the recipe, with much better results.  I still wound up adding a bit extra flour, but it formed a proper dough without much of a struggle.

I wound up making the pitas a bit thick -- they didn't pocket up,  and Jon said he thought they were more like flatbread than actual pita.  He was really adamant they they should have a pocket.  (He got his comeuppance, though, when we went out for Greek food and THEIR pitas didn't have pockets, either. So there.)

I wound up freezing some of the dough, and when I used it, I split the portions in half, so it was smaller and thinner after I rolled it out.  This batch came out a bit crisper, and with pockets!  So I'll probably do this in future -- plus, I'll be able to get twice as many pitas out of a batch of dough.  Win-win-win!

Amish White Bread

Jon picked up some honey on one of his farmers' market expeditions a couple of weeks ago, and had asked me to bake up some bread to eat with it.

First of all, it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to find a recipe that does not require a bread machine.   People.  I have an OVEN.  Aside from a fireplace or something, wouldn't that be the original bread machine?  Anyway.  I digress.

The dough, ready to rise.

I found a recipe on my go-to cooking website for Amish White Bread that seemed easy enough, and I had all the ingredients on hand.  For the record, I have no idea what was particularly Amish about this recipe.  Seems to me that if you're going to throw a qualifier on like that, you need to have some kind of an explanation for it.

This bread was really easy to throw together.  It took awhile to make, just because you had to wait for the yeast to proof, and then for the dough to rise.  But the actual labor time wasn't long at all.

Yum.

The recipe yielded two loaves of golden delicious carb-a-licious goodness.  The bread has a bit of a sweetness to it, almost like a Hawaiian bread.

When she tried it warm out of the oven with a little butter, Ella declared it to be "big yummy!', and I agree with her.  I'd definitely make this recipe again.  It was easy and delicious.

Chocolate Muffins.

More muffins!  Even though Jon had requested me to make lemon poppyseed muffins next, I went for the chocolate muffins.  I already had the recipe and all the ingredients, and frankly, I'm not entirely sure where to get poppyseeds.  Will research that later.

Anyway, I think that technically, these should be called chocolate-chocolate chip muffins, since that's what they really are.   They were tasty, but Jon and I found them to be a little bit drier than I would have liked -- I guess that's due to the cocoa powder.   I'm not sure how to combat that, though, and make them a bit more moist.

I bought a disher at Sur La Table's recent sale, and that made distributing the batter a good deal easier than previously, and the muffins actually came out roughly all the same size -- success!

Recipe forthcoming!

Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Everyone should have a good, solid chocolate chip cookie recipe in their baking arsenal.  I've been using this particular recipe  for around 3 years now, and it's by far the best one I've ever tried -- even better than the Toll House recipe.  One reason I like it is because even though it's called "The Chewy", you can adjust how chewy your cookies actually are just by altering the amount of butter you use.  (I discovered this totally on accident, by the way.)

It's an easy recipe to mix up, and the dough can be portioned out, frozen, and taken out of the freezer to bake as well, if you're into that sort of "rationing" thing....doesn't happen around here, but if you're able to save some for later, more power to you!

For this most recent batch that I made, I was a bit concerned that they weren't going to come out.  The dough was REALLY dense by the time I was done mixing, far more so than usual.  I was following a slight variation of the recipe from the one that is online, so I thought that might account for the difference.

As it turned out, though, these were the best of any of the recent batches I've made!  Really yummy, if I do say so myself. Jon's initial assessment of "Pretty good," was upgraded to "Really good" upon a later taste test.

Buttermilk Pancakes.

Alright, so pancakes aren't *technically* baking, but that's probably the best category for it, I guess.  And I mean, they're called panCAKES, so that should qualify them, if nothing else.

And, really, all I'm going to say is this.  This here recipe makes the best pancakes I've ever had.  Seriously. And the mix will keep for up to 3 months, which is fantastic for us, since we go through spells where we eat pancakes every week, and then it'll be awhile before we want any again.

I don't have any pictures, because my pancakes always cook up hideously ugly, so I'm a little embarrassed of them.  But the ugly 'cakes taste just as good as the (very) few that comes out just perfect.