New Starts in the Studio and Kitchen

Posted on by Sandy Webster

I did a bit of printing on cloth and tea bags today while a friend is in the studio working on small dry point etchings. As soon as there were a few prints hanging up to dry my daughter asked what I was planning to do with them. I told her I was just collecting materials to start something new.

Here is the beginning. Lots of bits arranged on a sheet of rusted paper to be looked at and rearranged….and then later glued and stitched and tied down. It felt good to just “play” with the papers, cloth and sticks and prints.

Here is a very special gift my friend, Marla made for me.

It only stands about five inches high and on the glass she etched a story about how much like a rock I am in keeping it together here as Lee slowly slips further away. Note the small book of my hands and the kantha stitched cloth like my dementia shawl. There is a tiny wooden wine glass to represent Lee’s bowl turning that he used to do and the need to relax and have a drink. This is just such a little treasure.

Our daughter, Amy, helped me make ginger marmalade yesterday. What a process! The fumes watered our eyes and made us cough. The exhaust fan on the range got an extra workout during the almost two hours it took to cook the chunks of ginger to the soft stage.

Here is the process in pictures.

About four cups of chopped ginger cooking up in water.

Two hours later being turned into marmalade.

The ugly greenish water poured off needed food coloring to look edible because this slime green just was not what would make an attractive jelly with the gingery water.

I forgot how much sugar it takes to make jelly!

And here is the color adjusted jelly cooking down.

And here it is in jars. One small problem is that it is slow to set up. We know we used the right amount of pectin but the ginger seems a bit stubborn. The jelly is setting up better and I may not redo it, but that marmalade needs to go back in and get cooked with additional pectin.

And the taste of it might just take the top of your head off. Maybe longer cooking on the front end with more water changes would be the answer.

All I know is that if you make a nice seedy french toast, butter it, add a large dollop of plain yogurt and top off with this gingery marmalade, you have one lovely breakfast.

We are waiting until after Christmas to decide how much needs to be cooked again.

Have a lovely Christmas.

Til later.

Second Best Malted Cookie I Ever Ate

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Finally! Here it is….the last word on malted cookies.

Recipe for The Second Best Malted Cookie I Ever Ate

Set oven to 350 F

 

2 ½ C. all purpose flour

1 ½ t. baking soda

1 ½ t. ground ginger

½ t. salt

Sift all of the above together on a parchment sheet of paper that has been cut to fit cookie sheet.

 

¾ C. softened butter

1 C. packed brown sugar

1/3 C.  each golden syrup and malt extract

1 egg

Cream above together and then add dry ingredients until all is moistened.

 

Shape into walnut size balls and roll in white granulated sugar to coat.

Place on parchment lined cookies sheets about 2-3 inches apart.

Bake 9 minutes, remove from oven and slam down on stove to increase cracks.

Return to oven for 6 more minutes,  cool slightly on sheet and then remove to cooling racks.

Wishing you well-spent Holidays!

Good Grief How Dumb!

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Lovely sunrise this week…..and more about those malted cookies.

I really can not believe how dumb I was on all the previous attempts to make the perfect malted cookie. I could not understand why they all were so hard to bite into. So I googled “what makes cookies hard to bite into?” And the answer was too much flour….not enough wet ingredients. And of course I knew I was doing everything right, in fact doing it “right” over and over again.

So after my malt extract arrived I tried it again. This time no Carnation Malted Milk Powder.

 

That extract is sooo good, very thick and very sticky.

So I following my recipe AGAIN and when it comes to the softened butter part I realize that for some unknown reason I was thinking one stick was a full cup….so was very careful to use only 3/4 of it when the recipe called for 3/4 cup of softened butter. It must have been forever since I actually baked something calling for butter! So I corrected my mistake but still kept the lesser amount of flour that I thought was a good idea.

Here they are slammed:

And here the next sheet is “unslammed.”

And forget “crispy”. These are very gooey and soft. BUT flavor is close to what I wanted. No molasses added this time and a healthy mix of both the golden syrup and malt extract.

Now to try it again with the increased flour and a good slam. I swear when I get it right it will be the last time you have to look at cookies on this blog.

In the meantime I finished the latest Cormoran Strike novel by Robert Galbraith, aka J. K. Rowling. It was very hard to follow as there were so many characters and I thought a lot of them could have been killed off earlier.

Then I went on to Louise Penny’s latest Inspector Gamache novel and devoured it. I have admired how she could write while caring for a husband with dementia and now that he is gone, she can continue when she thought the stories would end with his passing.

And now to try to keep myself entertained because for some reason I am not doing anything in the studio but stitching, I have started Dianne Setterfield’s new book, Once Upon a River. I really loved her twists and turns of The Thirteenth Tale a few years ago and am enjoying this one as well.

Lee is absorbed in a football game and I have Lyle Lovett channel on Pandora in the studio. Now I will go back to stitching in there or better yet, go try to get the ingredients right for the malted cookies.

Enough. I am headed to the kitchen.

Til later.

 

Cookie Test Kitchen News

Posted on by Sandy Webster

Another view of that 35 year old basket on the front door this holiday season. I sure was proud of that woven god’s eye joinery.

Anyway, back to the ongoing search for a really good malt-flavored crispy cookie.

When I first looked up (googled) malt cookies one came up by Martha Stewart. I don’t know about anyone else but I feel I need to put on LL Bean clothing, comb my hair and even put a little lipstick on before reading Martha Stewart instructions. And the few times I may have followed her directive tone, I know she can see me, my messy counter and worst of all, my less than top grade ingredients.

Well her malted cookies use Carnation Malted Milk Powder and are squeezed through a press to form nothing less than perfect little dollops of flavor. In fact all malted cookies that I found use this powder. None looked right.

So I did use the malted milk powder with golden syrup the other day. And the results were very good but required being bitten into by strong teeth….and they did not last long as we found them delicious. So much so that this morning they were gone and I went back to the kitchen. These three ingredients are key to what I made next. My only mistake may have been increasing the amount of malted milk powder…now they have a slight after taste of powdered milk.

This time I added equal parts molasses and golden syrup to get the 1/3 cup required. The molasses gives a bit more color but does not give a molasses flavor. Like I said the powdered milk increase to 3/4 cup was a bit too much and made mixing in the dry ingredients something that required mixing in with hands.

But good results otherwise. The slamming down of the half cooked sheet works nicely….just have to do it when the first cracks appear. Otherwise you spend too much time interrupting the baking time with banging time.

Here are the results this morning….with a porter that makes a good companion. Forget that milk and cookies idea with these.

These are crispy and can be tackled with your front teeth….but there is always the beer for dunking.

Tomorrow the malt extract arrives and in a few days we will start again. I will let you know how it comes out.

Here is a picture of our cat Patches, always ready to supervise happenings in the kitchen.

She has that Martha Stewart look down pat.

Til later.