And on our left is the rare Georgia Door Handle Frog! This here is my bakin' post. Mainly this will be about the Bake Off / Cook Off that my unit had. And that I baked 3 desserts for. The picture on your left is the recipe I used for cookies. I also baked some lemon bars and Kathy's Trifle. In addition to all of the desserts, I also made some Cuban Pulled Pork... mmmm... pulled pork.Well, The night before the cook off was pretty busy. I needed to make 2 deserts, finish the Trifle and start the pork. We actually started the Trifle on Wednesday. Unfortunately, he Trifle calls for a Blamage, which Kathy buys from a British store. And to have ordered the Blamage packet, the cook off would have been over by the time it arrived. That and shipping was going to cost more than the actual Blamage.
What you see on the right is what I used for the desserts. One thing to help the time go by...music. You can check out what I was listening to here. But moving on. I was able to successfully bake all 3 desserts in a row with out going crazy. Which I think was a first. It took two days to complete all of the dishes (well, technically 3 because of the pork).
The first thing to be finished was the trifle. During that time, I need to read through a recipe a few times before actually starting it. Good thing Cait showed up to help otherwise the shipped cream wouldn't have gotten added. Speaking of whipped cream, when topping the trifle, you should always use the tubs of whipped cream instead of the cans This is because the stuff from the tubs holds up a lot better then the canned version. Moving on. Up next, the cookies! They are small chocolate cookies rolled in powdered sugar. They are delicious! And while the dough was firming up in the fridge, time to start on the lemon bars. For that, you start with the crust.
You can see the flour mixture as its falling from the sifter! As you can see, there was a lot of sifting going on. That bowl in the picture actually contained a lot more flour and other ingredients still waiting to be sifted. Which leads me to my next point. I need a bigger sifter. If you want to buy one for me, I won't complain. The scent that the dough gave off... a little bit of heaven. Once the dough was formed and placed into the containers, time to bake the crust. While this was baking, I filled a bowl with some powdered sugar and grabbed the nice and firm cookie dough from the fridge. You roll the dough into little balls, cover in the sugar and place on a baking sheet. I was able to fit 18 on to each baking sheet.
By the time that I had finished laying all the the dough out, my crust for the lemon bars was done. Time to swap. Crust comes out and cookies go in. Now lets make some curd! You can't have lemon bars with out the lemon, and I used the juice from 3 lemons to give these a nice lemony flavor. Everything about them turned out good, except for the color. And I think was due to the fact that I left out the lemon zest. Oh well.
After I made the curd... you know, curd sounds kinda gross. From now on, it shall be called the "lemon mixture." Now, as I was saying, after I made the lemon mixture (and the crusts had cooled down a bit), I poured the mixture over the crusts and did another swap. This time cookies put and lemon bars in. You can see the cookies above and the lemon bars on the right. See how the lemon bars aren't that yellow? I'm pretty sure that's due to no lemon zest. I might be wrong. If you know, please let me know. Once all of the baking was done, time to clean up catch some sleep. The next day (Friday), I was able to come home after muster and finish getting everything ready. We let the pork slow cook over night. That was a wonderful smell to wake up to.
We loaded up the car with everything and headed off to the base. In this picture, you can see me leaning over the trifle. It was pretty delicious. There were not enough actual slow cooker dishes that wasn't pulled pork to actually have its own category. So they combined the slow cooker and meat categories together. The cook off was a big hit though. We raised over $200 for the morale fund! I'm expecting some very nice Christmas prize at the Christmas party this year. Time to declare the winners. I actually won! In the meat category of all things.And what did I win you ask? I won a day of special liberty! That's pretty exciting. Our deserts didn't get any votes except from Cait and I. Oh well. I had fun cooking. And that's what matters. And now I leave you with what I looked like when I was dancing while baking. Enjoy!
- Brent
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