Some Big Projects & A Contest!

We have done some really fun cooking and baking projects lately. A lot of these are actually from a while ago, because we are very behind on blogging. I'm posting this as my last fall post, but it's really already winter!

One thing that we made was Jerusalem Bagel Bombs. Jerusalem style bagels are less chewy than traditional bagels and have a texture more like bread or a roll. You don't need to boil them. My mom made the dough early, so that it had time to rise before we woke up.

Then we rolled balls of dough and put cream cheese in the middle.

This is my brother, squishing the dough up around the cream cheese. The cream cheese in the middle is why this is called a bomb!

And this is my sister putting on an egg wash.

This is what they looked liked finished.

And this is what they looked like when you bit into them.

We all agreed that these were actually better cold, which is different from most of what we usually bake. My mom and I thought that we would like these more with real chewy bagels. So we might try making regular bagels and then piping cream cheese into the middle. Stay tuned!

Of course, we've still been doing lots with apples and pumpkin! One morning, we made Dorie Greenspan's Custardy Apple Squares. Dorie Greenspan is a very famous cookbook author, but this is the first recipe of hers that we have ever made. My Grandma Linda uses her recipes a lot. This recipe was a huge hit. My sister insisted that she didn't like apple cake, until she tried this one! And we gave some to some people who were working outside at our house and they couldn't believe that we made it ourselves, so I highly recommend this!

You have to cut the apples very thinly for this recipe.

Another apple breakfast was Apple Cinnamon Crumb Cake. Everybody loved the topping on this cake. Rachel loved this recipe and said that she might make it over the holidays!

I thought that the topping looked like the ground with frost on it!

The cake was very moist and delicate. Of our three apple cakes on this post, this one was my favorite!

Our last apple breakfast (at least for now!) was a French Apple Cake. This recipe has bourbon in it, which is a kind of alcohol, but you can't taste it! This cake is very simple. It doesn't have cinnamon or nutmeg or the typical spices that you add when baking with apples. It is very light and I thought that it was divine!

Whipped cream is the perfect complement to this cake!

I really like baking with apples in the fall, but pumpkin is definitely my favorite fall ingredient. We made Pumpkin Maple Cornbread and it was rich and buttery and excellent. It has great maple flavor. The only thing about this recipe that was tricky is that we had a hard time getting the very center to cook through. We always use a tooth pick to check if things are done and if it comes out clean, then we know we're finished. We cooked this for longer than the recipe said, but the middle was still softer than it should have been.

I liked the color of the pumpkin seeds on top.

I also liked the color that the pumpkin gave the cornbread.

When we had our last contest to guess my new favorite pancake, my Grammy Marcia guessed pumpkin. That wasn't what we had made, but we thought that it was a really good idea, so we tried it and made these pumpkin pancakes! I loved these. They have a very soft texture that I liked.

We forgot to take a picture with maple syrup, but that's definitely how you should serve them!

My mom always makes an itty bitty pancake version of our family for my sister. She loves it! The Harper pancake looks like a fish though!!!!!

Since we liked the pumpkin pancakes so much, we decided to try pumpkin waffles! My mom thought that these tasted like fall!! My brother and I liked these even more than the pancakes, but we usually like waffles more, so that's not very surprising. My sister didn't love these. I think that's probably because they have a strong flavor from all the spices. And my dad usually likes waffles too, but in this case, he preferred the pancakes. I think that actually both recipes are really good, which is why we were divided!

These definitely should also be served with maple syrup! My Aunt ShayShay told me once that she likes to fill each pocket with maple syrup! I need to try that next time!!

We've been saving a bunch of pumpkin bread recipes to try, and then we read an article on the kitchn comparing pumpkin bread recipes and picking the best one. It was actually a Smitten Kitchen pumpkin bread recipe that we'd already saved, and so of course we had to try it! This pumpkin bread is super moist and what makes it really special is the cinnamon sugar topping.

Of course we forgot to take a picture until after we cut it! But you can still see the cinnamon sugar on top!!

I think that this picture shows how moist this bread is!

Do you remember how we made two pumpkin coffee cakes on our last post? Well we actually also made ANOTHER pumpkin coffee cake and this one was my favorite! It is a Pumpkin Coffee Cake with Brown Sugar-Pecan Streusel and it's really good!! Our friend Grazzy, didn't get to try our last two, but she loved this one.

If you look carefully you can see that we started cutting this cake before we got a picture. But I remembered just in time!

This was another cake with a streusel layer in the middle, which we like!

We made two of the best lunches that we've had in quarantine recently. They were definitely my mom's top two! The first one was a French Onion Grilled Cheese. We liked this so much that we made it three times in one week! Twice we had it as sandwiches, but then I had a really good idea to do another version. I thought that it would be good served as small squares with the crusts cut off as an hors d'oeuvre for a cocktail party and my mom did it! We're not having cocktail parties these days, but my dad had a drink with a friend outside and my mom gave them these!

Can you see all the melty cheese and onions oozing out?! Trust me, you should make this!!!!

Then our next really really good lunch was scallion pancakes! These were so fun to make and sooooooooooooooooooo good!!!!!!!!!! First you make a dough and roll it out. My Aunt Meggie got me the coolest rolling pin and mat for my birthday. The mat tells you the size of the rolled dough, which really helped us. And you can set the rolling pin to roll dough to a certain thickness, which I've always thought is really hard to figure out just by looking.

This is my brother rolling.

Then you sprinkle scallions over your dough and roll it up.

And after that, you make a spiral, before you roll your pancakes out again. We called this part "snailing it up!!!"

These scallion pancakes were light and crispy and flaky and spectacular!

You serve them with a dipping sauce.

My rolling pin from Aunt Meggie wasn't my only cool cooking birthday present. Kelsie and Chelsie got me an oven mitt so that I have my own when my mom lets me help with hot things!

And Alex, who used to be our nanny before my sister was born, got me this very special apron.

It has my name on it too, even though you can't see it in this picture.

A dinner that we made that was very popular was Spiced Ginger Shrimp with Burst Tomatoes. My dad loved that this dish was so flavorful. An interesting thing about this dish is that you can use any kind of spice blend that you want. We used a chili powder blend and loved it, but you can make this dish and use whatever spices you like the best. I think it might be fun for us to make this again but with some different spices, to compare.

The tomatoes make this sauce very savory.

A bigger dinner project that we did one night was lasagna. I had never made lasagna before and my mom hadn't made it since before we were born, and it was a bit more work than a usual dinner, but this recipe is SO GOOD!!!!!!!!

This is me spreading sauce over the noodles!

Unfortunately we forgot to take a picture of the finished lasagna, but this recipe is DEFINITELY worth making. We also made garlic knots, to go with it. That was a fun project. First we made a dough and let it rise.

We rolled the dough into ropes and shaped them.

This is what the dough knots looked like (that sounds like donuts!).

Then we baked them, brushed them with garlic butter and sprinkled them with cheese.

Don't these look special?

And this is what it looked like all together!

We actually also went on a big food adventure! We went scalloping!!!!! Nantucket Bay scallops are delicious and only available at certain times of year. They're very popular and expensive in the store, but we were able to get our own!

We had to buy my dad waders to go out in! He said that he's going to try to get me some too!

He used this push rake to scoop them up.

And this is what they looked like fresh out of the ocean.

Then we had to shuck them! It's a little bit weird because they try to close on you and sometimes spit out water. One of them got me in the eye!

You have to cut away the scallop from the membranes.

Then it looks like this.

We used ours to make scallop ceviche. We just used olive oil, lemon juice, some red pepper, onion, and salt. This tasted so light and fresh!!!!!

I thought that this looked really pretty.

When we went scalloping, we brought Chocolate Chip Cookie Brownie Bars to the beach. These are similar to Brookies (which have blobs of chocolate chip cookie dough and brownie batter baked together in a pan), but these have a chocolate chip cookie layer on the bottom, then a layer of peanut butter cups, and then a layer of brownie on top. My mom actually didn't love these, but I did!

It was fun sprinkling on the peanut butter cups.

Then we just poured the brownie batter right over.

The layers kind of look blended together when you cut them.

A fall ingredient that we haven't talked that much about is MAPLE! Maple goes well with apple and pumpkin AND is really good by itself. We made White Chocolate Maple Nut Blondies. I thought that the nuts in these added good texture. The glaze was very very sweet, but had good maple flavor. One interesting thing about this recipe is that while many recipes get maple flavor from maple syrup, this recipe uses both maple syrup and maple extract. I think that is why it has such intense maple flavor..

The glaze was very drippy!

But it did harden up. Ta da!!

My Grandma Linda gave me three baking cookbooks for my birthday. I love them!

I wanted to bake from this one first because I love American Girl!!!!

We made Rocky Road Fudge from this cookbook and I did it all by myself!! I thought these were more like bars than fudge. The recipe is very easy and this kept for a long time in the fridge.

This is what it looked like after it set in the fridge.

And these were how they looked cut.

A bigger project that we did was a chocolate chip cookie comparison contest. We baked three kinds of cookies and then gave one of each kind to a whole bunch of people to pick their favorite. Cookie #1 was a Copycat Levain Bakery Chocolate Chip Cookie. Levain Bakery is a bakery in New York that is very famous for its cookies. My mom has had them and says that she doesn't even love them that much, but she liked this version a lot!

This is me scooping cookies, and there were already racks of other cookies in the background. We baked a LOT of cookies for this project!

What made the Levain cookies unique is that they had nuts in them. If I did the project over, I'd make these without the nuts so that it was a more even comparison. I think some people didn't pick these just because they don't like nuts in cookies. Other unique things about this cookie are that the recipe calls for cake flour, and the butter and egg go into the batter cold. Most cookie recipes have the butter and egg at room temperature.

This is what the Levain cookies looked like baked.

Cookie #2 was Three Yolk Chocolate Chunk Cookies. These cookies are made with European style butter and use only the yolks of the eggs.

These are the egg yolk cookies. These were flatter than the Levain cookies.

Cookie #3 was a recipe from Broma Bakery. These cookies are made with browned butter. It makes for a very distinct cookie.

These are the browned butter cookies baked. They had the darkest color of the three.

My personal favorite cookie was #1 and my mom and dad agreed. I liked the nuts and I liked how thick and chewy they were. #2 was very popular also though. It was my brother and sister's favorite. #3 was a distant third. Only two people picked it as their favorite! I think the browned butter made them taste like something different than classic chocolate chip cookies.

I graphed our cookie results and this is what it looked like! We had 29 tasters total, which means that we made close to 100 cookies!!

I have one more fun project to tell you about. This is a little bit silly that I'm telling you about a Halloween project a few days before Christmas! But I thought that these were so cute that I don't want you to miss them! We made Halloween cake pops!! First we made a chocolate sheet cake. The cake was actually light and delicious itself! But then we broke it up and mixed it with cream cheese frosting. We don't always like chocolate cake with cream cheese frosting, but this tasted delicious together. We had to buy special molds that we formed the pops in. Then to dip them, we used candy melts for the first time. Usually we use real chocolate, but the melts definitely melted better and the color looked great!

Aren't these cute?

Then we wrapped them up and gave them to friends. Of course we got to try one too!

We did a ghost version too. I think it would be fun to do these in green and red for Christmas or in red and pink for Valentine's Day!

I'm sorry that this post is so late though. We've been busy doing other things, but maybe you'll hear more news about that in the New Year! Happy holidays everyone!!!!!!