Soy Butter Blossoms

Here's a blog entry I meant to make a month ago. Peanut butter blossoms are something people often make at Christmas.

I actually make them year-round. But I don't make peanut butter ones; I make soy butter ones.



You can hardly tell the difference.

My daughter is allergic to peanuts. I used to just be careful with peanut butter in our house, but at one point it became clear to us that just getting it on our dishes and counters was risking her life. She'll react to traces you can't even see and has ended up in the emergency room over it.

So for a while my husband gave up his peanut butter cookies. But then I learned about sunflower butter and soy butter.



A lot of people like Sunbutter, but it does taste like sunflower seeds, and it turns green in baked goods unless you add an acidic ingredient like lemon juice. My husband wasn't thrilled with those cookies. But when I baked them with soy nut butter, he ate a whole cookie without realizing it was different than a peanut butter cookie. They taste very similar.



The Brach's stars aren't safe for someone with a peanut allergy to eat; they have a shared facility warning on the package. But my daughter thinks that soy butter is creepy because it tastes like peanut butter, so she doesn't want to eat the cookies anyway.

My husband's grandma always made peanut blossoms with stars instead of Hershey's Kisses (which would be generally safe for a peanut-allergic person to eat). And they're easier to bite in a cookie. So I do use the stars.

Gingerbread

I've gotten one Christmas baking project done: gingerbread people. Well, I have also done basic, everyday sugar cookies, the kind I roll in balls and dip in sugar. I dip them in colored sugar and, voila, Christmas cookies. But gingerbread is a multi-step project.

I must say, a KitchenAid mixer is the best thing that's ever happened to my gingerbread process. It mixes up that big batch of stiff dough in no time flat. I got it for Christmas last year, and I'm feeling grateful.




I have the cutest gingerbread people cutters ever, thanks to my mom.



They're Raggedy Ann & Andy. We had them when I was growing up, and she let me have them when I had my own place and started baking gingerbread every Christmas. I have a traditional gingerbread boy cutter, too.



The kids helped roll out the dough, cut out the cookies, and frost them. It took two evenings and they were unusually squirrely, so I had to go looking for some patience. I put on Christmas CDs and we sang along, which seemed to focus all of us - them on listening and singing rather than acting crazy (really, they're very well-behaved children in general), and me on the meaning of Christmas rather than how much mess we were making.

The frosting turned out too stiff for the decorator utensils we were using. I ended up scraping it all back out to thin it, then using a plastic bag with the corner cut off, because that was just easier. Of course, I cut too much off. At that point I didn't care. We're just getting them done.






You can see that some have such skinny lines of frosting; that's from the first attempt. The thicker bands are from the second. None of them are beautiful. But our tradition is accomplished for the year. I hope the kids had fun.

Stretching Pumpkin

Last fall, I roasted two of the pumpkins I grew in my garden. I pureed them and froze them in two-cup portions. So that's what I used to bake pumpkin pies for holidays. Most recipes call for two cups - that's equivalent to a can. But I had one cup left over and didn't know what to do with it. I saw that you can turn pumpkin bars into applesauce bars by just substituting applesauce in the recipe. So I did 50-50: pumpkin-applesauce bars. They didn't look orange, and they basically tasted like spice bars without a particular fruit taste. But they were good.

Strawberry Shortcake

My son made this strawberry shortcake. It's the biscuit variety, which we'd never tried before. I read in magazines that people in other parts of the country like biscuit-y shortcake, but after this experiment I'm still in favor of angel food cake as the base.

Can you tell I believe in teaching my children to cook?

Apple crisp?

This is the apple crisp my wee little girl made, topped with my homemade ice cream. The apples were from my parents' tree; I froze some last fall.

We used the apple crisp recipe from the 1950s Betty Crocker Boys & Girls cookbook. Now, usually apple crisp is topped with a mixture of oatmeal, brown sugar, butter & cinnamon. This had a topping made of white flour & sugar and butter. The cinnamon was mixed with the apples. It was more like a butter cookie topping - kind of chewy & pale! It tastes good, but I would never call that apple crisp. Our ideas about food do change over time.

Bread pudding

I tried making chocolate bread pudding last night. It was not generally a hit. I liked it better than any bread pudding I'd had before (after all, it was chocolate), but I don't like the stuff generally. My older daughter liked it, and that makes it all worthwhile. She has a peanut allergy, so it's not like she can go trying desserts in restaurants. I like to give her opportunities to try new things at home.