A friend of mine left for a six month teaching gig in China this week, and in order to send her off in style I wanted to bake something for her. After much googling of 'Chinese desserts' I finally settled on a recipe for Chinese Five-Spice Almond Cookies from Whole Foods.
It's a fairly basic recipe, and I had all that I needed. All except for the Chinese Five-Spice. Apparently there was a run on Chinese Five-Spice. Whodathunkit? So when I got home from a fruitless trip to the grocery store I dug around in my pantry and come up with three of the five spices in Chinese Five-Spice. And thus was born, the Chinese Three-Spice cookie.
Chinese Three-Spice Almond Crescent Cookie
slightly altered from the Whole Foods Chinese Five-Spice recipe
makes around 20 cookies
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2/3 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup unsalted butter, in chunks
1/4 cup sugar
~1/8 tsp of cinnamon
~1/8 tsp ground ginger
~1/8 tsp ground cloves
1/8 tsp salt
2 tsp almond extract
powdered sugar for dusting if desired
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Put everything but the powdered sugar in a food processor and pulse until the dough gets crumbly. Then blend until it forms a soft dough.
Take a small pinch of dough, and roll it a bit to form a log. Shape the log of dough into a crescent. Repeat with the rest of the dough.
Bake for 20 minutes, or until the cookies are fairly firm to the touch. Let cool on the cookie sheet for 10 minutes and then transfer to a cooling rack. Once the cookies are completely cool, dust them with powdered sugar if you'd like. These aren't a super sweet cookie, so I think most people would appreciate the little extra bit of sweetness.
Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!
I'd never heard of these rolls before, though they reminded me a little of the Marco Polo bagel that Wegmans sells. Ah Wegmans... Ok, I'm back. I'm in a near constant state of Wegmans withdrawal so you'll have to excuse me.
I made these pretty much as soon as I could, my biweekly day off falling just a few days after this month's recipe was posted. So I scrambled around and gathered the necessary ingredients together and got started.
You can find the recipe here.
I got to use my much under appreciated doughhook on my Kitchenaide, and things came together nicely. The topping confused me a little, seeming thick enough when I left it to set for the ten minutes, but then it dripped around a bit when it was time to slather it onto the rolls. I think things turned out pretty well. Though I got the more giraffe spotty look as opposed to the larger cracks running down. I didn't mind too much, they still tasted good.
I ended up going with a fairly basic (but quite tasty!) sandwich: turkey, cheddar, and apple.
And in other news... I now have rice flour sitting around. Any recipe suggestions?
The Daring Bakers’ February 2012 host was – Lis! Lisa stepped in last minute and challenged us to create a quick bread we could call our own. She supplied us with a base recipe and shared some recipes she loves from various websites and encouraged us to build upon them and create new flavor profiles.
Banana bread is one of my favorite things to eat. Now, I don't bake it all that often given that I also love bananas and will eat them up well before they'd be ready for banana bread. But for Daring Bakers, I resisted temptation. Ok, ok. Actually I just bought seven bananas at once, definitely more bananas than even I can eat in a week.
This recipe from Joy the Baker came together quickly, not taking much longer than a few minutes before it was in the oven. But, it used three bowls. One for the dry, one for the wet, and one for the egg whites. Growing up, my family was often in the just-throw-it-all-in-one-bowl-and-mix-it-up class of baker. And I have to say, everything seemed to turn out just fine. So I'm wondering if you really need that separate wet ingredient bowl, and next time I try this recipe I may skip it and see.
I would recommend going out of your way to have large bananas or to have an extra banana or two. There was a shortage of bananas at my grocery store when I went and I ended up with a rather petite bunch of organic bananas (so not worth the extra cost, by the way). I had issues with the outside crust getting slightly tough while there was still a slightly gooey center and I wonder if my small bananas had something to do with that. Not enough moisture throughout or something. Though that gooey center? Oh. My. Deliciousness.
