The Flush of Early Success

Yesterday's baking adventure was quite successful, if I do say so myself. (It was also quite a long adventure, hence why this post is coming now rather than close to midnight last night.) One bite of the pumpkin cookies and I decreed that they had to get out of the house before I ate them all, and my husband gave the gingerbread his highest praise. Not a bad start, right?

Both recipes came from allrecipes.com, which has an amazing selection of, well, basically anything you could ever hope to make. I try to find recipes with high star ratings that have lots of comments because, as anyone who has ever been party to group discussion can tell you, it's fairly difficult to find something that everyone agrees on, so if hundreds of people can agree that a recipe is awesome, I figure it's worth a shot. Not to say that I won't try a recipe with only a handful of positive reviews, but lots of positive reviews is my general goal when searching for recipes via the grand ol' internet.

Now, onto what you're really wanting to know: the nitty gritty details of yesterday's baking!

The Iced Pumpkin Cookies were incredibly easy and amazingly delicious. This is a cake-like cookie, so it reminded me of pumpkin bread or pumpkin muffins, both of which I love. In fact, the plethora of pumpkin baked goods is one of my favorite things about Fall. The recipe calls for canned pumpkin puree, which I used, but I plan on trying it with fresh pumpkin at some point since I will definitely be making these again.

Looks tasty, right?

I had momentary concern that I was making my cookies too big because the recipe says it makes 3 dozen cookies and it wasn't looking like I was going to get that many. I'm not sure if I started making them slightly smaller after that, but I got exactly 3 dozen cookies. Now, I did only end up with enough glaze for 2 dozen, but that's because I drizzled my glaze a little thicker than called for. I could've made another half batch of glaze for the remaining dozen, but the cookies are good enough on their own, in my opinion, so I didn't bother. Also, since they're going with my husband to work - did I mention that they need to get out of my house before I eat them all? - I wanted to give people the option of a non-iced cookie.


The Gingerbread I had a few more moments of concern over. The first came when I added the hot water to the creamed butter and sugar after adding the molasses. It started separating in an odd way that made me think I'd done something wrong, but, hoping all would be well if I kept going, I proceeded to add the flour mixture as the recipe instructs. Thankfully, once I did that, it smoothed out and looked like normal batter. Crisis #1 averted!

My next moment of concern came when the gingerbread didn't appear to be cooking in the center. Now, to understand why this would be worrisome to me - after all, it has to set up at some point if I just keep baking it, right? - you need to know what happened the last time I attempted to make gingerbread. Specifically, the center of the cake was still batter and the edges were already burned. As good as fresh-baked gingerbread smells, burned gingerbread smells anything but. Adding insult to injury, that burned smell had worked itself into the flavor of the cake by the time the center was cooked enough that I was actually able to pull it out without having total goo in the middle and it tasted so bad that I just had to toss the whole thing. So, yeah, I was worried. Since I'd used a new recipe this time, I began to wonder if I was just fated to be inept at baking gingerbread, a fate that wouldn't be so bad if my husband didn't love it so much. But I decided to give it a few extra minutes (past the recommended 35 maximum), thinking that, as long as any potential burned edges didn't contaminate the flavor of the rest of the cake, I could just trim them off.

My third dread came in when I tried to test if the gingerbread was ready to come out - the center had stopped jiggling, but that didn't mean it was fully cooked yet, of course. Well, poking through the top of the cake led to something that resembled a small sinkhole in the middle of my gingerbread. The presentation of the whole thing was shot, but it came out clean, so at least the cake was done. (Can you tell I'd already resigned myself to failure at this point?)

Once I pulled it out of the oven, though, I noticed that the edges were not, in fact, burned. Score! Crisis #2 averted! And, after I let it cool enough that I could turn it out of the pan and cut into it, I realized that the gingerbread is just very gentle, hence the "sinkhole" from my tester poke. Crisis #3 semi-averted! And my husband LOVED it.

Delicious despite my worries. And, yes, I really like tea. Especially with pastries.

The next time I make this recipe - and, yes, I will be using it again - I will add 2-3 minutes of baking time and not do a test poke (I'll be working under the assumption that it's cooked through based on this experience) to see if that prevents the center of the cake from falling. Here's hoping.

Also, this recipe includes instructions for making a whipped cream topping. I didn't try it this time, but I will in the future because, hey, whipped cream makes almost everything better. (I would just say everything, but, really, whipped cream on something like tacos sounds downright gross.)

I hope these recipes turn out just as well for you. And if you find yourself worrying about your gingerbread, as I did, just trudge on and keep it up!