Not Cross Buns

I love hot cross buns, but I still haven't figured out how to keep yeast alive.

I am pretty good at making biscuits though. So, I'm sticking with my strength and messing with a traditional recipe.

If you're not familiar with Hot Cross Buns, they're a sweetened, spiced, fruited bread, usually served in the spring. The utilitarian version of the story is that they are made with the last of the dried fruit stores; winter is over, spring is making new fresh food, and yet you still have food in the pantry! Yay! We didn't starve to death over the winter!

Of course, like many other ancient traditions, they were appropriated by the newcomers, and added to that mythology.

They were always an Eoster breakfast thing at when I was a kid, and this time of year makes me crave them. And until the bakery starts making them, I'm going to have to come up with something of my own. 

Not Cross Buns

What you need:

• Biscuit dough
• 1/4 c dried cherries
• 1/4 c dried apricots
• 2 tbsp ginger sugar**
• any other dried fruit, candied peel, or spice you like

** I have ginger flavoured sugar leftover from making candied ginger, which would also work really well in these, but regular sugar will do fine, just add 1/4 tsp dried ginger with it.

What you gotta do:

Chop the apricots and cherries (and ginger, and orange peel, and whatever you want).

Roll out the biscuit dough into a rectangle, just like you would if you were making savoury cheese biscuits.

Put 1/4 of the fruits and sugar in a row in the middle of the rectangle.

Fold the part of the rectangle closest to you up and over the fruit, and put another 1/4 on top, then fold over the other half.

Roll this out and do it all over again.

Roll into your final rectangle and cut into 8.

If you want to have them look a little more like their inspiration, you can cut an X into the top of them. Or you can sprinkle some more sugar over top, or both, or neither. Whatever you have the patience for.

Bake them at 400 for about 20 minutes.

They'll be lovely and golden and glistening with the last of the winter's dried fruit.

I thought these needed a bit more spice to them, so I mixed some cinnamon into the butter. Cinnamon butter!

These taste like the end of winter and go perfectly with a lovely cuppa tea. Or coffee. 

What signals the end of winter to you?

Where's my cake?

I want to smash my face in it, cry, then have a nice long nap.

Why?

We're 1 today!!And that's what 1 year olds do on their birthday.

Well, technically tomorrow, but the party's today. One year olds have no clue that it's their birthday so it doesn't really matter when it happens. All they see is cake, lots of weird people, and shiney wrapping paper.

There are lots of weird people around here (we love our commenters, tell your friends) and are much too distracted by shiney things. My last attempt at cake was an epic fucking fail (don't worry, I'll post it soon so you can laugh and cringe too) so we're going to have to wait a couple weeks for Taneasha to make one.

When Taneasha told me we'd made it a whole year (see, totally oblivious, may as well be a toddler) and warned me it was closer to my post day than hers, my first thought was to do a "clip show" post, but she'd already done that to cover my ass over the holidays. Crap. Okay, fine. The first year is always full of firsts, new things learned, and first attempts at things that really need practice.

Here's what I've learned:

1) Preheat the fucking oven. This is where the shiney paper effect comes in. We get all excited about the prospect of making cookies; we sift, we cream, we add moar choklits! and then when we go to bake them, we have to sit for 15 minutes staring at a wall while the oven warms up. It's like a time out for naughty bakers.

2) Kitchen timers are your friend. When the recipe says bake the cookies for 13 minutes, they're not kidding. Granted there's a bit of leeway, but really, they don't need 17. Four minutes is a long time for cookies to be at 350 degrees. Plus, when you're trying to prove that it really is possible to make dinner in 20 minutes, it's nice to watch those last few seconds count down as you take your first bite.

3) Beginners luck is a fickle bitch. The first time I made hollandaise sauce (years ago) it came out awesome. I've never been able to make it quite the same since. But this is not always how things go. Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get a recipe right. Sometimes no matter how many times you try the recipe just won't come out right. Yes, there have been times when we've posted first attempts, but we've done it for a reason. We're here every week writing up recipes, acting like we know what we're doing, but really, we're just trying to feed ourselves and our families something other than cereal for dinner. Shit happens, some recipes suck (I fully expect that sometimes the stuff that works in our kitchens won't work in yours and that's okay). Sometimes you get it right on the first try, sometims you don't. Sometimes you never will. And if you don't, there's always cereal for dinner.

4) Tinfoil is the only thing that will stop guacamole from turning brown.

Taneasha here.  This looked like so much fun, I decided to jump in too.  Here are some things I've learned in our first year. 

1) Putting together a post will always take 3 times longer than you think it will.  I don't know how many times I've gone into the kitchen thinking, "Oh, this will only take me 30 minutes or so."  2 hours later, flour in my shirt and hair and butter all over the camera, I finally have the food cooked and the pictures taken... but haven't even started on picture editing and actual post writing. 

2) Don't make something for the first time for a post.  Ok, obviously I haven't really learned this because I still do it, but it's really not a good idea.  It has a habit of turning into chaos. 

3) Cooking is going to be messy.  There's just no way around it.  Almost without fail I'll need something from across the room while whisking batter.  Also without fail, I'll let the whisk rest against the side of the bowl, checking to make sure it's stable, but as soon as I turn my back, the thing falls out of the bowl, flinging batter much further than physics should allow.  Things are going to spill, drip, and boil over.  It just happens, and it's ok.   

Ok, back to Seeley.

There are also a couple things I'd like to post about again.

Chicken Picatta. This was a first attempt. I was totally winging it to the point that I didn't even know how much of each ingredient I used. I've made this a few times since and really want to post an actual recipe for it. Plus, it's way (like way) way better with basil than parsley.

Smoothies. While this wasn't a first attempt, it was a bit of a half-assed one. I want to do a bit more with them and show some of the actual fruit combinations that are tasty, rather than just telling you to dump a bunch of fruit in the blender for a while. But hey, at least it wasn't just cereal for dinner.

Pizza. I've shown you the quick and easy pita version, now I want to try the real thing. On real dough. With yeast. One of these days I'm going to make dough that actually rises. I swear I can feel the poor little yeasties dying. I kill them with my bare hands.

Well, I guess this did turn out to be kind of a clip show. But at least I can prove that I learned something in the last year. I sure didn't learn much calculus. No, seriously, someone show me how to take the partial deriviative of a multivariable function. Anyone? Bueller?

So tell us... what would you like to see us make in our second year?