Works for Me Wednesday – January 13, 2010

I can’t really think of any really great, life changing tips to share with you this week. I went grocery shopping today and it wore me out! But there is one thing I can think of to share with you that is definitely working out well for me.

Fir my birthday this year (which is right before Christmas) my mom sent me a gift card and told me I was to use it to purchase a bread machine. I was ecstatic! I love home baked bread, but it can be very time consuming, especially as much as my family likes it! This is the machine I purchased:

It is an Oster Expressbake and it sells at Wal-Mart for just under $60. It has been such a blessing! It only takes me about 5-10 minutes to gather the ingredients, mix them in the pan, and set the cycle on my machine. In 3 hours I have a delicious, golden loaf of home baked bread! And then in a matter of a few minutes, half of it is gone, LOL!

I have found that the bread does turn out better most of the time when you use half bread flour and half all purpose flour. One more thing I have learned after trying at least a dozen recipes so far, is that there is one that we really love and it always turns out perfect!

Portuguese Sweet Bread

1 c. room temperature milk

1 large egg (I warn it slightly by placing in a cup of warm water)

2 tbsp. butter or margerine

3 c. flour

1/3 cup sugar

3/4 tsp. salt

2 1/2 tsp. active dry yeast or 1 1/4 tsp. rapid rose yeast (otherwise known as bread machine yeast)

Mix the ingredients according to your bread machine instructions. Most recommmend placing all of your wet ingredients in first (milk, egg, butter) then the dry ingredients last. Set your machine to the sweet bread setting (the traditional bake cycle works too, I have tried both) and that’s it!

Enjoy!

Blessings,

: ) Cassie

Gingerbread Painting!

I have been wanting to make gingerbread cutouts for the kids to decorate for a while now. I bought all the ingredients last year, but never made them. So last night, we decided it would be fun to decorate some cookies!
It took quite a while to actually make and bake the cookies (the dough has to be refrigerated for 2 hours before you can roll it out) but they turned out very nice! For decorating purposes, i decided it would be easier to glaze them with a white icing and then paint them with food coloring. To make the icing I used the following recipe:
1 c. powdered sugar
3 tsp. milk
2 tsp. light corn syrup
1/4 tsp. almond extract
To make the icing, you blend the sugar and milk til smooth, then mix in the corn syrup and almond extract. It coats the easiest if you then dip your cookies face down to coat then lay them flat til it forms a slightly hard glaze. Then you are ready to paint! This would also be a great base icing for sugar cookies! We used cotton swabs dipped into food coloring for painting purposes. You don't need to use much of the food coloring, a little bit goes a long way.
What's that you ask? Well of COURSE I took pictures!











Here is Isaiah painting away!

Here was my test cookie, isnt it pretty?











And here, Drew joins in the fun!

Our snowmen very very colorful and festive!











My friends son wanted to paint cookies, too

Heres Jazz painting her cookies with friends.











And of COURSE Joey wanted to paint! We had to be super careful as he kept trying to dip his fingers in the "paint"!

They turned out really nice, exactly like I had imagined them! We all had fun decorating them and they taste pretty good too!

 Blessings!

Cassie