At the 48 week mark, you can already look back at what you were posting this day last year and realize that Coronavirus anxiety was already a thing.
The 52 week mark, coming soon, is going to be A Thing, except that I’ve already been feeling all of the milestones a few months early because of some other stuff I had going on that meant I was spending more time at home than usual before that. Yikes.
Week Forty-One: Rainbow Carrot Muffins, Gingerbread Cookies, and Sugar Cookies
I didn’t bother taking pictures of the repeat gingerbread cookies and sugar cookies. I had to get the last of the holiday season baking sent off to folks.
And then.. well, I have rainbow carrots and my spouse loves rainbow carrots and if I make muffins with rainbow carrots and sugar sparkles, that’s pretty awesome as well.
Week Forty-Two: Apple Cider Donut Loaf Cake, 50% spelt sandwich bread, and English muffins
I have lived for a period of my life in New England where there are apple stands with cider and cider donuts, but I don’t necessarily have a memory of apple cider donuts, just apple cider.
But I like apple cider, so the loaf cake was a clear sell.
Given that I’ve got a whole wheat bread recipe that I like, I decided to mess around with it some.
I’d gotten the spelt at the beginning of lockdown because there was very little flour because everybody was stress baking and the supply chain went whack and so I figured once I’d run down my personal stock of flour, I could make Irish soda bread sorts of stuff with some spelt flour that’s effectively whole wheat.
I decided that I might as well utilize the whole thing where it’s effectively just whole wheat flour, so I took the recipe that’s been working for me for wheat bread and I put spelt in instead.
It’s actually pretty amazing. Spelt doesn’t taste whole-wheat-y, it tastes nutty. I actually like it more than regular old whole wheat flour.
Week Forty-Three: Tres Leches cake and Apple Muffins
My birthday cake was from a bakery. When we were looking at the catalog from the bakery, I asked her which cake looked the best, so I could make one for her. She picked out the Tres Leches cake.
I looked at the recipe and decided that I was totally comfortable with making it off of the recipe without trying it out first. It’s not that different from some of the other recipes designed to have some sort of syrup soaked into them, really.
I figured that I’d cover it with a cooked strawberry compote because they aren’t in season right now.
Week Forty-Four: Rum Cake
My sister-in-law got me a bundt pan for Christmas and assured me that she had one but never used it.
Of course I had to try it out. I also figured it could be a nice second-birthday cake for my wife’s birthday. And this happened to be on the list of things to bake at some point.
This was the week that a noodlemaker arrived, which gave me even more dangerously unhealthy tasty carbohydrate options in my food, hence why there was only one baked dish.
Week Forty-Five: Pumpkin Muffins and Cibatta Rolls
I had a can of pumpkin sitting around that I wanted to use, so I figured pumpkin muffins would be fun.
Also, do you know the intro scene from Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)? Where Harley is looking at the perfect egg sandwich? My wife is not especially like Harley for the most part, but she does love a perfect egg sandwich.
The rolls in the movie looked like Cibatta rolls, so I figured I’d make my wife some to have with breakfast:
The recipe smells amazing the whole time. You have to make an overnight starter and then when it was cooking, my kitchen smelled amaaaazing.
Week Forty-Six: Apple crisp, Browned butter faux sourdough, yeasted donuts
I still have a few faux sourdough packets and decided it was time to use another one of those. I also remembered that I liked the yeasted baked donut recipe but hadn’t made that in a long while.
Also, I had some apples to use up and wasn’t up for making pie dough. Although I still owe my wife some pies.
Week Forty-Seven: Pain aux noix and baked donuts
I’d made a pain-ful screw up on week 29 by making pain aux noix with white bread flour instead of wheat flour and realized I’d still not gotten around to getting back to that. So I made it over again, this time with the recipe cut in half and wheat flour instead and it was great.
I also made baked donuts but I felt like they were kinda underwhelming.
Week Forty-Eight: 100% wheat bread and sugar cookies
Recipe from Flour: A Baker’s Collection of Spectacular Recipes by Joanne Chang.
The wheat bread recipe is intended for 100% whole wheat flour but gives adjustments to do 50% whole wheat flour, which is how I’ve been making it. I decided to see what happens if I did it as intended. It’s really quite nice, and fluffy.
Also, I made my wife sugar cookies for Valentine’s Day, although I didn’t shape the differently colored bits right so they kinda look like sugar cookies made of meat.
Oops.
They still tasted nice, however.
Conclusion
I’m posting this close to midnight on March 365th, 2020.
About the best thing to say right now is that a few folks I know have gotten their vaccine.