Bake 2019 - January Bakes

I had some great successes this month and a couple of fails. 

The first thing I made this month was a chocolate angel food cake.  

The cake was great!  The frosting brought mixed reviews.  I didn't care for it but Matt really liked it.  It was 50/50 with our coworkers as well.

I'll make it again but without the frosting.  Look at that!  Mmm!

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Next, I recalled my love of working with yeast and made bagels.

These were so good they never made it to anyone else to taste test.  

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Since I was on a yeast dough high I tried my hand at brioche.  The first fail of the month.  I've had this recipe pinned for a while so I just went for it.  It wasn't good.  I've since compared it to other recipes and the rise time wasn't correct.  I felt like it wasn't enough time but wanted to follow the recipe as written the first time.  I'll try again sometime.

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I made a doctored up box mix brownies for friends and had enough batter to try a brownie cookie dough creation.  For our friends I just sandwiched a milk chocolate bar in between two layers of brownie mix and baked it.  They said it was great.  Their daughter asked if she had surgery would I make those brownies for her.  I didn't get a picture of those. 

I had enough brownie mix for a base layer for something else.  I whipped up some peanut butter cookie dough and layered it on top.  Oh, and I used some more of that milk chocolate bar in the middle.  It was really good!  A couple of fun ways to doctor up a box brownie mix.

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We had two ripe bananas on the counter so I made a small batch banana cake.  I left the off frosting called for in the recipe and sprinkled with powdered sugar.

It was really good!  Matt made breakfast one morning with this banana cake, strawberries, and whipped cream.  That was amazing!

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I made some cheesy corn bread to go with a soup we had for dinner one night.  Again a doctored up box mix.  I used a jiffy box mix and added cheese.  Easy peasy.

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My next bake of the month almost didn't happen.  I wanted to make cream puffs.  My first try I didn't have the right kind of piping tip.  I could have made them without it, but I really wanted to work on my piping skills.  My second try - I think I rushed it.  The choux pastry is supposed to be a dough, this was a batter.  A runny liquid mess.  It may be one of the first bakes I've ever just thrown away.  I didn't have enough flour to try again that day.  I read a few articles and different recipes until I felt like I knew what I was doing.  My third try was a success.  I cut the recipe in half and took my time.  They turned out great!

I filled them with lemon curd.  I used the egg yolks from the first bake of the month and made two jars of lemon curd and one jar of orange curd.  Curds freeze well and are so easy to make.  My piping skills are still a work in progress.  Some had a lot of lemon curd, some a little, and some virtually none.  But they were really good and my coworkers who tried them liked them.  So did Matt!

Here are the recipes I used How to Make Choux Pastry, How to Make Cream Puffs, How to Make Perfect Choux Pastry.

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My last bake of January were chocolate chip mini muffins.  I only had bread flour and could tell the difference between muffins made with bread flour and all purpose flour.  They were tasty but just a bit more dense than normal.  I used a recipe from one of my cookbooks.