Helpful Baking Tips
The Prepared Pantry's
Helpful Baking Tips
Learning the Art of Extraordinary Baking
Samplers for the Holidays
Picture Perfect Bar Cookies
We love to bake and the holiday season gives us a chance to indulge our passion. We will bake cookies for kids, gifts for the neighbors, and fancy breads and delectable pastries for guests.
For Thanksgiving, when we will have a full house of family and friends, we will bake New York Bagel Bread (shown in the picture above). It's nearly two feet long and seems to match up with a turkey well and really feeds a crowd. Leftovers work well for turkey sandwiches the next day.
This is a spectacular loaf that is slathered with roasted onions and poppy seeds and is sure to draw "oohs" and "aahs". A mix makes this easy. You can bake this loaf using one of the two mixes in a package of Rustic Potato French Bread. Click here to see how.
For breakfast one morning, we will bake our favorite scones, Maple Nut Scones or maybe Sugar Crusted Current or Cranberry Scones. We'll serve our scones with Whipped Honey Butter and Apricot Butter. Click here to see the recipe for these scones and their spreads.
For the holidays, we've loaded up our web site with creative baking suggestions- favorite recipes, bakery goods that you can make from our mixes, and serving and cooking suggestions. You'll find directions to make Salsa Poached Eggs and a great spread from peanut butter and cream cheese. We'll tell you how to make our Canadian Cheese Bread from a Country Farm Honey White Bread Mix.
We have some new rolls to show you, including European Hard Onion Dinner Rolls (shown). For these and many other suggestions, check out The Creative Bakery and Holiday Baking Suggestions.
Books are wonderful. With them, you can learn almost anything-including extraordinary baking. (Though it takes practice to become very good.)
Chances are, you're a pretty good baker. The following three books are guaranteed to make you better, maybe extraordinary (if you are not already). We thought we would share them with you. (They are presented in increasing order of complexity and detail.)
Nick Malgieri's How to Bake is a wonderful step-by-step primer. It's more cookbook than manual but it does an excellent job of describing techniques. In 457 pages, it covers cakes, cookies, pies, tarts, breads, pizza, and muffins. We think it is a better resource for cakes and cookies but it still covers breads nicely, introducing the reader to the basic techniques required for most baking. If you buy the book, be sure to try the Rustic White Bread recipe on page 54. The book sells for $26.25 on Amazon.com.
If you are really serious about baking bread there are two books-in our opinion-that are "must haves". The first is Peter Reinhart's, The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. It has the most readable tutorial on baking bread that we have found. The "how to" section covers the first 100 pages; the remaining 190 pages contain recipes for breads ("formulas" in bakers' terminology). Be forewarned: Peter Reinhart is passionate and meticulous in his baking. His breads are very good but not quick. He has influenced us a great deal in the development of several of the mixes we offer. (We are working on a Hawaiian bread roughly based on his formula for Portuguese Sweet Bread.) If you buy the book, try the Vienna Bread on page 261. The book sells for $24.50 on Amazon.
The baking bible is Professional Baking by Wayne Gisslen. This is really a text book for professional bakers used at the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. It is a book of techniques with formulas at the end of each chapter. It is as thorough as you would expect yet straightforward enough for the amateur baker. More than any other book we know, this will make you a much better baker. (But buy a scale--all formulas are by weight, not volume.) You can buy this large format, 673 page book with 750 formulas for $45.50.
We have been impressed with the number of requests and questions that we have received about using our premium baking mixes for Christmas gifts. Frankly, we think that's a pretty good idea. But repeatedly, we heard: "I would like to give my mother four different kinds of bread in one package, not all the same mix." So we introduced Samplers--collections of four different bread mixes in one Mylar package from $9.95.
Since we introduced Samplers several weeks ago, they have become our best sellers. It seems everyone wants to try different breads (not just give them for gifts). You will find two samplers for traditional breads, one sampler for E-Z Bake breads, and two samplers for bread machine mixes. You will also find some companion cookie packs here-two types of cookie mixes in one package. Tell us what you would like to see in other collections. As these continue to sell, we will increase the selection. Click here to see our samplers.
Would you like your bar cookies to be picture perfect-like they came from the bakery? Here's how:
The Hermits in a Bar shown here were cut using this technique.
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The Prepared Pantry
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