just a taste?

i can't resist the photos of cole with food on his face while we bake. brownies this time - the best ones ever from the joy of baking (also, very easy).

cookie love

we have made a lot of cookies this year for the holidays. i really love making cookies - i mean seriously, what's not to like? butter and sugar? glace cherries and bits of chocolate?

cole loves baking and cooking (well, he loves standing on a chair, helping and eating supplies) and i enlisted his help with the sugar cookies. perhaps wisely, i made the dough while he slept and, like martha, baked a few trays first. when he woke up from his nap he was really excited to hear that we were going to bake. once in the kitchen, we rolled out his own special ball of dough just for fun. he ate spoonfuls of flour from the canister, attacked the dough with cookie cutters, scarfed fistfuls of uncooked dough trimmings whenever i wasn't looking for a second. then we put our cookies in the oven and pulled out a tray full of cooked shapes...

cole's idea of decorating them was pretty much just to attack the sprinkles, pour sprinkles all over the kitchen and then eat them when i tried to rake up some of the candied mayhem. but it was really fun! the end result? four decorated cookies - one for cole to eat and three that we're saving for santa. the other result was a seriously wired kid - he ate a lot of cookie dough and i thought he was turning into a hummingbird for a while...

the fruits of our labours

cole and i baked today for the first time. i mean, there have been plenty of times where i've cooked and he's played in the kitchen (like, three times a day plus snacks), and we regularly do the 'pretend cooking/bashing pot lids' thing, but this is the first time that i got him up on a chair and we made something together! i even put my grandma's apron on him - so cute.

it was a lot of fun, and surprisingly a lot less messy than i anticipated. we made pumpkin bread, since i happened to pick up a can of organic pureed pumpkin while grocery shopping solo on saturday. i love the leisurely kind of shop that a) costs too much and b) allows you to think ahead about things you'd like to make. cole used to eat pumpkin straight up but nowadays i figured that we'd better come up with a good disguise for it. and hey - it's the first day of fall, so pumpkin spice bread is perfectly festive!

he loved cracking eggs! i cracked them and then gave him the shells to re-crack (and then picked out the shells in the bowl). i dipped his finger in brown sugar and got a bonkers reaction from him when he tasted it - a muymmmmyyyy kind of sound and bug eyes. yeah, kiddo - sugar is tasty. he did lots of scooping and stirring and sploshing of things, and eventually settled on stirring his own bowl that contained a spoonful of flour and a dash of nutmeg. and he ate it by the scoopful - delicious?

he loves watching things in the oven, and it was so cute watching him watch the bread we'd made together. and eating it? forget about it - SO good.

i used a modified version of this recipe. we added some dried fruit, swapped some white flour for whole wheat and it called for a hell of a lot of sugar and oil, so i changed that a bit - it could probably go down a bit more without sacrificing the sweetness or moistness. oh, and it made a LOT - an enormous loaf and we still had left over batter for 8 muffins.

pumpkin bread

mix together, in a very large bowl:
- 1 (15oz) can of pumpkin puree
- 4 eggs
- 3/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1/2 cup thick plain yogurt (i use olympic 3.5% organic plain)
- 2/3 cup water
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 1 cup white sugar

separately, combine:
- 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
- 1 cup whole wheat flour
- 2 tsp baking soda
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 tsp nutmeg
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
(the recipe called for cloves & ginger too, but i didn't have any)

mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients. stir only enough to moisten. add in: - 1/2 cup golden raisins
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries

stir a little. pour into 2 bread loaf pans or a few dozen muffin cups... i baked one loaf for 65 minutes, a tray of muffins for 22 minutes...