Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Handmade, from Scratch

With the holidays right around the corner, and by corner I mean in two days, I have been doing a lot of baking.  More than I usually get to - which is great - but it's out of necessity more than anything.

However, this necessity turned out to be the best thing!  I always knew that I loved baking but last night after rehearsal I was finishing up the rolls and started on the apple pies.  I found this great pie crust recipe on allrecipes.com which makes two entire pie crusts (which I have made before) - yay for quick and tasty! 

I needed five pie crusts and it's late, it's eleven at night already!  Thank God I had made extra apple pie filling in September/October and froze it!  I don't want to make each recipe individually to have enough, that would take forever and I want to go to bed.  But I also didn't want to overload my mixer and break it - that would suck, future baking would be difficult for some recipes.

So, I mixed the flour, sugar and some of the butter with the electric mixer.  Then I dumped it into a bigger bowl and worked it by hand until I needed the water added - which Adam helped with.  I kneaded it all by hand until I could make a ball and then separate it into the right number of crusts.

It felt so good!! Working the dough like that, mixing everything together, kneading it, rolling it out.  All the stress just seemed to roll out of me and it was wonderful!  Words can't describe how awesome it was.  I could so do that for a living.  But then the stress relief might not be the same.

Ah, sweet success and relaxation....... 


......Except finding space for everything in the fridge was a bit of a task!  We did some cleaning out of the fridge, consolidating extras and drank a lot of milk!

Happy Thanksgiving!

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