GB's Awesome Brownie Kit

My go to brownie recipe, from Mrs. Fields Cookie Book. My version is doubled and has less sugar.

I love getting my baking kits together now that I have my Julia Child bowl set from my friend, Gail. All those years, in all those many kitchens, I never had a tiny glass bowl.

GB’s Awesome Brownies

325˚ 

Baking spray 

jelly roll or ½ size “hotel” sheet pan

12 ounces     bittersweet chocolate

8 ounces        butter

8                      eggs

3 1/2 cups     superfine bakers' sugar

1 teaspoon    vanilla

1 teaspoon    salt

1 cup              flour

1 cup              chocolate chips

 Melt chocolate and butter in a bowl set over warm water (or, sigh, in a glass bowl in the microwave, I can't believe I just said that). 

In KitchenAid bowl, beat eggs at medium speed until pale yellow, about three minutes. Slowly add sugar to egg mixture. Add vanilla and chocolate/butter mixture. Add salt and flour and mix well. 

Pour into sprayed jelly roll pan. Sprinkle with chocolate chips. 

Bake about 30 minutes, 

or until center is firm. Do not over bake. 

Cool completely and then cut away edges before 

serving. 

Makes 24 brownies.

Read More

Making Stuff - Japanese Teahouse #4

 Wow! I forgot how wonderful and fun it is to have little Xacto saws and a tiny miter box to use on Basswood and Balsa. Thanks to David for hunting them down. Now the tiny architecture and carpentry can move up a notch.

After creating the doors I made little troughs in which they could slide and glued them to the corner posts. The fabric that started this whole project, the quilters' cotton pieces with excellent tiny Japanese designs, was cut to make a curtain for the back room. All this trouble and precision just to hang that little curtain.

I made a little rod out of a skewer, punched holes in the curtain top, slid it all together and glued the rod to two pieces of trim wood.

 Next I'll be working on the roof.

Each part of the structure has to be measured and cut along the way. It's too late now, but I should have stained the "wood," but I would be sure to screw up the shoji screens if I did it now. For my next teahouse, I might choose all the wood materials and stain them red before I begin.

Ha ha ha. Red. Of course!

 All of this is reminiscent of the Gingerbread Farm I built in 2011, according to no scale at all - just another one of those projects that started out as an idea and went berserk!

Here it is below in progress. Note the toasted and dyed green coconut for the lawn, the pile of marzipan pumpkins, the pretzel chicken house, pretzel wood pile. Pretty proud of those two little marzipan doggies and the flock of chicks, too. The red door  on the main house is marzipan, too.

um

Read More

eBOOKS!!!

Thanks to the Lucky Valley Press tech department, First You Grow the Pumpkin, 100 cool things to make and preserve, my best cookbook, filled with all my favorite concoctions and kitchen creations, is available as an eBook.

First You Grow the Pumpkin was inspired by my brother Jess, who posed the question, "Why is it, when asked for a recipe, your first response is, 'Well, first you grown the______?'"

The DIY trend is nothing new for me. I have been churning butter, growing herbs, making stock and creating food from scratch since knee high to my mother on my grandfather's farm in Ohio.

On the left is an abundant harvest from Seabreeze Farm in San Diego. On the right, one of my mother's water colors from First You Grow the Pumpkin. She called it "Chicks." I call it "Run for Your Lives."

Other new eBooks from Lucky Valley Press

The Lavandula Series,

As the Wheel of Life turns at Sweet Farm, the homestead of the Wymans, a Carmel Valley, Calfornia family, we focus on three sisters: Rita, Nana and Fox, and their three daughters: Tate, Stevie and Jolene, cousins and friends.

In the Lavandula Series, life rumbles the earth at the farm, like any compound full of women, their men, children, elders and friends. They breathe the air of the Valley, filled with the scent of lavender growing abundantly on ten fertile acres. They eat of the garden harvest. The women are restless. The men are nervous.

The girls are growing up in the 60s and they and their peers will become known as Baby Boomers, Flower Children, Hippies, Yuppies, the ME generation; they will be affected by the Vietnam War, Rock & Roll, revolutions from sexual to political and other dramatic social changes.

But, mostly, they will be dealing with their loves, their children and their homes as they relate to and are touched by those concerns mentioned above.

Look for Stefani's Peacock Feather!

Read More