Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Is there a little ninja in ya?

Yesterday, I sold some ninja heads.


It felt pretty good.

I think I want to do it again. So I'm making more.

And!
I'm working on starting up an etsy shop. More to come when I have that information.

I have some folks who have already put in requests for ninjas, so those guys come first. After that, I'm going to just keep crocheting (crocheting, crocheting, just keep crocheting) and crank out some heads for the shop. 

Soon, there will be ninja heads for all!

Saturday, November 6, 2010

What are you so scared of? It's just bread.

While I was gone from the blog, my family instituted a new bi-weekly tradition: bread baking.


We go through bread at my house like nobody's business. Blame it on all the sandwiches (I do love me a good sandwich and it appears to run in the family). We buzz through the bread like beavers do trees. So when I was buying 3 loaves every 10 days for the four of us, I realized that it was time to bake my own. I mean, it's not like the bread's going to go bad. We eat enough of it.

Lucky for me, I understand the general principles of bread baking. Yeast, food for the yeast, flour, some other stuff, rise, knead, rise, bake, cool. Not that tough, right? I'm no stranger to bread baking after all.

I grew up baking bread with my grandparents. Once a month they would spend the morning making up a huge batch of dough and then spend the rest of the day making loaves, buns, and a ton of other forms of bread related goodness. I have great memories of that time.

So why have I not done this sooner!?!

Intimidation, friends.

Seriously.

It seemed like a ton of work and time that I didn't think that I had to spare. Plus, I wasn't the one putting the yeast and food for the yeast and other such ingredients together when baking with my grandparents. What if I baked a hideous beast of a loaf? What if my family was so disgusted by this carbohydrated disaster that they refused to eat anything I cooked again!?! Oh, the humanity!!

Then I realized two things:
1) Basic bread is not that hard to make.
2) Who cares if the loaf is gross? I'll just tweak the recipe (or my methods depending on the problem) and try again. My family is forgiving and forgetful. They will eat my food again.

Perfectionism. It's an evil, motherless beast.

Don't listen because it's not true.

Anyhow, so all of this to tell you that I'm going to share my recipe for super easy wheat bread with you today.

It has proven itself worthy of sharing with the masses--at least I haven't had any disasters with it yet. :)

I acquired this recipe from AllRecipes.com and used all but one of the tips from the comments section.

And this is what I have created using it:

Beautiful, delicious loaves of bread

And now for your baking pleasure, here is the easiest freaking wheat bread recipe of all time. I have added some tips that I learned along the way to hopefully help you out a little bit in your baking adventures. If you go to the original recipe, you'll see that I've incorporated a lot from the comments section and of course added my own flare to the text. A girl's got to get creative where she can, you know? :) Here you go!

Easy Wheat Bread
Adapted from AllRecipes.com
Ingredients:
  • 3 cups warm water (no warmer than 110 degrees F)
  • 2 (1/4 oz) packets active dry yeast
  • 1/3 cup honey
  • 5 cups white bread flour
  • 3 Tbsp butter, melted
  • 1/3 cup honey
  • 1 Tbsp salt
  • 3 1/2 - 5 cups whole wheat flour
  • 2 Tbsp butter, melted
Equipment Needed: Electric mixer with a big bowl

Directions:
  1. Combine warm water, yeast, and 1/3 cup honey in the bowl of your electric mixer. I usually heat up the water in the microwave 1 cup at a time and use an electric thermometer to test the temperature. That seems to give me a little bit more control. If my last cup of water is a little too hot (which happens most of the time) then I dump the honey into the water. This cools the water and makes the honey thinner and easier to get out of the measuring cup. Add 5 cups bread flour and stir with wooden/plastic spoon to combine. Let stand for 30 minutes or at least until it has doubled in size and is big and bubbly.
  2. Using your mixing spoon, make a hole in the middle of the big bubbly dough concoction. This will make room for the 3 Tbsp butter, 1/3 cup honey, and salt that you are going to mix in next. Add the ingredients, attach the dough hook to your mixer, and mix away at speed 2. When the new ingredients are combined, stir in 2 cups of the whole wheat flour. To minimize the flour cloud, I usually do this 1/2 cup at a time. Mix until not really sticky--just pulling away from the sides of the bowl but still sticky to the touch. This may take an additional 2-4 cups of whole wheat flour to accomplish. It usually only takes me 2 cups to get there, but one time it took almost 3. It just depends on the flour you are using.
  3. Once the dough ball has formed, leave the mixer going on speed 2 and all it to knead the dough for 8-10 minutes or until it is smooth. Dust your counter with a little bit of whole wheat flour and turn the dough out onto the floured surface. Knead by hand for an additional 1-2 minutes. I suppose this step could be optional, but I think the texture of the bread is better when you include this step.
  4. Grease a gigantic bowl. Make sure to grease the whole bowl and all the way up the sides. Shape your dough into a ball and place in the greased bowl, turning once to coat the surface of the dough. Cover with plastic wrap or a greased cotton towel and let rise in a slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature place until it has doubled in size. This takes approximately 2 hours. Covering and greasing the dough keeps the crusties off of your dough while it's rising--totally worth it. And if you don't have a naturally occurring slightly-warmer-than-room-temperature place in your house, just turn on the light in your oven because it omits just enough heat to make it the perfect temperature.
  5. Even though it rose too high, it turned out just as delicious so don't worry if yours rises too long, too.
  6. Punch down dough and divide into 2 loaves. Place in greased 9 x 5 inch pans (or 4 mini loaf pans, or whatever you are using) and allow to rise until the dough has topped the pans by 1 inch.
  7. Bake in an oven that was preheated to 350 degrees (F) for 23-30 minutes. Do not over bake. The bread is done when you knock on it and it sounds hollow and/or a thermometer that is inserted in the middle reads 180-200 degrees (F). I just use the knocking method. Works every time.
  8. When done, remove the loaves from the pans immediately to prevent the bottoms from getting moldy and cool on a wire rack. Brush with the remaining 2 Tbsp of butter to prevent the crust from getting hard. Cool completely before storing.

To store the bread, I wrap it in plastic wrap and then put it in a plastic sealable bag (or 2 if the loaf is too big to fit in 1 bag). The longest that the loaves have lasted is 10 days at my house, but in that time ours have never gotten moldy. I've frozen a loaf, thawed it out, and we've eaten on it for a week with no mold in sight. Test it out. Let me know if yours molds on you and in what conditions and I'll do the same.

 
WARNING: You're going to start looking for all sorts of ways to eat this bread. It's that good.

Also, this bread makes picture perfect grilled cheese sandwiches. See?

 Now that I've shared what I made in my free time, I'd love to see what you have been up to. Any projects to share? :)

Monday, November 1, 2010

And out of the shadows comes...

Me!! :)

Hello! It's been so long and I've missed you!! Thank you for waiting around for me to get back.

The last months have been C-R-A-Z-Y! As I mentioned in the last post, we had two family members who were injured in the course of about 1-2 weeks. There were added duties and emergency road trips to be had. One is well again and the other has a very long road to recovery (LOVE YOU). And, in the interest of maintaining their privacy, I'm not going to go into what happened exactly. Bad stuff occurred. Now they're working to get well again. And we love them. And miss them. And stuff.

Any how, I'm glad to be back, that's for sure!

I thought the day after Halloween would be a fabulous time to return to blogging. You know, that way I could show off these babies:

Asajj Ventress


Anakin Skywalker


That's right, I made costumes this year. Star Wars Clone Wars costumes, to be exact. It was a lot of fun even if it was one more project (or three) that was keeping me away from here. And I've noticed that the more sewing knowledge I gain, the less sewing disasters I seem to have. And less disasters means it takes less time to get projects completed. Go figure. :)

(Plus, believe it or not, they don't sell Ventress costumes for kids. At least none that I could find. So there weren't a lot of options there. )

Making the Ventress costume gave me the opportunity to practice freezer paper stenciling technique again. Although, I'd like to say that I found out that freezer paper generally doesn't stick well to felt. Lucky for me, I had my face 10 centimeters away from what I was doing and noticed the freezer paper not doing it's job (yer fired, freezer paper) before I smeared paint on parts of the fabric that I didn't want it.

Also, french seams are freaking amazing and surprisingly easy. Learned that tidbit sewing the Anakin costume. :)

Julie 1 - Crafting Disaster Fairy 0

It was a good (holi)day.

So, what were you guys for Halloween? I'm excited to find out. Here is my costume:

Monster
While I made this one, I totally got the idea from Polkadot Robot. I had fully intended on buying one from them rather than making one myself, but I spent too much time deciding on a costume which didn't leave enough time for shipping to Alaska. You should totally stop by and check out their hoodies, though. They have some really cute characters to choose from.