Sunday, January 22, 2012

Eggs and Baking

The chickens are down to about two eggs a day, although we're still occasionally picking up a turkey egg, which are about the size of a double yolker, and have a thicker shell, and tougher membrane than the chicken eggs. We also got one goose egg. Yeah! We know there's at least one female goose! Hopefully one of the others is male and she likes him! But I digress...

I used one of my batches of frozen eggs up during the christmas baking frenzy. I just pulled the second one out of the freezer to defrost yesterday.


They're still kind of slushy here, but you can see I just scoop out a yolk, and the white comes with it.  They don't last as long in the fridge as I had hoped they would, so I lost a few from the first batch.  I'll be baking up a storm in the next couple of days to try to use this batch up without any going bad.  Next year, smaller batches.

Blue cookies
My first attempts to bake with more of our free foraged fruit (raspberries and blueberries) were both wonderfully successful.  I made a batch of banana bread, but replaced half the sugar with raspberry sauce.  They devoured it in no time.  I've made both raspberry and blueberry bread before, but without the banana it comes out very dry.  Most blueberry cookie recipes don't work for me because they expect you to be using whole blueberries.  My blueberry sauce is more like a heavy syrop or a runny jam.   Somewhat similar to pumpkin puree.  Hmmm...  The pumpkin cookies were a hit, why not try it with blueberries?

I left out the cinnamon and nutmeg, and cut the sugar due to the blueberry sauce already being sweetened.  I debated the chocolate chips, but threw them in in the end.  Yum!
Before replacing my yeast I had started reading a bunch of web pages and recipes for sourdough bread.  One of them said to bake buns in muffin tins.  Who'd have thought that would make such a difference.  These aren't sour dough buns, but I tried the muffin tins, and I'm happy to say they did make a big difference in the shape!  They're a little narrow at the bottom, but still, the best batch of buns I've ever made.  I'll be keeping my eyes open for extra large muffin tins at the thrift stores.  I think they'll make some great kaiser size rolls!

5 comments:

  1. I wish I had some frozen eggs from my three hens! I got one last Monday, and there have been none since. However, since being ill, I may have left a couple. I know your boys are enjoying all the baking. Do you put away, freeze or hide, some of the cookies so they will be around longer?

    The buns look good. I wonder, could you make hamburger bun shaped rolls and would they taste right? I have some child's cake pans just like the big ones we use that would probably make a great hamburger bun if I only wanted four buns...lol.

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    1. If you've got extra eggs in the summer, I'd definitely recommend trying it! I haven't been brave enough to just fry an egg yet, but for baking and cooking, you can't tell the difference!

      I aim to fill the cookie jar when I bake. It's a very big jar, about 2.5 gallons. They munch on warm cookies while I bake. Then I tell them they HAVE to eat any extra cookies that won't fit in the jar, lol. A full jar will last a couple of weeks. I'll put extra pies, cakes, and fruit bread in the freezer so it doesn't go bad.

      We used these for hamburger buns last night. Delish!

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  2. Okay, Practical Parsimony above. I just hit publish and did not mean to. Have you ever shared your roll/bun recipe?

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    1. Lol... Yeah, I can relate. I hit publish last night without changing the title. Oops. No, I haven't. As usual, it's a recipe I found online a while back. I'll see if I can find the original and link to it.

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    2. Couldn't find the original, so here's the recipe
      http://whishinrecipes.blogspot.com/2012/01/homemade-hamburger-buns.html

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