What Should I Bake?

Take a look at what moved into my house on Tuesday....

I haven't posted much about the sad ongoing saga of my kitchen. For a while I was cooking for a family of six with two working burners, a crock pot, a rice cooker, and a toaster. Then the crock pot broke and the well went dry.  The situation has improved dramatically since then, but I haven't had a real oven for almost a year.

We could have replaced it sooner, but shopping for appliances makes me miserable and we kept finding excuses to put it off. We'd go out and look at appliances and put off the decisions until later. Our experiences over the past few years have been nothing but bad. (Remember the washing machine?)  Hubby finally picked this one out. My one request was for five burners. If I could've had an appliance without any computerized bells and whistles, I would have been happy as a clam.

Why does my stove need to have Bluetooth capability?  Apparently, it's so it can talk to the microwave and the clocks will sync so we don't have to set them both. We won't be buying a new microwave that speaks the same language as the stove. Just in case you were wondering.

So, now that I've forgotten all of the things I used to make in the oven, what should I bake for my family? Any tips for a first time gas oven owner?

Carving Pumpkin Cookies

Once upon a time, I could make chocolate cookies and barely check the recipe on the bag of the bag to make sure I mad my measurements right. Having kids seems to have eliminated that ability. Either they sucked the remembered recipes from my brain, or going so long without doing it made me forget.

Now days, fresh baked cookies are a once-in-a-blue-moon thing that require special circumstances. Like these cookie cutters that I found on the clearance shelf at a big box store last November.

Teenage Daughter was looking for marked down T-shirts and the boys were trying to talk me into anything with blood or teeth when I saw these. If it's not clear from the picture, that's a pumpkin with different mouths and eyes and noses.

There was no UPC code, no label, no trace of what it was or might have cost. I was debating how much time I could spend in line at customer service trying to buy them when there was no way to tell what they actually were....the woman at the checkout line scanned one of the boys cookies-in-a-spooky-tin an extra time and said that was good enough.

I need a different sugar cookie recipe next time, one that won't make the faces spread and the eyes and mouths close into winks and smirks. And I need to make a much bigger batch because the boys saw what I was doing and wanted to cut their own faces. (That sounds a bit wrong when I re-read it....they wanted to design their own faces....on the pumpkins. That's better!)

I'm also thinking these would make good quilting templates for something like my Pumpkin Carving quilt. I did  some Googling and it looks like these are the Nordic Ware Jack-O-Lantern Cookie Cutter Set.

Melted Ice Cream Bread

When I first saw something on a homemaking blog about melted ice cream bread, I was confused. Why on God's green earth would you spend money on perfectly good ice cream if your only intention was to melt it to make weird bread? Aren't there enough wonderful quick bread recipes out there?

Then my boys were watching the show None of the Above, where the host sets up an experiment and you're supposed to choose the result from a list of possibilities. Then they explain the science behind what happened. My boys have watched so many episodes of Mythbusters that they can usually guess the answer, but I'm the only one who knew what would happen if you mixed flour and melted ice cream and put it in the microwave.

It works the way it does because ice cream contains everything that's in bread except for the flour. At least that's how my nine-year-old explained it to me. So we headed for the grocery store to buy the cheapest brand of ice cream I could find and some self rising flour, then checked the Internet for recipes.

We wound up using 3 cups of melted strawberry ice cream and 1 1/2 cups of flour and baking it at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes. The instructions I was following said 30 minutes, but I left it in until a sharp knife came out clean. Ice cream bread should follow the same rules as banana bread, right?

It worked. Sort of. I really wouldn't recommend it as more than a fun science project for the kids because it didn't taste all that good and there are so many really good quick bread recipes out there to try. According to the articles I read online, you should use the best quality ice cream that you can find, with the fewest artificial ingredients. I think I'll just bake my next loaf of quick bread from scratch!

I'm linking up to Mom's Library, WFMW,