Tuesday with Dorie the Cookie edition

December 2: noskos of Living the Life chose Linzer Sables

December 9: Ulrike of Küchenlatein chose Grandma’s All-Occasion Sugar Cookies

December 16: Heather of Randomosity and the Girl chose Buttery Jam Cookies

I have to say that I am not that good at making cookies, I generally can make the dough OK but the baking of the cookies mostly goes wrong for me. The Buttery Jam Cookies came out the best. I used cranberry jam and they come out a little biscuit like. I will most definitely make them again.

Linzer Sables Cookies these were the cookies that really went wrong. I think that they needed some more moisture, the dough was very dry. I padded out half of the dough and spread some more of the cranberry jam and sprinkled the rest of the dough on top. After cooling I cut the cookies as if they were bar cookies. They tasted good but in no way looked like what they should have.

Grandma’s All-Occasion Sugar Cookies taste great but I had trouble rolling and cutting them out. In the end I just rolled them into a log and sliced them. They did take twice as long to cook.

I am glad that I am done with cookies for a while.

Dorie will be late

Back up computers! Especially if there is irreplaceable info on it. That and you can buy a 1 Tera bit external hard drive at best buy.

Canned Cranberry Sauce recipe

When I went to my Sisters for Thanksgiving I sent apple and peach pie filling and 3 jars of canned Cranberry Sauce that I had made. The cranberry sauce went over well, there was none of the three jars left, and my sister wanted the recipe so I thought that I would put it here so that I could reference it later if need be. It was partly taken from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, one of the best canning books I have.

Cranberry Sauce - Whole Berry
Yield about 6 pints
8 cups cranberries
4 cups sugar
4 cups water
zest of a lemon or an orange
2 tablespoon ground ginger
1/2 to 1 cup of crystallized ginger, this depends in how much of a zing you want

Wash and sort cranberries
Combine sugar and water in a large saucepot. Boil 5 minutes.
Add cranberries. Continue boiling, without stirring, until the skins burst. Lower temp to low.
Add the zest, ground ginger and crystallized ginger. Stir, smash cranberries with potato masher until the texture you like.
I tend to have to cook the cranberry sauce for 30-40 minutes to get the constancy that I like. Just stir every once and a while.

Ladle hot sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch head space. Adjust two piece caps. Process 15 minutes in a boiling water canner.

I had to add another 15 minutes for altitude. I am at 6038 ft, just over 6000ft.

Bookmarked Recipes - Crockpot Peanut (Not Brittle) Candy

This weeks Bookmarked Recipe is from A Year Of CrockPotting who has a very cool website, I have been looking to make some of her stuff, I needed thank you gifts for spending the night at relatives so I started with Crockpot Peanut (Not Brittle) Candy. I made it the day before I left, it was very easy and most everyone liked it, the only person who did not like it does not like chocolate.

I tended to call it nut candy. I made some changes and found out that this works much better cooling on silicon or parchment paper than aluminum foil.
It stuck to the foil big time. As in I could not get any of it off.

Changes:
Added 2 cups more nuts, we like our nuts. I used half almonds and half peanuts.

After pouring out the candy to cool I sprinkled some chocolate chips and when they had melted I spread them out.

For one of them I had also added some dried cranberries. It gave the candy just that little something extra.

I will most definitely be making this again. Every one wanted the recipe, at the end of the week I had it mesmerized from writing it out so many times.

flight home pictures

Well I am home, Tuesday with Dorie will be a little late this week. I got home late. Seattle was wet and the Day after I got home, the day that I was going to the store it snowed all day and I got 6-7 inches of snow. Anyway here are some pictures I took an the flight home. The first one has the moon, Venus and Jupiter with a sunset.