Happy 2019 everyone!

Since I had the day off, I decided to spend it catching up on baking that I’ve been wanting to do & using up some of the snacks in my house. My dad declared a moratorium on us buying tea and/or snacks due to the overflowing cupboards. To help with that, my brother and I decided to try and make some chocolate crunch bars.

That did not work out very well because they turned out like this:

I think the first problem started with melting the chocolate. The instructions said to heat over a pan in low heat, but the chocolate starting to seize up and I had to redo it. The end result? An extremely sweet, buttery plate of chocolate bars. I don’t even know who’d eat this because there aren’t that many people with a sweeter tooth than me (and I’m finding them too sweet too).

Clearly this is to be filed under “actual kitchen mishaps, not just the category Taco makes up”

ETA: I may have been too hasty about the chocolate bars. My family is actually eating them every day, and I haven’t had to throw them away yet. I definitely used too much butter though.

Luckily for my family, I made two other things that were much less sweet and more to their liking.

The first would be panettone pudding. This would be the pudding just before I poured the cream/milk mixture and baked it:

So this wasn’t really a “using up things in the cupboard” thing. I mean, they have been lying about, but only because I bought these after Christmas and never took them out of the grocery bag. I had to give the recipe a fighting chance because my family loves panettone and would have eaten them if they were too obvious (I’ve been wanting to make this the whole Christmas season, but with no luck).

The panettone was a bit stale but that didn’t matter because they turned out perfectly.

I see why people make bread and butter pudding out of leftover bread now. It is so good and the panettone version is fruity and light.

I had mine with a dollop of clotted cream, but my family had theirs plain.

Speaking of clotted cream, finding that in the closest Cold Storage led to the third recipe: SCONES.

I wasn’t going to make some for a while, but I saw the clotted cream and decided that I had to buy it to show that there was a demand for it.

I was about to bake the first batch of scones when I realised that I didn’t mix in the chocolate chips or raisins (the raisins were a request from the parents). Luckily I caught these before they went in.

Here they are just out of the oven.

I love the chocolate chip ones but my family (as usual) are munching on the raisin scones. I’m not such a big fan – I’ll probably switch back to cranberries next time.

By the way, this is the third time I’m making scones (fourth if you count the shortbread as a scone) and I’ve used a different recipe each time. I wonder how many there are and if there is a super recipe? Maybe I should learn to bake and learn how to make my own.

All the baking made today a relaxing day. My grandma was asking me why I’m spending my free day baking and this article in The Atlantic about millennials and stress baking got me wondering if this is a generation gap thing. To my grandmother, me choosing to bake is unfathomable because baking is work and why am I working on my day off? To me, there’s something about baking that’s soothing.

Actually, it’s not just baking. I like cooking too, especially if I have a lot of podcasts to listen to while I prep and cook everything. I think that’s due to the fact that my cooking school was really fun and I looked forward to the monthly lessons, so I now find cooking interesting. I’m slowly stocking my grandma’s kitchen with staples like bonito flakes and miso – now, I can make miso soup at the snap of a finger. Okay, it takes longer than a snap, but it’s easy and it’s such a comforting drink.

Then again, I bake and cook only occasionally. My grandmother, on the other hand, had to do this daily for years. It makes sense that I see it as fun, since this is something I voluntarily do, while she sees it more as a job.

I guess it’s not really a generational thing after all.