Coming soon...

Ok so we got a bit lazy over the past couple of weekends, but we're hoping for an amazing Chicken a la King next weekend. Hopefully it doesn't come out looking like a cookie again, Wayne...

4/15 Chicken a la King

This weekend we'll be making Chicken a la King.

http://www.dianaskitchen.com/page/recipes03/0827_chickenala.htm

Seems a bit light on the veggies, so I'm planning on adding some green beans to the side, and probably serve it on rice. Serving 6 to 8 seems like quite a lot though, so I'm kind of tempted to cut the recipe in half, hopefully without affecting it too much. :)

Scookies!

Unlike Chewy, for our first project I wasn't about to make any compromises, so I went for the frozen blueberries (on sale too!). Overall, the recipe seemed easy enough with pretty standard ingredients and techniques. The hardest part of it was actually cleaning the oven before baking. This time I opted to go for the baking soda + water method, since the last time I used the clean cycle on my oven, it set off the fire alarm. ^_^;;;

Here we have the eggs & cream being whisked together with a fork.

Creamy mixture being added to the dry stuff :)

Mixing it up! At this point, I stopped taking pictures because things started to get pretty messy. Perhaps I should have gone with the dried fruits like Chewy, since my attempt at mixing quickly smooshed all the blueberry goodness. Secondly, the decision to use frozen blueberries without thoroughly thawing them probably wasn't a good idea either, as my hands quickly started freezing. It appears I didn't knead the dough as well as I ought to, which was probably an effect of the whole "frozen hands" thing.

Well, they're very light and fluffy, and taste quite good! :) Unfortunately, they didn't turn out quite as picture perfect as I had hoped. Instead they're kinda like.... cookies... except really light and fluffy like scones. I'll have to work on my kneading next time so I can cut out cleaner shapes given a denser dough, hopefully using something I can knead without my fingers falling off.

The outcome for Chewy...

The scones looked nice in the end and everyone at the Easter dinner party seemed to like them. Success!

Blueberry scones with a twist

Our first project is to bake blueberry scones, but instead of blueberries I went with the more affordable dried cranberries. The recipe is from Martha Stewart and seems easy enough.

http://www.marthastewart.com/portal/site/mslo/menuitem.fc77a0dbc44dd1611e3bf410b5900aa0/?vgnextoid=49cf61876e70f010VgnVCM1000003d370a0aRCRD&autonomy_kw=blueberry%20scones&rsc=ns2006_m3

Preparation time took about 25-30 minutes, though with more practice, this could be knocked down substantially. So far they smell really tasty, but still 10 more minutes until the baking time is complete. My biggest concern is that they will be dried out because of my need for extensive kneading :P