I Spent The Day Baking

I haven’t written much about cooking in the past couple of months, mostly because I haven’t been cooking that much. Whenever I start a new job, I come home exhausted mostly just from learning it. This new job I have has taken a lot out of me because there has been so much to learn and it is very fast paced out there on the entrance station. A lot of people want to see the Grand Canyon. And, this week, I had one day that I had to be at work at 5:30 a.m. and one when I had to be there at 6:30 a.m. Although I love my job, I am not so good with early morning wake up times.

We have been grabbing this or that when we can, eating a lot of quick to fix dishes, salads, and the old standby of scrambled eggs or pancakes for dinner. So, since I was off today, I decided to do some baking so that this week we will have a little more variety in our meals.

I mixed up a batch of those good cheese-garlic biscuits using my Pamela’s Baking Mix. All I will have to do now every night this week is pop a few in the oven and bake for 22 minutes. These are really good and go with just about everything.

I had several bananas that were already turned black, so I peeled them and mashed them up and made some banana muffins. These were also made with Pamela’s Baking Mix. I put in some almond extract and some Chinese Five Spice Powder, too. MMMMM. These will be good for breakfast with some peanut butter.

I decided to make some bread while I was at it. This loaf of bread turned out not so good, so I am not telling the recipe I used. It will do for breadsticks or garlic bread, though, so I’m not chunking it in the trash can. It’s not THAT bad, but it ain’t that good, either.

And since I had some strawberries and cherries in the fridge that needed to be used up, I wanted to make something I could use as the base for Strawberry Shortcake. I found a very good, easy recipe online at RecipeZaar. The write up about this shortcake on their website said it tastes like the wheat based spongecakes you can buy at the store, and they do! This is the first time since I started cooking gluten free that I made a cake and the batter actually looked like cake batter. See:

Here is the recipe:

1/2 cup butter
1 cup confectioners sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 cup cornstarch
1 1/4 tsp baking powder

Cream the butter and sugar, add the eggs and vanilla and beat until light and fluffy. Add the cornstarch and baking powder a little at a time, mix until well blended. Fill greased muffin tins half full and bake for 15 minutes at 375 degrees. I baked mine for 22 minutes because they were still too sticky on top after 15 minutes. (But that could be my little RV oven).

The recipe says to grease muffin tins and fill them half full. I did, and they grew up over the edge of the muffin tins and dripped down into the guts of the oven, so we had that burny smell in the trailer. Also, they stuck somewhat in the muffin tins, so next time I will use those little cupcake papers, but let me tell you, they are really GOOD! I will definitely be making these again.