My mom was a big Christmas baker when I was a kid: shortbread, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, Nanaimo bars, mincemeat tarts and chocolate-covered cherries (which had a crunchy nut layer between the maraschino cherry and the chocolate — I loved the nut layer and the chocolate but not the cherries, and years later we found a bunch of petrified cherry remains behind the piano). When I moved out of my parents home I continued that tradition for a while with my own specialties: miniature brownies, meringues, gingerbread.

I haven’t done much baking since I got married, since E. won’t (or can’t) eat most of it, and we were often at my parents’ place for Christmas anyway. Sometimes, though, we have a party or two to attend, and then I have an excuse to indulge my sweet tooth a bit. Yesterday was more about making candy than baking, but it was indulging nonetheless.

This peppermint bark recipe from the Food Network was super easy to make. I cut the recipe in half because I didn’t really need two pounds of candy(!), and I sprinkled a handful of leftover crushed candy canes on top for some sparkle. I melted the white chocolate in the microwave 30 seconds at a time at 50% power, stirring after each burst, until it was fully melted. Took maybe 15 minutes, including hammering the heck out of the candy cane.

I love fudge, but I don’t remember the last time I tried to make it — probably as a teenager, and I sort of remember it being a major fail. Perhaps because I didn’t have a candy thermometer at the time and was trying to cook to some “ball” stage that I had no reference point for. Candy thermometer and Alton Brown’s Chocolate Fudge recipe for the win! My one critical mistake was that I accidentally used semi-sweet chocolate instead of unsweetened, so it’s really, really sweet. But still edible!

I have not given up on my plans to try one new recipe a week. It hasn’t quite been every week, but it’s been more than usual. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always worked out.

After my moderate success with the gnocchi, I decided to try some real baking: pretzels. That attempt ended in tears: the dough completely failed to rise and refused to be rolled (much less shaped into anything pretzel-like) and pretty much looked like anemic dog poop on the baking pan, and I binned it without even trying to cook it. That dampened my enthusiasm for the whole try-cooking-new-things thing quite a bit.

Friday I took another shot at it, this time with pizza crust. E. had been hiking all week and I wanted to surprise him. I used the Gluten Free on a Shoestring recipe (as I had with the pretzels), and again, epic fail. The dough failed to rise at all, and was pretty much a dense, heavy brick. I don’t know if it’s the flour (Bob’s Red Mill All-Purpose), or if the yeast was bad, or if it’s because I clobbered it in the food processor, or perhaps didn’t clobber it enough. Fail, fail, fail.

When I was at the grocery buying flour for the pizza, I also picked up a box of Arrowhead Mills Gluten Free Pizza Crust Mix, figuring (apparently wisely) that if the scratch version went the way the pretzels had, I could try the mix and see how that went. So yesterday I tried it.

It wasn’t perfect. I followed the directions carefully, first dissolving the yeast in water (which the Shoestring recipe doesn’t say to do), then stirring in the dry ingredients by hand until it came into a ball, and turning it out on a board to (try to) knead it for 10 minutes. But it was so sticky I had to keep dumping more flour on the board to keep it from sticking. After about 10 minutes of swearing and punching at the dough (occasionally managing to knead it properly) and scraping it off my fingers, I put it in a bowl with a damp towel over it, and put it in the oven to rise (along with a bowl of hot water that I had placed in a few minutes previously, on a tip I’d found on the ‘web).

And… it didn’t. When I took it out 1/2 hour later it looked the same as when I’d put it in. It was, however, significantly less hockey-puck like than my previous attempt, so E. convinced me to bake it anyway. I think by this point I’d so tortured him with the idea of pizza–which he once loved but has not able to eat since long before before we discovered his wheat allergy–that he would have eaten it regardless of how it turned out.

Well, this is how it turned out:

It wasn’t bad! The crust was slightly spongy (not dense and cracker-like, as I’d feared), and had sufficient structural integrity to pick up a piece to eat. We topped it with a can of pizza sauce, ground turkey, minced onions, half of a leftover tomato that was nearing the end of its useful life, and a mixture of grated reduced-fat mozzarella and fat-free cheddar (which we added after about 10 minutes of baking).

I had two slices and E. ate the rest, and was so pleased with it that he wants to make the second one (the mix makes two crusts, so we put one in the fridge) tonight.

And so I am emboldened to try again.

Another iPhone photo. But when your fingers are all sticky with dough, it’s hard to handle a camera! Side note: don’t try to handle an iPhone when your fingers are all sticky with dough.

So… remember back in January when I said I wanted to eat a higher variety of foods? Not doing too well with that. We are creatures of convenience and habit in this household. So in an effort to shake things up a bit I’m going to attempt one new recipe a week.

When E. discovered he was allergic to gluten, it didn’t change our dinner routine much. We replaced our standard staples (pasta and burrito shells) with gluten-free brands and went on more or less as before (albeit with a higher grocery bill). But one thing we did have to drop that we’d grown fond of was the potato gnocchi from Trader Joe’s. So this weekend I thought I’d try that.

I used the recipe from the book Gluten-Free on a Shoestring, which is also available on the blog. I doubled it, thinking I’d freeze it. That was my first mistake: one batch makes a lot for two people. Two batches made too much to fit in any bowl we owned. So I ended up mixing each separately.

My second mistake was trying to blend potatoes with a hand mixer. It may be because I don’t have a lot of strength in my hands right now, or because I don’t have large enough bowls, but… well, it didn’t work, and I ended up wearing potatoes. Fortunately I had the food processor as a backup.

Mistake number three (I’m not blaming the recipe for any of these — this is all me, baby!): in a rush to actually cook something, I only let Batch One’s mashed potatoes chill for about a half hour, and they were not chilled through. They are very sticky until they are very well chilled. I left Batch Two’s potatoes in the fridge for two days, and they firmed up quite a bit. It was considerably easier and less messy to knead in the flour.

Mistakes aside — and I made one more, and overcooked the first lot — they didn’t turn out badly. They didn’t disintegrate, in spite of the overcooking. E. said he could taste the potato in them more than in the TJ’s brand. I froze half of each batch for future dinners. We’ll see tonight how the second batch cooks up.

Months ago – um, over a year ago – I bought a hot water canner and jars and lids and a food mill, inspired by an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown made blueberry jam. And then I never got around to making it. But this week I got inspired again, and this morning I pulled all the canning hardware out from the back of the cupboard and bought 15 pounds of apples and made applesauce.

First, let me say that if you’re going to buy apples for applesauce, Safeway is probably not the way to go. The produce at our local Safeway isn’t very good, and of course it’s not organic and who knows where it’s being brought in from. But this was a trial run for me and I’ve been short on spare time lately, so it had to do.

Second, while 15 pounds of apples may not sound like a lot (especially when the site where I got the instructions suggests using a whole bushel, or around 42 pounds) it turned out to be more than my stock pot could handle, so I had to use multiple pots. I used about 10 each of Golden Delicious, Fuji and Gala apples, and a few each of Honeycrisp and Mcintosh. Also, the Oxo Good Grips Apple Corer and Divider is awesome – it makes short work of slicing an apple into wedges and coring it.

I got about eight pints of applesauce in total, plus a small bowlful that never made it to a jar. The only other ingredient was about a half-tablespoon of cinnamon. Since the water canner only takes seven pint jars, I put the last jar in the fridge to be eaten within the next few days.

I won’t know until tonight or tomorrow whether the seals worked, but they look great and I’m pleased. My mom and aunts always canned in the summers: I remember mom making green tomato relish with the neighbours, and mincemeat and I think pickles; my mom and aunt would can the salmon we kids caught when we visited; and my aunt always had a variety of jams. There’s not a lot of space in our San Francisco apartment to store food, but if the apple sauce works out then for my next trick I might try spaghetti sauce.

UPDATE: One day later, all seven seals are tight with no popping, the lids slightly concave. Perfect.