Inspiration: One of my new-to-me favorite cooking shows is Girl Meets Farm. So much so that when I spotted one of Molly Yeh’s cookbooks on the shelf of my local bookshop, I decided to make a purchase.
Within Molly On The Range was Yeh’s challah bread recipe.
However, the enclosed recipe makes two loaves — which is a lot of bread! Undoubtedly, aware that these loaves are huge, Yeh also offers alternate ways of utilizing this base dough — including prezel buns. Needing more than the line of instructions given in the book, I quickly located Yeh’s recipe here.
And I must admit, though these bakes looked intimidating to make, once you overcome that trepidation, they are pretty straightforward. And, despite my amateurish scoring skills, these buns turned out great!
Learn From My Mistake: This recipe calls for baked baking soda, which is easy to make. However, in this form, it can (and did for me) easily irritate the skin with very little contact.
Moreover, next time a recipe calls for baked baking soda, I will need to wear a mask while transferring it into a container, measuring it out, and before adding my wet ingredients into a mix. Since no matter how careful I was, the fine powder went airborne and irritated my lungs as well.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I think Lucy Eyelesbarrow, from the Miss Marple mystery 4.50 From Paddington, would whip up this recipe (with far more finesse than I) for one of her clients. As the challah base recipe can yield at least nine different bakes, allowing Lucy to dazzle her clients with a variety of tasty treats with minimal effort!
Inspiration: With the fridge and freezer now containing homemade apple butter, I took to the interwebs once again. This time seeking a tasty looking apple butter cookie recipe…and, happily, I found one on Dessert Now Dinner Later blog!
Thin, chewy, applely, and filled with warm spices, these were a total hit with the crew at game night! And we ate entirely too many in one go!
Though I must admit I did fiddle with the spices called for in the recipe, since I knew exactly what was in the apple butter. So I added a single pass, on a micro-planer, of nutmeg, 1/16 tsp of ginger & mace — just to give it a little added depth without muddying the hero flavors of cinnamon and apple.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: Although these cookies aren’t as sophisticated as millionaire shortbread or a petite four, they are tasty enough to tempt Poirot. Especially if Capt. Hastings trys them first! And in a rare bit of overlap, I believe Miss Marple would also enjoy nibbling on them whilst gathering intel over tea!
Inspiration: Recently, summer gave our region a break from the heat. With the mercury hovering in the low seventies, I sprang into the kitchen to where my mixer lives. Months had passed since I sent treats off to my husband’s coworkers, and this situation needed rectifying. Plus, I had a new cookbook to try out.
Fresh off my challah win, I flipped a few chapters further into Molly On The Range (a cookbook by Molly Yeh that you should totally pick up) to her Chocolate Chip Cookies Without The Chocolate Chips recipe. (It has a shorter name, but this one is more fun.)
Let me tell you, these cookies are fabulous.
The addition of flaky sea salt to the top of each scoop of dough adds way more to the experience than I could have ever imagined and is what makes Chocolate Chip Cookies Without The Chocolate Chips utterly fantastic to eat.
Above and beyond this, Yeh recommends making the dough one day and baking it the next, thus allowing the flavor to fully develop! A feature I absolutely love in a bake.
The scoops of dough before baking!
However, I did need to alter one aspect of Yeh’s recipe, the size of the cookie. In the book, she suggests forming the dough into a hockey puck sized disk. From past experience, my husband’s coworkers don’t care for cookies this size. They prefer a touch of something sweet to go with their coffee, not something the size of a teacup’s saucer. However, as adjustments go, switching to a smaller size was easy enough to accomplish.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I can easily envision Miss Marple making these when she wants a rich, delicious cookie that isn’t overly sweet. Even better? Without the inclusion of chocolate chips, she doesn’t run the risk of smearing slightly melted chocolate onto her yarn and staining whatever soft and woolly piece she’s knitting for a friend.
Inspiration: I wish I could say that I made these cookies for someone’s B’day, but alas, it’s the recipe’s use of sprinkles that drew me to this particular cookie. These tiny flecks of color always make me happy when I get to sprinkle them into one of my bakes.
Despite my passion for sprinkles of any variety, if this were back in March, I would’ve shied away from baking them. However, since reading Kate Lebo’s series of arguments in The Book of Difficult Fruit, I am far less trepidatious about using imitation or cheap(er) almond extract in my bakes. Which is a wonderful thing, since almond extract is one of the key tastes in the quintessential birthday cake flavor. (BTW: If you haven’t read The Book of Difficult Fruit, I highly recommend you give it a try. Click here for my full review.)
The magazine where I found this recipe.
With imitation almond extract in hand, I set about whipping up these festive treats….Only to realize I didn’t own vanilla bean paste or all-natural jimmies, the recipe writers recommended using. The latter I already knew I was missing. However, on my birthday, my husband gifted me a three-pound container of jimmies to play with in my bakes — and they are definitely not all natural. Though it went against the recipe’s recommendation, I went with what I already had on hand.
The vanilla bean paste was more troubling.
However, by the time I read the recipe’s fine print, I was already neck-deep in multitasking, and pausing my cookery to run to the grocery store for a single ingredient wasn’t a viable option….So I improvised. Using two teaspoons of vanilla powder and the innards of one vanilla bean in an attempt to recreate the clean taste of the missing paste. Which worked surprisingly well!
The other alteration I made to these bespeckled treats was reducing their size. Rather than portioning off the dough in half-cup scoops, I used my standard tablespoon-and-a-half scooper — then adjusted the cooking time for the smaller cookies. (For me, large cookies are great as a special, sometimes treat you buy at a bakery. But for the everyday cookie? Smaller is definitely better, as they are far easier to dunk in a cup of coffee.)
Cookie dough!
However, what I enjoy about these large cookie recipes is that if you do decide to reduce their size, they typically yield about two dozen cookies rather than the standard thirty-six to forty-eight.
Even with these minor adjustments, the cookies turned out great! Soft and cake-like, they went down a treat with my husband’s co-workers.
Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I definitely think Miss Marple would make these Birthday Cake Cookies. They are simple to whip up, easier to transport than cupcakes, and still make the recipient feel special.
Of course, the byproduct of this gesture isn’t anything to sneeze at either.
Taking the time to bake something especially for them, plus the sheer act of recalling their birthday in time to act on it, could potentially lead the recipient to reveal a piece of crucial information they might not have otherwise divulged to Miss Marple during an investigation.
Though I don’t see this beloved elderly spinster as being this Machiavellian, I don’t think she would turn away from using every advantage she could — if someone was in imminent danger. And since St. Mary Mead’s an invention from the mind of Agatha Christie, imminent danger could be very deadly indeed.
Inspiration: Over the past few years, I’ve struggled to make and maintain sourdough starters. Much like my fermentation experiments, my forays into these fermented starters always seem to crash and burn before I ever get to the good part — baking! Irritated at the latest failure, I sat down with a stack of cookbooks devoted to sourdough and started studying. Whereupon I found two simple tips/tricks that kept my starter alive long enough to bake with.
First and easiest fix: wrapping the jar of starter in a kitchen towel. Apparently, my kitchen is a tad too cool for a starter to thrive and it needed a blanket.
The second solution required a trip to our local farmers’ market, more specifically to the stall selling organic heirloom varieties of flour. According to several books, these small-batch flours contain a variety of micronutrients that help starters flourish, whereas plain old white flour from the grocery store strips away these nutrients.
And it worked!
Happy to have finally made a sourdough starter that lived longer than a couple of days, I started scouring these same tomes for a recipe and found a simple one in King Arthur Baking Company’s Baking School — a straightforward Sourdough Sandwich Bread recipe.
And it turned out magnificently fluffy!
Unsurprisingly, within a week of making this loaf, my starter died — again. But now I’ve hope!
There’s a similar recipe on their website, but it has way more steps and ingredients. I would highly recommend purchasing the book instead. Over the years, Baking School‘s become the baking book I keep turning to when I need a recipe that turns out beautifully the first and one hundredth time. (BTW: I’m not paid for this review or for making the recipe; I just really like their stuff.)
Christie’s Canon of Characters: Though Agatha Christie’s sleuths often struggle to find and nail down that book’s ne’er-do-well, I don’t know if they’d apply the same deductive reasoning to their failed bakes. Poirot probably would, though I can’t imagine him flubbing up repeatedly on something as supposedly simple as a starter.
Miss Marple probably mastered this technique early on and teaches it to the long string of maids she hires to help her out around the house. Perhaps Tuppence would struggle? Only because she’s pulled hither, thither, and yon by her three kids, husband, and murder cases. Colonel Race globe-hops entirely too much to even contemplate something as needy as a starter.
Superintendent Battle, yes, he’s the one who would both want to try making bread and figure out why it failed. He strikes me as a man who would enjoy puttering around the kitchen with his wife and daughters during his off hours. Perhaps not failing on purpose, but still enjoying the exasperation of one of his female family members showing him “the right way” to ensure the bread turned out every time!
P.S.: Here’s a picture of the modest Dagwood Sandwich I made that night for dinner using the sourdough bread!
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
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