It wasn’t super hot yesterday, so I took advantage of the semi-coolness and did some baking.

I made three loaves of whole wheat bread (one for communion, two for us),

a double batch of buns, ( I’ve been using the dough from Honey-Glazed Pan Rolls for this lately…I just leave off the glaze.)

a batch of Snickerdoodles,

thin crust pizza,

and a new recipe for soft ginger cookies.  The dough is still in the fridge, unbaked, so the jury is out on whether or not the recipe is good. 

I made some mess, but not as much as one might expect, because I had to keep washing and re-using my bowls and pans. So, it’s not like I ended up with a huge pile of dishes when I was all done.

Have a lovely Sunday, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow. 

Today’s 365 post: Help me!

This past Friday I was supposed to go take some senior pictures, but the weather was overcast and too dark for that.  So, I ended up have a surprise day at home, and since the weather was really cool, I decided to get some batch baking done.

I made:

3 dozen Sweet Potato Chocolate Chip Muffins (I had a couple of sweet potatoes that had gotten wrinkly)…

1 batch of Banana Chocolate Chip Muffins (to use up some bananas from the freezer)…

3 dozen whole wheat rolls…

and a batch of granola.

Plus, I made 4 quarts of yogurt (I know this picture only has three, but there were four, I promise! ).

Most of what I made will serve as no-cereal breakfasts for us, and the whole wheat rolls will be used for sandwiches and as a dinner accompaniment.

I had to wash tons of dishes, and I did get a little tired of measuring and stirring, but the payoff is that I don’t think I should have to turn on my oven very much at all over the course of the next week.  And that’s good because the forecast is looking distinctly summery!

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I’m curious as to why one of the top sides of regular loaves of bread tend to crack and rise higher (during baking) than the other side (like in your cinnamon oatmeal bread photos)?

-Elizabeth

You know, I’ve never thought about that before!  It seems to me that this mostly happens in loaves that have a filling (like the cinnamon swirl bread) or in breads that have hearty grains in them (like oatmeal bread).  I’ve also had it happen when I’ve rolled two different doughs together (like whole wheat and white dough, to make a swirl bread). In the case of the different doughs, I think it must be because they rise at different rates.  In the case of the oatmeal bread, I’d imagine that the lower gluten level would cause the bread to crack (more gluten means a stretchier dough, so lower gluten would contribute to cracking).  I don’t really know why cinnamon bread tends to split, though!  Readers, any ideas?  I’d say it was from the oatmeal in my oatmeal cinnamon bread recipe, but my regular cinnamon bread sometimes splits too.

I do think the split side rises higher because it’s freed from the rest of the loaf.  But I don’t think it splits the loaf because it’s rising higher (if that makes sense!). 

I’ve been enjoying your blog and considering getting into the world of blogging myself but not sure where to start. Most of my favorite blogs appear on Blogher but I’ve realized they aren’t where one starts……do you have any advice on where to start a blog?

–Amy

Yes, I do!    I always, always recommend that you start out with a WordPress blog.  I know a lot of people use Blogger and love it, but if you want to be at all serious about blogging, I’d definitely tell you to go with WordPress.  Most of the big, popular blogs I read are powered by WordPress, and I keep seeing blogger after blogger moving from the Blogger software to the WordPress software.  So, save yourself the trouble and start out on WordPress!

Why do I love WordPress?

I have to say, the main reason I adore WordPress is that they make blogs look sleek and professional, much moreso than Blogger blogs. Some people customize their Blogger blogs and make them look great, but most WordPress blogs look awesome right out of the box (which is good for a coding idiot like myself).

(Of course, Blogger and WordPress aren’t the only two options out there…Typepad blogs look pretty snazzy, in my opinion, but I don’t think that Typepad is as widely-used as WordPress is, which means that it doesn’t have as many themes, plug-ins, and tutorials as WordPress does.)

I also like WordPress’ dashboard better than Blogger’s, and I like the way comments function better on WordPress (you don’t have to open a new window to leave a comment).  In addition, WordPress has a really useful built-in stats counter and spam catcher (Oh, Akismet! How I love you!).  The spam catcher means that those annoying Captcha codes Blogger offers in the comments are completely unnecessary, and without those codes, your readers are more likely to leave comments on your posts.

Where to start

You can host your blog on WordPress.com, which is what I did at first….my blog address used to be www.thefrugalgirl.wordpress.com.  When your blog is hosted on WordPress’ servers, though, you have limited options as far as customization and putting ads and various media on your blog.  After a few months at wordpress.com, I bought my own domain and hosting services, so now WordPress is installed and hosted on my own server (and now my blog address has no “wordpress” in it.)

The other sort of big change I made was buying the Thesis theme. Unlike a lot of other WordPress themes, Thesis requires a purchase, but it is SO worth it, in my opinion.

Why is Thesis so fabulous?  Well, if you know html and css, you can modify free WordPress themes to your heart’s content.  I, however, am almost completely clueless about code, and that’s why Thesis is so stinking awesome for me.  I can change a bazillion things about my layout and design all with the touch of a button, and that makes me a happy girl.  I uses Thesis for this blog, for my 365 blog, and for my review blog.

You mentioned BlogHer, and I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that they are one awesome blog network.  If you have a blog and you’re wanting to earn some money with it, do sign up to get onto BlogHer’s advertising waiting list.  My Blogher ads have definitely been the best source of revenue for my blog so far.

So in a nutshell, my recommendations are to 1) blog on WordPress, 2) use the Thesis theme, and 3) sign up with BlogHer.

I’ve also written a few (ok, two!) other posts about blogging, so you might want to check those out as well.

So I’m curious. I read your post from last year about fixing your van’s door handle, but what does your family do about routine vehicle maintenance?

-Ben

Well, that depends on how routine the maintenance is.  When it comes to stuff like oil changes, air filter changes, and the like, my husband is totally capable of doing the work himself.  When we need to do more involved stuff (especially stuff that’s way easier to do in a real garage with a lift), we have our trusted mechanic do the work.

We never, ever go to the dealer to have work done, though, as they charge an arm and a leg and the work they do is not as good as the work our mechanic does (plus, I kind of prefer to give my money to someone who owns a small, local business).

And though we try to fix problems ourselves when they arise, sometimes we pay our mechanic to take care of those.  For instance, we fixed our door handle, and my husband and my dad put in a new air/fuel sensor when ours went bad, but we recently paid our mechanic to fix our blower.  Fixing that involved removing the entire front dashboard, so to us it was more than worth the $100 to have our mechanic do the work (it turns out a small animal had made a nest inside our blower!).

Do you ever try to prepare other ethnic meals for your family?  For example, pad thai, Vietnamese Pho soup, or Chinese and Indian foods?  If not, do you expose your kids to these different kinds of foods, and do they enjoy them?

Virginia

I do make some Asian foods, like stir-fries (though not as often as I should, probably!), and our kids love takeout Chinese food (won-ton soup especially), but we don’t eat much in the way of Indian and Thai food.  In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever had Pad Thai!

Sometimes, I’m discouraged from trying ethnic recipes because of the long lists of unusual, hard-to-find ingredients. However, I’ve seen a few recipes from Cook’s that offer simple substitutions, so I hope to try a few of those (I know at least one of those was a Thai soup).

Our kids eat exactly what my husband and I eat (I make one meal and they can choose to eat it or choose to not eat it, but I don’t make separate meals), so their diet is just like ours (I wasn’t sure if you were wondering about that or not!).  I am always trying new recipes and new types of foods, so as our diet expands, so does our children’s.

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Readers, as always, do feel free to share your input in the comments. 

disclosure policy

(the bread pictured here is Challah)

Next Wednesday, I’ll post a recipe (Whole Wheat Dinner rolls, if you’re impatient to know!), but today I thought I’d take a stab at helping those of you who have written me about your yeast baking troubles.

My bread didn’t rise at all!

If your bread dough didn’t change in size at all during the rising period, this probably means that your yeast is dead. There are several reasons this could happen.

• Your liquids were too hot, so they killed the yeast.  For recipes where you add the liquid directly to the yeast, 110 degrees F is about right, and for recipes which combine the flour and the yeast before the liquid is added, 120-125 is right.  I use a digital instant-read thermometer to test the temperature of my liquids, though a non-digital one works fine too.
• Your yeast is old.  If you’ve kept your yeast at room temperature for a really long time, it might have lost it’s potency.  Keeping yeast in the refrigerator or freezer will prolong its shelf life greatly.  I keep mine in a screw-top lid in the freezer just to be safe.  I could probably keep it in my cabinet, though, given how fast I go through a two-pound bag of yeast!

My bread rose, but not enough.

Again, there are a couple of causes for this.

• Your yeast is old. Sometimes old yeast does work a little bit, but not enough to lift a batch of dough correctly.  Make sure you have new yeast, and store it in the fridge or freezer if you don’t bake a lot.
• Your dough was too stiff. Generally speaking, when I’ve helped people learn to make bread, they’ve been surprised at how soft the dough should be.  Most novice bakers err on the side of adding too much flour, so if your bread isn’t rising properly, this is the most likely cause.  Yeast raises dough by producing air bubbles, which in turn lift the dough.  If the dough is very stiff, the yeasty air bubbles won’t be strong enough to lift the dough.  The dough should be soft and fairly pliable…like the recipe books say, it should feel kind of like a baby’s bottom!
• You didn’t knead properly/sufficiently. As I explained in my post about gluten, kneading stretches and develops the gluten in the flour.  Proper kneading produces stretchy gluten strands that are strong enough to hold and enclose the yeasty air bubbles.  I wrote a post on kneading that might be helpful to you, and there’s also a little bit of video of me kneading in the CBN TV spot…one of my readers played it in slow-motion so she could see better.
• Your house is too cold. My house is actually a little too cold for bread rising in the wintertime.  To combat this difficulty, I turn my oven on to 350 for 1 minute (I set a timer so I don’t inadvertently leave the oven on) and then put the dough inside the oven to rise.  This provides just enough heat for the yeast to do its work.  (incidentally, your bread dough will eventually rise in a cold house…it just will take longer for the dough to double in size.)  Just don’t forget to remove the dough before heating your oven!

My bread is crumbly.

This is probably caused by insufficient kneading.  Properly kneaded dough is stretchy and produces bread that is more chewy then crumbly.  See above for solutions to this problem, and also check out my post on kneading and gluten.

My bread was undercooked/doughy inside.

Obviously, this is sometimes caused by simply not baking the dough long enough, but there are a couple of less obvious things that contribute to this problem.

• Your dough didn’t rise enough. Dough that hasn’t risen properly tends to be on the dense end of things, and thus takes much longer to bake than properly risen dough does.  See above for solutions to rising difficulties.
• You didn’t preheat your oven. Bread that starts out in a cold oven will obviously take longer to bake than bread that starts out in a hot oven.  You might also be surprised to know that starting with a cold oven will also produce bread that is not as light and fluffy.  The initial blast of heat from a preheated oven gives the bread a little bit of a last-minute rise (bakers call this “oven spring”).  I always, always preheat my oven before I bake bread.  To help me remember to do this, I set a timer to go off about 10 minutes before the dough will be ready to bake.
• Your oven temperature sensor is not calibrated properly. This is a fairly uncommon cause of underbaked bread, but if you’re still having difficulties after fixing the previous two problems, you might want to get an oven-safe thermometer and check to make sure that your oven really is 350 degrees when you’ve set it to 350 degrees.

If you’d like a concrete way of testing your bread for doneness (I don’t think that’s a word, really!), you can insert an instant-read thermometer into the side of a loaf.  Most breads are done when they reach 190 degrees.  I rarely do this myself, but you might find it to be helpful if you’re new at baking.

If you’ve never tried yeast baking before, you might feel very overwhelmed by reading this list!  Yeast baking is really not as scary as it seems, though, and many of my readers will attest to that.  If you want to give it a try, here are a few recipes that are fairly simple.

Garlic Breadsticks-These are so small, it’s easy to get them to rise and bake all the way through.

Glazed Honey Pan Rolls-This dough rises very easily, which is why I included it here.  You can leave off the glaze if you prefer to keep things simpler.

Easy French Bread-These loaves are not as tall as regular loaves of bread, which means that it is not as difficult to get them to rise and bake properly.  And the loaves are so handy for panini sandwiches, garlic bread, Beef au Jus sandwiches, and the like.

Thin-Crust Pizza -This dough is almost entirely kneaded in the food processor, which makes it almost fool-proof.  I just use my normal food processor and my normal blade…nothing special is required. You’ll need a pizza stone for optimum baking results, though.

English Muffin Bread-This is a batter bread, which means it uses a very soft dough that is just mixed in a stand mixer…no kneading necessary!

And if you are one of those people who is just not interested in messing with yeast, you’ll be pleased to know that there are a number of no-yeast baking recipes in the Wednesday Baking archives.  There’s even a recipe for no-yeast sandwich bread.
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I hope that this helps to solve some of your yeast-baking problems.  I’m sure some of my readers who are experienced bakers will be by to share some of their solutions as well. And of course, you can always email me if you have a problem I didn’t address here. Happy Baking!

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I have a baking question: How do you know when something is “doubled”? I don’t have one of those super nice buckets that a lot of bakers use so I’m having a hard time knowing when things look doubled.  Especially once I’ve rolled it out and put it on (or in) the pan and have waited the length of time, I can’t tell if it’s doubled or not. Any advice or suggestions on how you tell?

-Elizabeth

This is a very not-exact science, if it makes you feel better! I don’t think my loaves and rolls are precisely doubled in size when I put them into the oven…I just kind of eyeball it, honestly.

I think that as with many other aspects of yeast baking, practice makes perfect. If you make some rolls and discover the end product wasn’t quite as risen as you’d prefer, you’ll know that you should let them get a little puffier next time. And if you let some loaves rise until they’re very puffy and they spill over the top of the pans while they bake, you’ll know you shouldn’t let bread dough get that high in your pan.

Just keep at it…as you gain more baking experience, you’ll have a better idea of what works and what doesn’t, and you’ll be better able to spot a perfectly risen loaf of bread.

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How do you save on your children’s clothing? Hand-me-downs worked great for a while but daughter is developing some curves :O) and is harder to fit now. Unfortunately I never learned to sew. How do you do it with 4?

-Tracy

First, let me assure you that sewing your own clothes is often not a money-saving proposition. By the time you buy fabric and notions, it’s easy to spend just as much as you would in a store, so don’t fret about that, ok? There are plenty of ways to save on clothes without sewing them yourself. I don’t think I have sewn a single item of clothing for my children, even though I do know how to sew!

My oldest kiddo is 10.5, so I haven’t had any personal experience with clothing a teenager. However, I do manage to clothe myself pretty cheaply, and the strategies that work for me will probably work for your daughter as well. Here are my best suggestions:

• Buy second hand clothes. You can see a few of my Goodwill finds in previous posts…my Charlotte Russe dress, my polka-dotted dress, my $.75 Old Navy skirt, my Mossimo jeans and t-shirt, and you can also see a Mossimo skirt and camisole in the picture on my About Me page. Buying second hand clothes does take patience (often I stop at Goodwill and find nothing), but there’s some good stuff to be had, especially in the juniors section, which is probably where your daughter’s sizes will be anyways.

• Shop clearances. Doing this does usually mean shopping a bit off-season, but since stores offer the next season’s clothing ridiculously early, it’s not as off-season as you might expect. For instance, you can usually get great deals on winter clothing in January and February, and summer clothes are deeply discounted in August. I’ve found my best clothing clearance deals at Target, Kohl’s, and Old Navy, though those are certainly not your only options.

• Keep an eye out on Freecycle. Though I’m not really in the market for teenage girl clothes, I’ve noticed several offers for bags full of junior size girl clothes.

• Watch for sales. This won’t save you as much as the tips above, but if you have to buy something in a retail store, looking for sales when you shop will help to stretch your dollars.

• Give your daughter a budget. I currently bear the responsibility for buying clothes for my kids, but as they get older, my husband and I intend to give them a monthly clothing budget to spend as they wish. Hopefully this will inspire them to shop clearances, sales, and thrift stores so that they can get more for their money. If your daughter is resistant to these shopping techniques, giving her a personal clothing budget just might help to motivate her (as long as you don’t bail her out if she makes a unwise choice like spending all the money on a single pair of shoes).

• Don’t buy too many clothes. I’d offer up that we often think we need more clothes than we really do. All six of us here at Chez Frugal Girl get by with smaller wardrobes than the average American (except for maybe Sonia, whose drawer is bursting with hand-me-downs!), and we are all surviving and thriving. And people in generations past managed with a very minimal wardrobe. So, don’t feel as though you must buy your child tons of dress clothes, school clothes, and play clothes. If you could put off laundry for two weeks before your children start running out of clothes, you might have too many.

As I said at the outset, I’m not speaking from personal experience here, so if any of you readers who do have teenagers would like to chime in, feel free!

Yesterday, the kids and I baked cookies (with cookie cutters that were bought for pennies in Januarys past).

This was always one of my favorite Christmas activities when I was young, and my kids are like me in that regard.

They enjoy the whole process from cutting the cookies out….

to decorating.

They’re all quite fond of liberally using sprinkles (which were, naturally, purchased post Christmas on deep discount).

We always end up with a table full of very colorful cookies.

And a LOT of mess.

Oddly enough, the mess is conspicuously absent from my childhood memories of cookie baking.  

(Joshua was there with us…he just managed to stay out of almost all the pictures!)

This year, I used a Christmas Cookie recipe from the Girl Talk blog (I omitted the nutmeg and added a teaspoon of vanilla, though) because the one my family traditionally uses calls for a small amount of Crisco, and I had none.  I did, however, use our traditional frosting recipe, because I think all good frostings should include butter.

I usually make 1.5 times the frosting recipe for one recipe’s worth of cookies because some of my children are fairly,  um, generous when they spread the frosting.

Christmas Cookie Frosting

1/4 cup softened butter
2 cups powdered sugar
2 tablespoons milk or cream
1 teaspoon vanilla

Whip the butter until soft and fluffy. Mix in half the powdered sugar, the milk, and the vanilla. Add remaining cup of powdered sugar and beat until smooth, adding more milk if necessary.

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If you have kids of your own or if other people’s kids are in your life (our neighbor’s daughter joined us yesterday), I highly recommend baking cookies with them. Though it requires an investment of time (and a lot of cleaning up!), kids take such delight in being allowed to participate in the baking and decorating process. I think you’ll find yourself thinking, even in the midst of the sweeping and wiping, that it was an awfully good use of your time.

Happy Baking!

(Apologies for my blog’s disappearance yesterday.  For a couple of hours, my server was offline because of a network outage.  I did publish a Q&A post before it went out, though, so if you missed it yesterday, just scroll down.)

Last week, on a rainy, rainy day, I was just about to start making the dough for some buns when our electricity went out. Bummer.

This meant that I couldn’t use my stand mixer, but that was ok with me…I’m quite capable of mixing and kneading bread dough by hand. I do it every Sunday when I make bread for communion, actually.

No, the main problem was that I needed to melt some butter and heat some milk, and with no stove and no microwave, I was sort of low on options.

I was planning to make a grilled chicken Caesar salad for dinner that night, so I decided to grill the chicken breasts, since (yay!) the grill operates off of a propane tank.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I could use the heat from the grill to help me heat the milk…

and the butter.

The milk didn’t get quite as warm as it would have on the stove or in the microwave, but it worked just fine, and we had a lovely pan of rolls to go with our salad at dinner (the power came back on before I had to bake them, thankfully. I don’t think my grill would work too well for baking rolls!).

I was actually trying to replicate the buns they serve at Fuddruckers, using a recipe from the internet. The buns were lovely, but they weren’t at all the size or shape of the Fuddruckers buns (not for reasons having anything to do with my unusual heating method!), so I will try again. When I figure it out, I’ll share with you.

A lot of you have been wondering lately how I store my flour.  Someone else asked that a while back, and I answered in a Monday Q&A post.

I don’t do anything fancy, because I’ve never had problems with bugs and weevils, but if you still want to see my method, go check out my answer.

If you DO have problems with bugs, there are a couple of things you can do.   I’ve heard that putting your flour into the freezer for 24 hours before storing it will kill any bugs.  Another option, if you have space, is to simply store your flour in the freezer.  You can also store the bags in a large bin, like a Rubbermaid tub.

As I said, though, I have no personal experience with bug prevention.  I’m sure some of you have, though, so if you’ve got some anti-bug tricks, please share them in the comments!

Could you please have a flour sale soon? Because this is the very last Gold Medal flour bag from my Christmas and Easter stock-ups at your store, and my flour stash is in desperate need of replenishing.

I was thinking something along the lines of the $.99/5 lb sale you had last year would be good.

Thank you.

This recipe is from a newer Fleischmann’s Yeast cookbook that I got for free somehow a number of years ago. Actually, it was a lot of years ago, as I know I had this for a while before I got married (I was the sort of weird teenager who sends away for yeast baking freebies!), and it’s been 12 years since I tied the knot (or, more appropriately, since we tied the knot).

Anyways.

It’s a basic bread dough that can be used in a number of different ways, and over the course of the next few Wednesday Baking posts, I hope to show you the other things you can do with the dough.

Today’s post is about the most common way I use this dough, and that is to make braided loaves of bread. A braided loaf looks really lovely and impressive but is not at all hard to make.

Here’s how you can be the proud owner of some gorgeous braided loaves.

First, mix the dry ingredients together.

Then heat the milk, water, and butter together to 120 degrees.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, beat for a few minutes, and add enough flour to make a soft dough. Turn it out onto a floured surface….

and knead until it’s smooth and elastic.

After letting it rise for an hour, punch the dough down and divide it into 6 equal portions.

Roll three portions out into 12-16 inch ropes.

To braid them, you can either start at one end and work to the other, or you can start in the middle, work to one end, and then start in the middle and work to the other end (if you have trouble handling the long strips of dough, this is a good way to go).  Repeat with the other three portions of dough and lift the finished braids onto a greased baking sheet.

Cover the loaves with a wet tea towel and let them rise for about 35 minutes. The length of time necessary for the rising period will vary depending on how hot or cold your house is, so use a visual check in addition to a timer. They should be puffy and about double in size, like this:

To give the crust a nice shiny finish, you’ll need to mix up an egg wash.  This is not at all necessary, but it does make an enormous difference in the appearance of the loaves.  I always do an egg wash if I’m giving loaves away or bringing them to someone else’s house.   When I make these for just the six of us, I usually only make an egg wash if I have cheap eggs around as I’m not really interested in using a pricey farm fresh egg to make my bread shiny.

To make an egg wash you just beat an egg with a tablespoon of water, and then use a pastry brush to gently brush it onto the risen loaves.

A thin layer of egg wash is sufficient. The loaves should just look kind of shiny when you’re done.

Bake the loaves in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until lightly browned.

Let cool on a wire rack before slicing. Happily, these cool off fairly quickly, so you shouldn’t have to wait long before enjoying a slice, preferably a warm one, so that the butter will melt into it. (Really, as long as you are not opposed to dairy, you ought to use real butter on your homemade bread. Margarine is not the same. Not even close. I’m just sayin’.).

Braided Loaves

6-6 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
3 tablespoons sugar
4 1/2 teaspoons (2 pkg.) yeast
2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 cups water
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons butter

Mix 3 cups flour, the sugar, yeast, and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer. Combine water, milk, and butter and heat to 120 degrees.

Gradually add warm mixture to the dry ingredients, and beat for 2 minutes. Mix in enough additional flour to make a soft dough. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 5-8 minutes.

Cover with wet tea towel and let rise in a warm place for 1 hour. Turn dough out onto a floured surface and divide into 6 portions. Roll each portion into a 12-16 inch rope. Braid three ropes together; pinch ends to seal. Repeat with remaining dough, and transfer braids to a greased baking sheet.

Cover and let rise 35 minutes. Beat 1 egg with 1 tablespoon water and brush over risen braids. Bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for 25 minutes, or until nicely brown. Cool on a wire rack.