Baking 3 Things in 1 Day

Several days of summer has passed already. Tomorrow is summer school! I'm so sad about that. The days before, I went on vacation with my family, where I spent the majority of the trip sleeping on the car b/c my dad and uncle were driving a lot. I was practically sleeping whenever I had the chance to. During school, I was progressively getting less and less sleep. This happened after the first semester of school where I had to cram for my finals and I discovered that I could actually make it through the day without that much sleep. So I was basically catching up on my sleep. I will also try to change my bad habits of sleeping really late.

Now back to the point of my post. The day before school ended, I baked up a storm. I baked 3 different items so I could give goodie boxes to my teachers as a thank you. Whewf...It was soo tiring. I spent, like, 5 hours in the kitchen and my feet hurt afterward. It was fun, but tiring. So much things to clean up though.



I baked spritz cookies, pecan cookies and muffins.
I made the pecan cookies from a book I have.



Cute cupcake liners!! I just had to show you them.




Please bear with me, I took many, many pictures because I rationalized that since I spent so much time baking, I might as well take a lot of pictures.












All packaged and ready to go.


Pecan Cookies

These cookies required toasted pecans, a relatively easy thing to do. Just measure out the pecans and bake them at 350 degrees F until they are slightly browned.

The dough was rolled into logs.


Refrigerated for 2+ hours, then sliced.


Press pecan halves onto the slices and bake.

Tada...

My dad loved these cookies. I felt kind of bad though because I was worried he would eat too much. The cookies had so much butter (1 cup?) that I was worried about my dad's health. Do you ever feel like that after baking things and people keep on eating them? Well, that's why I try to bake healthy things.

My spritz cookies review:
These cookies tasted really good. The recipe asked for one egg yolk, but because I increased the amount of flour by around 1/4-1/2 cup, I found that the dough wouldn't stick together. The main reason for the increase in flour was that I wanted the butter to flour ratio to be lower. As a result, I included the egg white too as an after thought. Because the flour was sifted, the cookie turned out very crispy. This was because of the butter too, but the sifting helped. It tasted good after a few days. It's a really good cookie. I also sprinkled some cinnamon sugar on top of some cookies and left others as plain. I found that if you baked the cinnamon sugar mixture too long and some was on the baking sheets, then the sugar would start caramelizing (or something very close to that). So don't bake it too long.

I forgot if I mentioned this before, but I use to baking sheets when I bake these spritz cookies to prevent the bottom of the cookies from being burnt easily. I just place a sheet on the lower rack and a baking sheet with the cookies on the higher rack. The sheet on the lower rack absorbs some of the heat preventing the cookies' bottoms from being burnt quickly.