Baking Inspiration

Hello blog!

It is currently 12:52am on Wednesday night and no surprise, I cannot sleep. My right eye has also developed a twitch again which is just wonderful. I googled it and apparently eye-twitching results from lack of sleep (yikes!).

Anyway, I’m writing this blog because I feel like my family would be proud of me for all of the cooking and baking I’ve been doing here at Otago. Of course, we all know Grayson is the foodie of the family, but I’m staging a coup because I feel like I’ve earned it!

This morning I made my childhood favorite: an egg in a hole! I cooked the egg perfectly (which is rare for me because I always burn it somehow ??) and I used the small, round cutout as an excuse to eat more of my DELICIOUS Bay Road crunchy peanut butter. I ate my egg in a hole while I explained to Grace how my mom used to make this when I was growing up. Except she used to put apple butter on the small cutout instead of peanut butter. As soon as I said the words apple butter, Grace flipped out. It turns out she used to eat apple butter as a kid too!

Side note: why do some foods only exist at certain periods of your life? Apple butter, magic shell chocolate sauce, bagel bites, bugel chips, dinosaur eggs oatmeal, spaghettios ?? Do these foods still exist?

We both got so excited about the concept of apple butter that we decided to make some from scratch! In addition to the apple butter, Grace also wanted to make biscuits because no one in New Zealand understands the concept of biscuits. They all think they are some sort of cookie (must be a UK thing?). Anyways…we went to the store and bought some apples and milk because we had all of the other ingredients already at the flat.

We shaved the skin off of the apples and diced them up into small pieces. Next we made a mixture of sugar, allspice, cinnamon, and ground cloves and tossed our apples in the mixture. Lastly, we added it all into the slow cooker and put the heat on low. The apple mixture had to be in the slow cooker for 10 hours, so now it was time to make the biscuits!

Biscuits are surprisingly simple to make and only require a few ingredients (as I’m sure anyone reading this blog knows). So we mixed our dry ingredients, flour, salt, baking powder etc. in a bowl and then cut in the butter and added the milk. This created a sticky dough that I kneaded until it looked how it was supposed to. Next we flatted the dough until it was an inch thick and cut out small circles to form our biscuits. We had some dough left over, so we made a giant biscuit and plopped that on the pan with the remaining space we had.

The biscuits cooked beautifully!!! Grace and I felt like Pillsbury professionals :) I tried to feed some of the freshly cooked biscuits to our kiwi host, Aliyah, and she replied “ah no, I’ll just have one for dessert tomorrow night!” They really do not understand the concept of biscuits here.

I’ll let you know how the apple butter turns out!!

Thanks for reading:)

baking with grannie (grace + annie)