Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Bicycling...no cooking!

Julie decided to skip this week's Tuesday's with Dorie baking thing, for a few reasons.  We had quite a bit of stuff going on this weekend and on Monday so we didn't have much time, and well...the recipe called for 7 sticks of butter!!!!!  Seriously, 7 sticks of butter.  I can only imagine the resulting pecan rolls would have been delicious, but I don't think that I need 3 1/2 sticks of butter for breakfast. 

So to help fill the void, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about how we are trying to stay somewhat fit against the bi-weekly flood of buttery goodness! 

As we mentioned a while back, we bought some bicycles from the REI, and have become regular cyclists since then. OK, probably not so much just yet, but we have been riding when the Spring weather has allowed.  Tonight Julie and I went out for a ride with our friend Kim, and it was quite lovely.  We rode from the Starbucks right by our house up the road to King Soopers, down close to the Garden of the Gods, and back home, for a total of 11 miles.  We are still new to this bicycling thing, so we didn't bring the camera, but here is a lovely picture of our map, and our elevation gain (since we're in Colorado and all).


We started up at top, and rode South, then came home

The scale is a bit odd...but those were some tough hills


This wasn't just for fun and cookies, we are actually training for a bicycle event!  Not a race at all, just an evening ride through Colorado Springs, called the Starlight Spectacular!  This is a ride which does a big loop starting by the Garden of the Gods, heading to downtown Colorado Springs and then back up to the park.  It is a 14 mile loop, so we have to get our legs and rear ends ready for the event!  It happens on June 9th so watch out for our post about that, but it starts at 10 PM so we might not have many pictures! 

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

TWD: Baking with Julia - Hungarian Shortbread

Whoa I can't believe another two weeks have already flown by.  Over the weekend Mikey helped me make the Hungarian Shortbread, you can view the recipe of butter at 1smallkitchen or The not so exciting adventures of a dabbler.  The recipe was pretty easy to put together, especially after all the butter got to room temperature!

Here is the butter and sugar getting mixed with the egg yolks.
















After the dough was all put together we stuck it in the freezer so it could get hard enough to grate with our box grater.















I grated the first half of the dough and let it cook for about ten minutes in the oven before adding some homemade strawberry jelly and then added the second half of the dough.  The strawberry jelly was made last year with my parents, it has been a tradition to whip up some strawberry jelly since the first time we  all made some over three years ago to give out as our wedding favors!  We have one jar left, but can't seem to use that one for sentimental reasons.  Is it even still going to be good?  Oh well.. back to the shortbread.  Here is the grated dough and the precooked assembly.















Ta-da, it cooked wonderfully!  I had to leave the house so Mikey was helpful, as usual, and took it out when it had achieved a wonderfully golden crust!  Then he coated it with powdered sugar.  Of course he cleaned it up before I got home, but he said he got sugar everywhere!  It was worth it!















I cut it up into pretty small pieces and took it to work to share!  There was no way I was going to leave all that buttery goodness in the house!