Baking Season Is Here

The Spring was all about lighter foods, then Summer was fresh produce- and lots of it. Now we are in to baking and cooking. Love it!

Recently I made a Taste Section recipe from last February actually- and I taught myself something new. I butterflied a chicken! The recipe was called Butterflied Roasted Chicken. It was really pretty simple- you basically put the chicken on it's breast and cut out the back bone with a kitchen shears and lay the chicken down flat. The chicken cooks faster and it was easier to carve up than a whole chicken. Really pretty easy meal.

Another chicken dinner I made was Pretzel-Coated Chicken Tenders with Mustard-Apricot Dipping Sauce. We had company over and I had my daughter help me dip the pieces. I bought some oven French Fries and made an easy salad. Everyone commented that they were really good and well worth making again. I thought they were tasteless actually and next time I'd add salt which wasn't part of the recipe. I'm sure it would seem like the salt in the pretzels was enough but actually there wasn't much there.

For baking this winter so far, I made a few recipes that I thought would be great gifts. The first was Cranberry Pecan Swirls. I was going to make Christmas cookies with my daughter and wanted to make a cookie from the StarTrib's annual cookie contest. These seemed easy because you roll them up, cool the dough and then later slice and bake. The only problem is that you make the dough and cool it, they you roll it out, put on the toppings, roll it up and then freeze for 8 hours! Well, I did make them and they were well worth the effort.

Another recipe that looks great is Cinnamon Swirl Bread. I made it and it looks delicious! I haven't cut in to it yet because I am going to give it as a gift. They great thing about this recipe was that you knead it in a standard mixer. It was super easy! I used to love to bake bread but this took time out of the process speeding it along.

Now I have two things to give as gifts- but next time I make the cookies, I'm going to double the batch so that I have several swirls ready in the freezer to bake up!