Okay, now skip this paragraph if you’ve been following my blog and already know my story. For those who haven’t I’ve been on one ride of a weight loss journey over the past ten years that you can read about on The Journey to Finding Me. The Cliff Notes version of that story goes something like this:

• 1999: 325 pounds, miserable, sad, hopeless, desperate. Gave my will and my life over the will of a loving gracious God, worked a program of recovery, and lost 125 pounds. Gratitude, joy, and more gratitude.
• 2008: Felt the time had come to lose the last of the excess weight I was carrying, participated in a medically-supervised fast, continued to bust my behind at the gym, and lost another 70 pounds. Thrilled, amazed, and more gratitude still.
• 2009: Had corrective surgery to remove the excess skin. Ouch. Slowly had weight plateau about 20 pounds above post-surgery low. Full physical revealed in excellent physical condition or to quote my doctor, “If I didn’t know better I’d assume you were a conditioned athlete.” More gratitude.

And then came the Fall and Winter of 2010 filled with cake pops, cupcakes, and cookies. There were tables of goodies prepared for hospitality hour following church on Sundays.  There were high fat dinners and sugar-saturated desserts loving made and shared with my brother (ALS requires that he eat to keep as much weight on as he can); foods filled with childhood memories and staggering levels of calories from cans of cream soup and cubes of butter. All of which brings us to the orange clad still sweaty faced from a workout Anita in the photo montage at six o’clock.

And here we are. Up thirty pounds from my lowest weight and a solid ten to fifteen pounds from where I’d ideally like to be, and once again sporting a muffin top. You know the muffin top; that squishy belt of chub that resides just above the waistline. This little muffin-top, which in my case would more fittingly  be called a cookie-top since cookies are largely responsible for it’s reappearance, stands (or jiggles as the case may be) as witness to the virtuousness of my self-discipline over the past two months of blitzkrieg baking.

Honestly, I don’t know how they do it, and by they I mean those incredibly creative cookie bakers whose blogs I’ve been stalking following for the past few months. Unless their profile photos are actually a “cut and paste” JPG of a model from “Women’s Health Magazine” then clearly these women have established a reasonable level of sampling and taste-testing that’s not pushing past the perimeter of their pants.

And then again, maybe they aren’t all compulsive overeaters with no moderate set point as to how much is enough and how much is too much. I came broken from the factory. My dial is set to one more. One more bite. One more taste. One more plate, one more serving, one more dozen. These are just the facts of me and my relationship with food. I don’t make the news people, I just report it.

I can’t draw or paint or sculpt but decorating cookies is like creative expression for me. I love mixing the dough and decorating the cookies. Giving something from my kitchen is a natural and easy way for me to show care and love to my family and friends. Every time I put on one of my Etsy-acquired vintage aprons it ties me back to times I spent with my grandma making batch after batch of snickerdoodles and chocolate chip cookies. And with risking sounding like I’m taking it over the top, there’s something about spending time baking that restful and calming to me. Dare I say meditative? And here’s the really amazing thing; it seems I’m a more than respectable baker. I can turn out some awesome groceries with a few ingredients and an oven set to 350. Something I bake can make someone smile. How cool is that? For all these reasons I don’t want to give up baking but neither do I want to find myself in a dicey place when it comes to being around all that yummy goodness.

So what’s a girl to do? Well, I have a couple big cookie commits coming up soon but for the time being my focus is going to be

Less Baking and More Biking

Less time searching Saveur and time exploring Eating Well

And definitely, Less Pie and More Protein.

And only time and my cookie top will tell . . .

Bears hibernate in winter. I bake. And this winter was like none other, inspired by the creative baking brilliance and ridiculously awesome blogs of Angie (Bakerella) and Bridget (Bake at 350). This duo of baking babes are doing incredibly things with the simplest of ingredients; Bakerella with cake mix and candy melts, Bridget with unbleached flour, sugar, eggs, and then more sugar. Lots more sugar.

If imitation is the best form of flattery then this winter has been my humble attempt to sing these women’s praises as well as to learn a new skill in the kitchen by practicing, practicing, practicing, and copying, copying, copying ideas I’ve seen on their blogs. The photos below are my rough around the edges copies of what they and others doing what they do have already done. Give credit where credit is do.

In early October I provided food for a gathering of about 40 people who were coming together to learn how they could provide spiritual, emotional, and tangible support to my brother Randy and his wife as they navigate life following his diagnosis with A.L.S. Along with the savory snacks, there was a dessert plate on each table with an assortment of home-baked cookies surrounding a jar of  Introductory Cake Pops 101 in the green of my brother’s A.L.S. support team.

While they weren’t all that good looking they were crazy good tasting and so when Halloween came around I pulled out my beautiful new copy of Bakerella’s Cake Pop book and made a go at a couple of her monster creations.

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The red velvet and chocolate fudge cake pops were a favorite of kids and adults alike but when it was all over there hardly anything left of the spider-web deviled eggs with “spider egg” black salt, salami witch hats and cheese pumpkins, dark rye pumpkins filled with black olive cream cheese, orange bread owls with orange zest cream cheese, and harvest caramel candy corn.

The hit of the day with the littlest ones by far was the brownie graveyard with Milano cookie tombstones, marshmallow ghosts, candy bones and chocolate pebbles.

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There were Nutter Butter ghosts and pumpkin Oreos and black cat Oreo lollipops co-inspired by Bakerella’s cake pop black cat and our little Simbakitty boy. We thought they looked just like him, right down to his Halloween kitty bling.

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So with my Bakerella monster cake pops a smashing success I ordered a boatload of colored candy melts and scoured local candy stores for little sweet decorating doodads and then . . . wait for it wait for it . . . I stumbled into the world of iced cut-out cookies when I stumbled onto Bake at 350. So it seems I’m a little slow on the uptake when it comes to trends because the last time I gave much thought to decorated sugar cookies was back in the days when that meant a roll of refrigerated cookie dough and red and green sprinkles. Who knew it had blown into a new edible art form?

As it happened I came across an Italian flag cookie of hers on the day before my weekly Italian language class and since making it required nothing more than 3 colors of icing and a rectangle shaped cookie I thought I’d give it a go. Bridget’s cookie is on top and mine is on the bottom. But I didn’t need to tell you that didn’t I? Could it be the bumpy, cracked icing and shaky handwriting that gave me away?

Even though I wanted more practice before putting my cookies “out there” for others to see (judge, mock, ridicule) when Dana asked me to make a dessert for a co-worker’s baby shower I decided to take a chance and follow Bridget’s awesome and easy directions for making monogram cookies, which I sent along with milk chocolate cupcakes filled with coconut-pecan icing and topped with milk chocolate and white chocolate buttercream. Yum.

Next on the calendar? The hospitality hour at church on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. And here we go!

It was so fun to see everyone’s reactions to the “giving thanks” cookies and especially the little hearts with the names of the children of our church on them. Along with the cookies I thought it would be fun to provide a little taste of everyone’s upcoming Thanksgiving dinner so I lined mini pie crusts with cream cheese and filled them with turkey I’d roasted the day before topped with fresh cranberry sauce and a sprig of rosemary. They were adorable and a wonderful savory, creamy, sweet bite.

Oh. And then there were the Turkey Cake Pops that I spent an entire day making and no one ever saw.  Oh sure, they look great in the photo I took a few minutes after finishing them but within two hours every one of those little birdie poops pops  cracked in half and were a total mess. Apparently I compacted the cake too tightly when I mixed it together with the cream cheese. Bakerella suggests using a spoon for combining but smartypants me reasoned if a spoon was good, a standing mixer would be better. Not so. Once the cake mixture thawed from having been in the fridge it expanded in the candy shell and disaster followed.

I not only learned from my mistake but I also learned that Oreo truffle pops are easier than cake pops! My new go-to sweet on a stick, like these I made as a hostess gift for our friends, the wonderful innkeepers at the Joshua Grindle Inn in Mendocino.

Around mid-December I traveled up to my brother and sister-in-law’s in Oregon to spend the week baking cookies for an open house party to celebrate her daughter’s recent marriage.

I practiced and experimented until I came up with a  selection that included Oreo Truffle Balls brushed with gold luster dust, ginger sandwich cookies filled with lemon cream (Oprah’s December issue), chocolate shortbread dipped in white chocolate and crushed peppermint, miniature wedding cakes made from a stack of vanilla cookies layered with rolled marzipan and decorated with royal icing and fondant flowers, and at the bride’s request my triple chocolate chunk cookies that are so over the top good they’d make your momma cry.

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These two photos professional photographer Mark Galligan took really classed up all those platters of  humble little cookies.

We now interrupt this nightmarishly long baking post with a photo of bespectacled me and my dashing brother Randy.  So it seems that Mark’s photographic magic works as well on people as on cookies.

Halloween, then a baby shower followed by Thanksgiving and a wedding celebration, at now at long last we’ve reached Christmas, complete with a church table buckling under the weight of holiday goodies from iced cookies inspired by Bake at 350, Cookie Crazie, The Sweet Adventures of Sugar Belle and other cookie rolling, baking, icing fools to cake pops and even a Nutter Butter Baby Jesus or two. The following photos were also taken using my new table light box that’s the coolest thing since forever. I’ve provided this series of cookie photos commentary free. Feel free to write your own captions.

With the cookies and cake pops all done for the year, I headed up to Portland to spend Christmas with family. I baked an apple cranberry citrus pie for my brother.  I roasted a crazy big 24 pound organic turkey for Christmas Eve dinner. And then on Christmas Day under the watchful eyes of my brother and sister I made crispy fried rosette cookies just like our Grandma use to make  every holiday when we were young.  While my rosettes tasted just like the ones Grandma we were all reasonably certain that her pile of failed attempts was significantly smaller than my towering pile of crumbled burnt bits.

Whatever the case, it was a fun baking season thanks to all those fabulous baking bloggers out there and to my grandma who passed along her passion for baking to her youngest granddaughter . . .along with a cardboard box full of old cookie cutters and baking sheets!

Fall and baking. The perfect combination, and so I decided to start off the new fall season of baking last Sunday because we Lutherans like our after worship hospitality hour.

Nothing fancy. Just delicious. Starting with Triple Chocolate Chip Cookies. That would be white chocolate chunks, dark chocolate chunks, and M&M’s Harvest Blend. 1 – 2 -3.

Harvest Blend M&M’s.

It almost sounds…

healthy….

organic….

natural goodness.

I love creative marketing.

But not as much as I love my new cookie jar! Dana and I found it at our local “gorgeous stuff we don’t need but we’re weak and we can’t resist” gift shop. It was love at first sight. I loved everything about it…the warm colors, the pinecone design, the shape, and oooooh….this baby can hold a seriously massive batch of cookies. Swoon.

Then there were these pumpkin-pecan cakes that I made with this awesome fall cakelet pan from Williams-Sonoma, and then sandwiches together with a cream cheese frosting flavored with pure maple sugar, glazed with a maple-infused simple syrup and then frosted with sugar. Big hit with the Lutherans. Big.

And finally to round out the table, I arranged three paper bags of fall-themed candy into a miniature apple basket. Yep, more of the M&M Harvest Blend, the ever-popular sugar-busting candy pumpkins, and some fall-colored Jordan Almonds I found in the Halloween section at Cost Plus World Market, right between the gummy bloody fingers and chocolate eyeballs.

Oh. Did I mention I’m in charge of the hospitality hour again on Sunday, October 31? Those chocolate eyeballs are sure going to come in handy is all I’m saying.

]]> http://www.anitasblog.com/fall-and-food/feed/ 1 http://www.anitasblog.com/lemon-curd-candied-peels/ http://www.anitasblog.com/lemon-curd-candied-peels/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 02:05:06 +0000 Anita http://www.anitasblog.com/?p=684 Over at Savouring where I blog about the snippets of our daily life there's been a few posts on our neighborhood lemon tree and my obsessive pursuit of gettin' me some, and when the first of the harvest arrived I had so many lemons that I was able... Don't stop now...keep reading!

Over at Savouring where I blog about the snippets of our daily life there’s been a few posts on our neighborhood lemon tree and my obsessive pursuit of gettin’ me some, and when the first of the harvest arrived I had so many lemons that I was able to make a double batch of lemon curd and candied lemon peels.

Zest and and then juice 8 lemons. Be sure to remove any seeds. Crunchy isn’t considered a good thing in the world of lemon curd.

Place the zest and juice to the side. We’ll get back to them in a minute.

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Take one cup cold butter (2 cubes) and cut into 16-20 chunks and then return to refrigerator.

.Make yourself a double-boiler by paring one of your metal mixing bowls with a sauce pan. You should be able to put two inches of water in the saucepan and the bowl shouldn’t touch the water when you rest it on the top.

Remove the bowl and bring the water in the saucepan to a rapid simmer. While the water’s heating whisk 2 cups of sugar and 10 egg yolks in the metal bowl until thoroughly blended. Write a note for yourself so you don’t forget to have an egg-white omelet for breakfast.

To the blended sugar and yolk mixture add in the lemon zest and juice and mix thoroughly. Once the water in the saucepan has a fast simmer going on, turn it down to medium high, set the bowl on top and whisk continually for about 8-10 minutes or until the mixture thickens and you begin to notice bright yellow streaks showing up. Remove from the heat and still whisking, add the butter one piece at a time. Be sure that you don’t add more butter until the last addition is completely melted into the curd.

I made two batches and my arm was so tired from the first batch (time for a little more strength-training at the gym!) that I transferred the second batch directly from the stovetop to my standing mixer and let my little friend Kitchen Aid do the whisking while incorporating the butter.

Transfer the lemon curd to the refrigerator to cool, covering with a layer of plastic wrap directly on the curd surface to prevent it from developing a gummy skin. The lemon curd will last refrigerated for 10-14 days.

So now that you have lemon curd, what do you do with it?  You can start with sticking your finger in the jar and licking it but if you have a little more style than that….schmear some on a breakfast scone or biscuit, drop a dollop on the center of a thumbprint cookie, spackle it between two meringue cookies or ginger snaps, or put a spoonful on top of fresh berries and if you must with a drizzle of chocolate. For a super easy lemon pie, fold a cup of lemon curd into a pint of whipped whipping cream and spread in a pre-baked pie crust. Add a thin layer of plain whipped whipping cream to the top and decorate with a sprinkle of lemon zest or better yet, with candied lemon peels!

To make candied lemon peels (orange works too!), use a vegetable peeler to peel thin lemon strips. Take care to peel lightly so that you don’t pick up too much of the white flesh underneath but don’t worry, a little is fine. Once you have a saucepan of water boiling on the stove top drop the peels in and let them jacuzzi at an easy boil for about 15-20 minutes. Remove the saucepan from heat, tossing out the water and leaving the peels to drain on a stack of paper towels or in a colander. [The hot water bath softens the peels while removing some of the bitterness from the taste]

Bring two cups of sugar and one cup of water to a boil. If you use the same saucepan you just boiled the peels in either wash it first or at least wipe out the inside of the pan to remove the bitter oils that clung to the sides. Continue boiling the sugar water until it reaches 230 degrees on a candy thermometer. If you don’t have a candy thermometer, get one. If they don’t have candy thermometers in the Land of Oz where you apparently live you’ll know it’s ready when you can drop a little into a cup of really cold water and then form it into a soft little ball. If you can, you’re at the soft candy stage and all systems go! With the sugar water still on the heat add the peels and let them simmer in the hot goo for about 5 minutes before removing and draining.

To finish the candied zest, put a cup of white sugar into any small container you have with a lid. Toss in about one third of the now sticky peels and shake them in the container of sugar until they’re thoroughly coated. Remove and separate. Repeat with the next third. Shake and separate. Repeat. Rinse and shampoo. Repeat.

Store the candied lemon peels in an airtight container….that is until you decorate the top of your pie or just nibble on them for no particular reason other than it’s the weekend or Wednesday.

Here’s the little goodie plate I gave to six of our neighbors and with even more lemon curd remaining I think there’s going to be some mini lemon tarts at our church hospitality hour very soon in the future.

]]> http://www.anitasblog.com/lemon-curd-candied-peels/feed/ 1 http://www.anitasblog.com/nutella-oatmeal-thins/ http://www.anitasblog.com/nutella-oatmeal-thins/#comments Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:50:15 +0000 Anita http://www.anitasblog.com/?p=657 I originally found this recipe for Nutella Oatmeal Thins over at Baking Bites three months ago and since then have made them four or five times.  They are the very one and the same cookies that led to my great internet fame, or infamy as it... Don't stop now...keep reading!

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I originally found this recipe for Nutella Oatmeal Thins over at Baking Bites three months ago and since then have made them four or five times.  They are the very one and the same cookies that led to my great internet fame, or infamy as it were, over at John Shore’s blog in September, an incident which only goes to prove you can maximize your readership comments by combining the words lesbian and christian into the title of a blog post.  Throw free downloads and pics into the mix and there’s every chance you’re going to overload your internet server. But back to the cookies.

The thing I love about these cookies, aside from the fact that they’re made with Nutella, the most divine creamy delicious substance God has allowed to slip through heaven’s gates and tumble to earth, is that they’re easy to make and they never fail to get rave reviews. They have a crispy texture with just a bit of chew from the oatmeal and then mix in the flavor of the Nutella and a Paula Dean helping of butter and everyone ends up wanting the recipe. I’ve also found that they’re great little cookies for shipping since they stay fresh longer than any have ever lasted and if you pack them right, they don’t turn into cookie dust. Just put them in a tall stack, slip the stack into a plastic bag, and then stuff the plastic bag into a new quart-size metal paint can that you can decorated with Christmas stickers or permanent color markers. The paint cans will run you about two dollars a piece at the paint store or twice that at a greeting card and gift store where they’re no longer marketed as paint cans but as creative gift packaging.

This particular double batch was divided between my beloved’s office, two sets of neighbors and a stack that even now is UPS-ing its way to the front door of my brother Randy’s house…along with a jar of Nutella which serves as a rather glorious bonding agent when you have two cookies and a little time on your hands.

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I had a blast! It’s been months since I’ve baked and with the exception of my annual gingerbread house bake-off when I bake and assemble 30-40 of them for the children at church to decorate at Christmas, it’s been years since I did something like this. I shipped four boxes of cookies to friends, took a tray of cookies to my plastic surgeon whose office is one block from our front door, sent a tray of cookies with D to work, and still had plenty to load off on some friends who came over for dinner that night.

But there was a problem. For all my resolve to not taste any of them, I did. I’m not a big lover of all things cookie myself. For me, it’s all about the dough. And the little bits of chocolate, toffee, coconut, and nuts that are tossed before baking. Those little bits of goodness that so easily manage to find their way from bowl or cutting board into my mouth are my undoing. If I just sat and ate cookies it would be easy to add up the damage but given it was in dabs and morsels, it’s a little more difficult to calculate. My best guess is I ate about the equivalent of 6-8 cookies over the 8 hour bake-a-thon.

Could it have been worse? Oh sure. For every time I popped a nibble in my mouth there was five times when I said no, but that’s not the point. The point is that I don’t want to go down this slippy road of consuming calories that a) are empty nutritionally and b) are eaten mindlessly rather than with intention. If I eat a cookie, I want it to be because I make the intention decision to have one and then I want to take the time to enjoy it and be satisfied with that bite of sweetness. I want to know that I can occasionally bake treats for friends and family and when I’m done, have no regrets that I had managed my own behavior better around the food.

I use to weight 325 pounds. I now weigh 150 pounds. My body shape has changed dramatically, my clothes sizes have dropped from size 30 to size 10, my self-esteem has risen and my level of health, according to all the doctors, rocks. Only one thing hasn’t changed and that is that I remain a compulsive over eater. My years in Overeater’s Anonymous taught me that and my own personal history with food since I was a child only serves to confirm it. My baking adventure on Monday reminded me yet again that unless I work consciously and deliberately at doing things differently I will default every time to my compulsive eating ways.

So what do I do with this information? Never bake cookies or cakes or pies again for friends and family and church? Some people would say that’s exactly what I should do but I hope it doesn’t have to come to that. I love baking for people. I fell in love with baking standing at my Grandma’s side. She’d dropped spoonfuls of peanut butter cookie dough on the cookie sheet and I’d follow behind making crisscross designs on the top of each with a dinner fork. She’d slide dozens of chocolate chip cookies warm from the oven onto the brown butcher paper that lined her counter top and when cool I’d gather them up and stack them in her beat-up silver metal cookie tins.  Never do I bake without thinking of my Grandma and every time it makes me smile because I know how proud she’d be of me and how she’d eat one of my cookies and act as though it was the best cookie she’d ever tasted.

But…if I can’t bake cookies without nibbling and tasting and “sampling” then giving up baking is something I’ll have to consider because I will NOT jeopardize all the work I’ve done to get to where I am. I love my health. I love feeling comfortable in my body. I love moving easier and more gracefully. When I add it all up, I love it collectively more than I do mixing cake batter or pressing a pie crust into a pan or making crisscross markings on the top of a peanut butter cookie. If I have to give up the one for the other than the baking goes. I just hope that doesn’t have to happen.

That leads me to this…how could I have done Monday differently? What plans could I have put in place that would have supported my resolve to not nibble away on empty, wasted calories? What can I do different next time? Here are some ideas I’ve come up with. Feel free to add some of your own because clearly, I can use all the help I can get.

• Limit the hours I bake at one time so that I’m less likely to get “worn down” by being around so much food for so long.
• Prepare any meals I might need on baking day ahead of time and then STOP baking, sit down at the table and eat.
• Keep a glass of cold water on the counter.
• Fill a glass with ice water and some nibble veggies like sticks of carrot, celery, or jicama.
• Chew sugarless gum. I thought of this toward the end of the day and it really did help to keep me from putting anything else in my mouth. Chewing cinnamon gum and cookie dough at the same time isn’t all that appealing.
• Remember the quality of life I’m enjoying that I never want to risk losing for a few sugary-fatty bites.
• And maybe it would help to have these two photos taped side by side on my kitchen cabinet within view…

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