Cinnamon Buns

I've made cinnamon buns twice this year.  The first time was a month ago when I decided to try a recipe from Smitten Kitchen.  The recipe seemed promising although I had problems with the dough not rising.  Probably because it's arctic cold in our house.  Flavor came out great but texture was simply not as fluffy as hoped.

I held off trying again until this week when Monkey came to town for the holidays.  This time, I used a recipe from my Baking Illustrated book and boy did it deliver.  Both recipes were similar but for the second go, I used a technique Monkey recommended for rising the dough: preheat oven to 200, turn off the oven, and put the dough inside.  Sure enough, super puffy.  Everything about these buns were fabulous, including the icing.  Will definitely make again.

Here are pictures of this week's buns.

And here are pictures of the previous buns which failed to rise to expectations (pun intended har har).

Movies

The best part of the holidays are when you're stuffed after dinner, the baby is finally sleeping and you get to snuggle up on the couch and watch movies...still wearing the pajamas you woke up in of course.

So far, we've watched Ghostbusters as previously mentioned.  I don't think I've watched that since I was a teenager.  Bill Murray will always be funny in my book.  We also watched Stardust, a fantasy movie from 2007 that Monkey recommended.  Badge grumbled about this one, thinking it'd be a total dud, but he was the first to admit it was anything but.  Surprisingly cute and funny, the whole family enjoyed it.  I kinda want to watch it again.

After Stardust, we went on a tear and watched Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve.  We're now going to go watch Ocean's Thirteen and drink some more egg nog that Monkey whipped up this afternoon.

Christmas Time

Well it's certainly been a while since I last blogged.  Oops.  I'll play catch up later.  For now, I'll focus on documenting our Christmas day.

On Christmas morning, we rolled out of bed and started opening presents.  This was BB's first year opening presents, and though I'm pretty sure he had no idea what was going on, I like to think he enjoyed the chaos.

In the afternoon, I made egg nog using a Saveur recipe that Badge saw at the doctor's office (and immediately swiped).  The flavor was great, but was pretty thick and frothy from the whipped egg whites.  The family all had differing opinions on preferred thickness so I just left the milk out for individual adjustments.  The recipe called for 1 cup rum but I used 3/4 because that's all I had left.  It seemed like enough since Uncle Jamie still got drunk, which I suppose isn't saying much.  The egg nog really didn't last long and we were all disappointed when it was gone.  A double batch will definitely be considered next year.

For dinner, we decided to revisit some of our old favorites.  Since we didn't have mac n cheese at Thanksgiving, it was a must.  We also remade the same scalloped potatoes from our past two Christmases, tried a new roasted cauliflower dish, and made caesar salad with Monkey's addicting dressing.  For the main course, I was originally planning to make some beef short ribs but was distracted by a large slab of pork belly while shopping at Whole Foods.  The mere thought of crispy skin on top of tender melt-in-your-mouth meat was all it took to make my decision.

Over all, the dinner came together pretty quickly, except of course the pork belly which took 3 hours to roast.  Everything was delicious.  There was really nothing I would not make again.

At the end of the meal, we were all utterly stuffed so we put BB to bed and parked it on the couch to watch Ghostbusters.  We took a break towards the end of the movie to make some hot chocolate.  It was the perfect end to a great Christmas.

Egg Nog
Courtesy of Saveur Magazine

Ingredients

• 1 cup light rum
• 1/2 cup sugar + 2 tbsp
• 6 eggs (yolks separated from whites)
• 3/4 cup heavy cream
• 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/8 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground allspice
• 1/8 tsp ground anise
• 1 cup milk

Whisk rum with 1/2 cup sugar and egg yolks in heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of simmering water until very thick, 2-3 minutes; chill.  Whip heavy cream in a bowl until soft peaks form; chill.  In a large bowl, whip egg whites, 2 tbsp sugar and spices until soft peaks form.  Fold whipped cream and cooled egg yolk mixture into whites; stir in milk.  To serve, ladle egg nog into mugs and garnish with ground cinnamon and nutmeg.  Serve additional rum on the side if you like.