Happy Friday everyone! The work at our house finished up this week and for the last three nights, after work A.J. and I have been trying to get all of our belongings back to where they belong, along with dusting the whole house. Construction work always creates so much dust!

I’ve done some rearranging and reorganizing of some of our spaces, which I’ll show you soon.

If you’ve had a long hard week, like us, reward yourself with some breakfast rolls Saturday morning.

I want to make them a little different this time around, so instead of sprinkling cinnamon and sugar or chai tea spices in middle, I sprinkled in mango iced tea drink mix and made an iced tea glaze. They turned out really good!

I started by making the dough for the breakfast rolls. I creamed some butter and sugar in a mixer, set some milk on the stove to scald and dissolved some yeast in some water and set it aside to proof, all at the same time. [Read more...]

I am a planner. I make lists that I sometimes complete. I have a calendar, or two, or a dozen. I plan our meals each week, and then jostle them around on the calendar when life happens or our schedules don’t mesh and neither of us are home at the same time for three days.

I make pages-long grocery lists and then get home and unpack all the groceries and realize that I forgot to put something on the list (every time!). If I could realistically plan every minute of every day, I probably would.

But sometimes I just have to bake. It’s unplanned. It’s chaotic. It’s just an itch to make something out of nothing. I can’t explain it. Other than the whole love-to-cook thing.

I usually don’t know what I’m making, and I have to research a thousand recipes online to see what I could possibly make with a few sticks of butter and bunch of flour, because I’m sure not getting out of my pajamas on a Sunday to go the market, if I haven’t already planned for that.

The answer to what to make with only a few sticks of butter and a bunch of flour? Scones. That’s pretty much all you need. (Well, that’s not true. You need sugar and eggs and buttermilk and baking powder, but just a little bit of those things!)

So this past Sunday, I got the ache to bake. And I decided to bake scones, so I didn’t have to leave the house. Also, scones are my cooking goals list. Also, scones are delicious and people always ruin them by putting chocolate in them.

These scones are delicious without any chocolate at all! Just a hint of maple amid the cakey goodness with a sticky, sweet, maple glaze.

To make these maple scones, I adapted Ina Garten‘s recipe for maple and oat scones. Except mine didn’t have oats. Because I didn’t have those in my house.

I know I have told you guys about grating butter, as it’s my favorite way to make pie or biscuit dough, but Garten’s recipe called for a different way to incorporate butter into flour using the Kitchenaid. Using my stand mixer is so tempting because it makes everything easier, so I tried it out. It’s not as great as using your hands to incorporate frozen, grated butter into flour.

Using Garten’s method, I cubed one pound of butter (yes, that’s four sticks; yes, that’s a whole package; no, I did not know scones had that much butter in them) and put them in the bowl of my stand mixer, along with a mixture of all-purpose flour and whole-wheat flour. I put the mixer on its lowest speed (slowest speed?) for about five to seven minutes until the butter was incorporated into pea-sized, flour coated pieces. (Really, though I recommend you grate the butter, freeze it and then use your hands.) [Read more...]