Baking Exploits in Italy...

If you know me, or have read through some of the posts from last year then you know that I really like baking. I enjoy making desserts, even though I'm not a particularly precise person. I use recipes and then completely change things as I go even when baking.  It's supposed to be the science of cooking, and is, but I still like to tweak and play.
That being said, I haven't baked in ages.
I tried baking cupcakes back in December but sadly they didn't come out as well as they could have.  I had a couple of problems to contend with. The main issue was ingredients. Since Italians aren't big cake bakers (they're great with desserts and pastries but don't make fluffy cakes and cupcakes like we make in the States) I had a hard time finding the right kind of baking powder and baking soda. Vanilla comes in powder form, unless you go to specialty shops. Brown sugar here is not brown sugar but cane sugar, so it is darker in color but not finely ground. It doesn't pack well and therefore changes the texture of any cake or cookie that calls for it.
Ingredients were a slight problem, and so was measuring. I didn't own a measuring cup here because a measuring cup here doesn't measure cups but milliliters.  I didn't feel like taking the effort to convert my recipes into Italy appropriate measurements  so I just used a drinking glass to measure... Yes, so this doesn't really work.
Anyone with half a brain, probably wouldn't have tried to make it work but I'm a little insistent on doing things my way.
My chocolate chip cupcakes were edible but they weren't quite right either. They didn't rise the right way and certainly didn't get fluffy like I wanted.  No one complained, so I suppose they were good, but I wasn't happy with them.
I wanted to try again, but then th eoven broke.  Ok, not quite the oven, just the dial.
That being said, it took over a month for it to get fixed. I live in Italy after all.
So I had bought new pans, measuring cups and spoons and I couldn't bake until last night!
I finally got to bake something successfully last night.
My student gave me lemons from her garden so I decided to use them to make lemon squares for the

first time ever.  I looked up a bunch of recipes before getting the oven fixed which was quite comical. I looked up No Bake Lemon Cake and No Bake Lemon Bars and for some reason Yummly (a recipe search engine) linked me to a bunch of recipes that definitely required baking.
I was a little confounded but in the end it was fine, because I found 2 recipes that seemed great for when I got my oven back. Luckily, we got a new dial Wednesday morning so yesterday evening after work it was time to try some baking.
I'm going to have to post the recipe later on because my lemon squares came out wonderfully. Sweet, moist and gooey.
I made 2 batches and I was ridiculously pleased with both!

my beautiful lemon squares

Kitchen Blunders

This past December I was baking sugar cookies with some friends and I got the brilliant idea of making glitter sugar.  Sugar cookies always seem so beautiful when paired with sugar decorations.

The recipe seemed simple enough. Sugar, food coloring and bake for 10 minutes or so at 350 F.
EASY. And the end result looks like glitter!!

And yet, I messed it up.
Not once.
But twice.

Well, you see, the first time, I kind of forgot to check the sugar... Sooo no glitter. Tasty, melty sugar... Not quite caramel, but pretty good.

I would have stopped there. There was no more sugar in the big cupboard, but my friend, naming no names went hunting for more in the small cupboard and she found some! We were so excited to try again, so we made an even larger quantity of red and green sugar glitter!

I let it bake for 10 minutes precisely and then checked. However, no glitter. No melting, but no sugar. I had lowered the heat a bit so I thought, well maybe another 5 minutes.
All in all, I let this batch bake for about 20 minutes. No glitter, no melting just a slight deepening of the color.

I didn't bother to question why. I had simply failed... again. 

No matter though. I figured it would be a good decoration in any case, since it matched our Christmas themed cookies.

Once it dried, I decorated 5 cookies, threw them in the oven.

About an hour later, when the cookies had cooled I decided to try one.

I went from smiling, laughing to screaming in about 15 seconds flat.  We made colored SALT!!!  We never actually tested our found "sugar". We just assumed it was sugar, which was apparently, not a good decision.

My face must have looked so ridiculous as I sputtered and screamed "It's salt!  How the hell did we use salt?" I hadn't even put a small quantity of "sugar" on the cookies, NOOOO, I had coated them thoroughly.

My friend could only laugh, "No wonder they wouldn't start to glitter."

Some of my "Sugar" decorated cookies... Thank goodness I hadn't made more of them

Gahhh the horrible taste stayed in my mouth after a bottle of water and 2 regular non salted sugar cookies...

MORAL:  Always taste your non labeled spices. You may guess incorrectly...

~Raspberry Truffle