Baking With Julia - Paperblog

On Friday (12/23/11), I went over to my friend Julia's house with my two other friends, Abby and MacKenzie. We went over there to hang out and BAKE! We made Elephant ears. When we got there, I Googled elephant ear recipes... all of them had yeast in them. Well, Julia didn't have yeast, and I couldn't find a recipe without yeast. Since Julia drives, (she is a year ahead of us), we drove to the Sandy Fred Meyer and bought yeast. When we came back, I was going to grab the recipe again... well I found one without yeast! I found an elephant ear recipe WITHOUT yeast. Well, that little trip to Fred Meyer was an adventure and it was fun. Here is the recipe we found... (http://allrecipes.com/recipe/elephant-ears/)
INGREDIENTS...
~8 Tablespoons melted butter
~1 cup of all purpose flour
~5 Tablespoons of white sugar
~1/2 tablespoons salt
~1/2 tablespoon baking powder
~1/3 cup milk
~1 teaspoon ground cinnamon.
We doubled the recipe... so it was TWO or FOUR of everything, since there were for four us. Here is the recipe....

Directions

Preheat the over to 425 degrees F (220 degrees C). Grease a cookie sheet.
Stir flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl. Stir in milk and the 1/4 cup melted butter until dough forms.
Turn dough onto a flat, floured surface. Knead dough 10 times. Roll dough with a rolling pin or pat with hands into a rectangle, 9x5 inches. Brush with remaining melted butter using a pastry brush; sprinkle with 3 tablespoons sugar and cinnamon. Roll dough up tightly, beginning at narrow end. Pinch edge of dough into roll to seal. Cut into 4 equal pieces with sharp knife. Place cuts sides up on cookie sheet; pat each into a 6-inch circle.
Bake until golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes. Immediately remove from cookie sheet with a spatula. Let cool on wire rack.

It was tons of fun! I took some pictures of the process!
Julia and Abby... starting the elephant ears off.

This is MacKenzie mixing the flour and the sugar and the cinnamon... and what not.

We made kinda a little mistake here...We poured ALL the butter into the flour mixture... which made the dough a little too sticky. So we just added more flour and it evened it out. :) That wasn't the only butter problem we had...

This is where we added the flour to the dough...

Here is where the other butter problem came about. I was going to melt a little extra butter to brush on the elephant ears so the cinnamon and sugar would stick. I put the butter in the microwave for what I thought was going to be 12 seconds.... well through out that time, I was helping Julia find some hot chocolate mix. That was probably about 2 minutes. When we came back out of the pantry, the microwave was STILL going. So I rushed over there, opened the microwave, and saw that the paper towel over the bowl of butter was drenched and when I lifted the paper towel, the little bowl was full of over bubbly butter, like it was FOAM! I looked at the timer and it was 10:49 seconds.... so it had 10 minutes and 49 seconds left! Her microwave is one of those that is already set to minutes... there is a certain button for seconds. I was so embarrassed. Once the butter wasn't lethal to touch... we brought it out of the microwave and set it on the counter....This is my burnt butter...

This is the perfectly melted butter that I tried the second time...Compared with the burnt butter...

After a while, the burnt butter started to smell like caramel. So it smelled kind of good a little bit until we dumped it down the drain.This is Julia making the hot chocolate we found. She is so cute. We were all confused on how many 3/2 ounces is times by 4 is, so that we could put that much hot chocolate in the sauce pan. Then we just decided to use four scoops instead of get all complicated and technical.

Cute Christmas mugs.

MacKenzie and Abby, still working on the elephant ear dough, rolling it out and making flat.

Once it was done, and all rolled out, we put it on a PAM sprayed pan, and I brushed the butter on the flattened elephant ear dough, with the perfectly melted butter. :)

And Abby brushing the butter on the other elephant ear... and sprinkling the cinnamon and sugar mixture on the elephant ear to bake.

While they baked, Julia finished making the yummy hot cocoa. I didn't get a picture of it in the sauce pan, but I did get a picture of the hot cocoa in the mug and of the empty sauce pan!

Once the elephant ears were finished baking, we took them out and cut them up with a pizza cutter, served them up and watched Christmas Vacation, while sipping out very yummy hot cocoa.

It was such a fun day! Even got a group shot! Of course, I'm the one being silly because I thought we were doing a silly shot...

MERRY CHRISTMAS