Secret Cinnamon Rolls

Kandice: Hey! I hope that everyone had a good holiday. I know that I did! I got a lot of new cookware that I’m extremely excited about and hopefully I’ll use for upcoming posts.

… Well being that it is Christmas my family has a couple of traditions. Every year one member of the family will bake homemade cinnamon rolls from scratch. And every year, since I was 13 or so, that person has always been me! Now unfortunately this family recipe is a secret so I can’t say how much of an ingredient is in the recipe but I will try to explain what I did the best I can.

Ingredients:
Flour                   Eggs
Sugar                   Milk
Salt                       Softened Butter (lots of it too)
Yeast                   Cinnamon

The best thing to remember when creating cinnamon rolls is to knead the dough! The first thing I had to do was to mix the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast. While mixing these ingredients together, in a saucepan I heated the milk and butter. Once the milk is heated, I tempered the eggs into milk and butter.

*** Note: To temper an egg is to slowly mix it into a hot ingredient without cooking the egg. To do this you would have to take a spoonful of the hot ingredient and stir it into the egg one at a time. This will slowly raise the temperature of the egg so that it doesn’t get cooked. ***

These ingredients were then mixed in with the flour mixture. Then it was time to knead the dough for approximately 3 to 5 minutes. This part is always so messy because the dough it extremely sticky. When I made it this year, my entire hand got covered and stuck in dough! I then set out the dough to rise.

Once done I then rolled out the dough and covered it with a cinnamon and sugar. I cut the dough into strips and rolled them into the familiar spiral. Then the cinnamon rolls were placed in a well greased pan and cooked in the oven at 375 degrees for 20 – 25 min. I then used the remainder of the Cream Cheese Icing from Josh’s and my Carrot Cake Cookies to top off the cinnamon rolls. Now enjoy! Something that I challenge you to do is to submit your version of the best cinnamon roll. Josh and I will bake them and test them. Whomever submits the best recipe for cinnamon rolls will be posted on our site. Please submit all entries to jkdailyspecial@gmail.com. And remember to have fun!

Christmas Carrot Cake, Cream Cheese & Coco

Josh, Kandice & Abbie: Merry Christmas and happy holidays!

Josh: Today we have a special guest with us! Abbie is home from college for the holidays and she’s helping us take photographs of our work.

Kandice: She is also going to be our official taste tester for this week! (whispers) Hopefully she doesn’t die…

Josh: Anyways …

Kandice: Oh yeah! Well, in the spirit of Christmas Josh and I decided to make something festive. Earlier in the week, we had decided upon making cookies and hot coco for “Santa”, but weren’t sure on what type of cookies we wanted to make.

Josh: We didn’t want to make any old, ordinary holiday cookies. We wanted to make something that would remind people of the warmth of Christmas but also have a little pizzazz to them.

Kandice: So we decided to make Carrot Cake Cookies with Cream Cheese Icing!

Josh: We know that it’s a little unusual, but we both love carrot cake! And the idea of making carrot cake into cookies made our mouths water. So we went ahead with the idea.

Kandice: Since we were doing something different for the cookies, we also decided that it’d be a good idea to try something different with the hot chocolate as well.

Kandice: This week I’ll be explaining how Josh and I created the cookies. I will also be posting about the hot chocolate that I made from scratch! Yumm…

Carrot Cake Cookies

Ingredients:
½ cup butter, softened
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 (8 ounce) can crushed pineapple, drained
¾ cup shredded carrots
1 cup raisins
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Kandice: I’ve made a lot of cookies throughout my years but I’ve never once run across a recipe for carrot cake cookies. So when Josh and I came up with this idea I was very excited to see how they would turn out. I’m a huge fan of carrot cake so I was worried that the cookies wouldn’t have the same texture and flavoring as carrot cake does. It’s true that it doesn’t have the exact texture of regular carrot cake, but the cookies that Josh and I made were great!

The first thing we did was to take soften butter and cream it together with the brown sugar. This turned out to be a lot of sugar because Josh and I were making three batches of cookies (enough for Josh’s, Abbie’s and my family).

Tip: Here’s a little tip for all soon-to-be-bakers out there; make sure that you let your butter warm to room temp so that it’s soft and easy to work with. Using cold, hard butter is a big “baking no-no”.

The next project to do was to prep the carrots. Josh helped by peeling the outer skin off the carrots, which then went into my food processor to be finely chopped. This, along with the eggs, was then added to the sugar mixture. In another bowl I mixed together the remaining ingredients except the raisins and pineapple. Josh then helped me combine the two mixtures together. We got so messy and full of flour because we added the ingredients together too fast. So remember to take things slow!

Some people may know this but most don’t … I’m a little picky when it comes to my carrot cake. I don’t like having any raisins or “extras” in it. So when the recipe called for raisins and pineapple, I made a funny face and cringed. Josh laughed at this and agreed that we would make the three different batches into three difference recipes. For the first batch we added the pineapple to 1/3 of the batter. The second 3rd of the batter we added craisins to it. (We forgot to buy raisins and I only had craisins at home so we made do.) The last of the batter we left alone … my favorite!

All these cookies we then baked in the oven at 350 degrees F for approximately 15 – 20 minutes.

Peanut Butter Hot Chocolate

Ingredients:
4 tablespoons baking coco
½ cup water
1 cup granulated sugar
3 cups milk
½ tablespoon creamy peanut butter

Kandice: While Josh and I were baking the cookies I worked on making a modified version of my uncle’s recipe for hot chocolate. I, myself, have never made hot chocolate from scratch before but my uncle had shown me what to do. I found out that it’s not that hard to make homemade hot coco.

The first thing I did was to heat up some water in a sauce pan and then add the baking coco and sugar. When the coco was fairly warm I then added my secret ingredient … peanut butter! Once the peanut butter was all melted I finally added the milk. It was so good! I’m sad because I no longer have any more coco.

Cream Cheese Icing

Ingredients:
4 ounces unsalted butter, softened
4 ounces cream cheese, softened
2 cups powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Josh: This week, I worked on the easy part. Between peeling the carrots, getting some prep work done, and showing Abbie how to use my new camera so that she could take some pictures, I really only got around to making the Cream Cheese Icing. We got the recipe from Food Networks website, and it is amazing, to say the least.

The recipe within itself is very very simple, and also versitile. I first added the unsalted butter and cream cheese to the bowl. As Kandice said earlier, Please make sure that the butter is softened. If you're working with still cold butter, things will get ugly fast. Anyway. After creaming those two ingredients together, I added the powdered sugar to the mix slowly. I put the sugar in about 1/2 of a cup at a time, until it was all in and the icing was getting nice and creamy.

Here's where the versitility of the icing comes in. The recipe calls for vanilla extract, which makes an awesome icing, but you can really put in whatever flavorings you want. I just recently made lemon icing for some holiday cookies at home, and it turned out fantastic.

And after that, all there is left to do is to pipe your icing onto the cookies, or just dunk em' right in. You can also store the icing in bags, or closed containers, and throw it right into the fridge.

So that's how we spent the evening. With sleep deprivation and sugar highs, basically. We really hope that you will try these recipes for yourselves and tell us what you think! You can find the recipies we used on foodnetwork.com, and allrecipes.com. Also, please feel more than free to comment on our posts, or send us comments and suggestions at our e-mail: jkdailyspecial@gmail.com. Please check back in for more Daily Specials!

Josh's Pasta Recipe

Josh: Hey everyone. Josh here. I'm here with the first of those "mini recipe posts" you all have been hearing so much about. I'm going to share my delicious pasta recipe. It's the first recipe that is of my own creation, so I'm kind of proud of it, dispite it's simplicity. It also is pretty healthy, because I use fresh veggies, a light sauce, and whole wheat pasta. Anyway, here's the recipie. It feeds a family of four with a little bit of leftovers, so you can mess with the measurements however you'd like to fit the portion size you need.

Ingredients:

1 Box of Whole Wheat Pasta (I use Penne)
1 Zuccini Squash (Quartered or halved, depending on preference)
About 1 cup of diced Mushrooms
1 to 2 cloves of garlic (Again, depending on preference), minced.
1/2 of a large yellow onion (chopped)
1 Jar Store-Bought Light Basil Tomato sauce
Orreagano
6-10 Meatballs (cut into 8ths, or whatever size you would like)
Salt and Pepper to taste

I like to first do all the prep work and seperate every ingredient into seperate bowls. First I wash and cut the Squash. I like to slice the squash and then stack the slices, so I can easilly quarter about 7 at a time. It's a big time saver. Careful with the sharp objects, though.

I then cut the mushrooms, onion, and garlic. For the meatballs, you can use any type, and it will taste just as good, I'm sure. You can use lean turkey meatballs to make the dish even healthier.

Next, I put the jar of sauce in a large pot and let it warm to a very low simmer on the stove. Before I add the ingredients to the sauce, I first sautee the onions, garlic, and squash in a little bit of olive oil until they are tender. When they're ready, they can be thrown right into the sauce. Then I add the mushrooms. The meatballs can go in as well, if you're using pre-cooked meatballs from a store. Otherwise you obviously have to cook the meatballs first.

While the ingredients are being added, I start to boil a pot of water for the pasta. Once it starts to boil, I add the pasta and cook until tender. Then it's only a matter of draining the pasta, and serving. You can mix the sauce and the pasta together, or serve them seperately. Leftovers can be stored in the fridge, and taste just as good microwaved as they did fresh, in my opinion.

Add a little parmesan cheese on top, and you've got a delicious pasta with a nice veggie crunch to it. Let me know what you think! I hope you enjoy it!

Spin on the Classic Fish and Chips

Josh: Hey, everyone! Welcome to our blog! This is officially our first meal post. We’re very excited to get this started, but first, let’s explain how a lot of this will work.

Kandice: Yep! Let me explain how we're going to do things. We plan to have one main post per week. This main post will consist of the recipe that both Josh and I got together to work on. Along with that will be a write-up about what we did, what adjustments we made, and what mistakes we had.

Josh: Of course, we hope for as few mistakes as possible. Also, along with our weekly main post, either Kandice or myself may post little updates, stories, or mini recipes that we have made. Those will look the same as the weekly posts, just miniaturized.

Kandice: So just keep an eye out for new posts frequently. We don’t have a real set schedule yet, but be sure that we’re working on it!

Josh: So on to our first recipe. This week we made Crispy Fish Strips and Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes. Here’s a write-up for you guys. The recipes are also below.

This week, Kandice and I were able to meet up one evening to make the first meal of JK’s career. We originally decided on the Crispy Fish Strips and A Creamy Cheese Potato recipe, both of which we got from Food Network’s website. Unfortunately, the potatoes fell through, due to a mishap with them becoming too tender to work with. Oops. So instead, we just mashed the potatoes. I worked on the fish, while Kandice prepared the potatoes. Here’s how it went.

Crispy Fish Strips

Ingredients:
4 slices whole-wheat bread (1-ounce each)
Cooking spray
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound flounder fillets
2 eggs, beaten to mix
---------------------------------------------------------------
1/3 cup nonfat plain Greek-style yogurt
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 1/2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon snipped fresh chives
Pinch cayenne pepper, optional

I’ve never made fish before and I don’t eat fish all too often either. Once in awhile, sure, I’ll get the fish and chips at a restaurant, but I don’t normally have fish at home so this was a first. It was a big learning experience for me. Although I had a lack of know-how, the fish turned out great! We bought one pound of fish fillets. The recipe calls for flounder, but we used Tilapia instead. They were prepackaged, and we got about 6 or 7 fillets. I took those out of the bags, and looked them over. Any extra scales that were left on, and/or pieces of fin that were still attached to the top, I cut off. After they were nice, neat, and clean, I cut them into strips about an inch wide and however long the fillets were. I got a total of 12 or so strips from our fillets.

Next I set up my own little station (Pictured Above). I took the flour, salt, and pepper mixture, and one by one, dipped the fillets into the mixture to coat them. Then I put the fish into the eggs, then into the breadcrumbs. The breadcrumbs were made from four pieces of whole wheat bread that was pulsed in a food processor until they were fine, and then toasted in a skillet until they were golden brown.

Now that all the fish was breaded properly, I put them onto baking sheets that were coated with an olive oil nonstick spray. When I asked Kandice for said baking sheets, she began to shuffle around the kitchen, searching for what I assumed to be the baking sheets. She then said, “I have aluminum foil… that’ll work, It’ll just cook the fish a little faster.”

Needless to say, I had no idea what she was talking about.

She then responded with, “Oh! You said Baking sheets! I thought you said, ‘wax paper’.”

…What?

Anyway, now that the breaded fish was on the baking sheets, I put them in the oven at 400 degrees F for ten minutes or so, or until they were done with no pink in the middle.

I did not make the tartar sauce that was included in the recipe. If you want to make that, It consists of everything below the line in the recipe I’ve posted. You can find instructions on the Food Network website, where we found both of our recipes for this meal.

Cheesy Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Ingredients:
Salt
24 bite-size new potatoes, scrubbed, with a tiny sliver cut off each potato so they will stand after filling
1 (5-ounce) package soft garlic herb cheese (recommended: Boursin)
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, softened
1/3 cup whipping cream
Freshly ground black pepper
Finely chopped fresh parsley leaves

Well as you already know by what Josh said earlier, the potatoes that I made didn’t turn out exactly how we had wanted them to. Don’t get me wrong, the potatoes were delicious! I just had to improvise a little when the potato explosion occurred. But more on that later …

The first thing that I had done was boil the potatoes, in a large pot of water, until they were tender. I tested them with a fork about every 5-7 minutes to try to tell when they were done. But apparently I wasn’t watchful enough. After about 20 minutes I stuck the fork in one of the potatoes and well … kaboom! Not really but it did break in half unexpectedly. Once this happened I knew that they were definitely done so I drained the potatoes and set them aside to cool.

Since the potatoes were too soft to carve them out with the melon baller, I decided to make them mashed potatoes instead! No one knew the difference when I served them. It’s not like anybody but Josh was reading the recipe while I was making the potatoes. So I mashed them up, skins and all, to make our meal.

I then combined all of remaining ingredients with the potatoes and spooned them in a pan. For something a little extra I sprinkled some of the remaining cheese on the top and stuck the potatoes into the oven along with the fish. When the fish and potatoes were finished we took them out of the oven. Everything smelt and tasted so good!

Josh: We hope you've enjoyed our first post, and we also hope that you'll come back and check us out again next week. We'll have a new recipe, a new story to tell, and hopefully no food poisoning.

Kandice: If you would like to reach us to comment on our blog or to suggest recipes, modifications, kitchen gadgets, etc, you can reach us at our e-mail: jkdailyspecial@gmail.com. Feel free to send us ideas and comments as to how we can make our site better. Thank you all!

Intro

Kandice:  Hello and welcome to the JK Daily Special! My name is Kandice and my partner in crime is Josh.

Josh:  Hey.

Kandice:  One night, at like 3 o’clock in the morning, Josh and I decided to broaden our horizons and create this blog that you are reading right now. This blog is going to be dedicated to our mishaps, our goof-ups, and (hopefully) our successes in adventuring to create various foods. All while showing you some new recipes that you can try at home. We came up with this crazy idea while we were pulling an all-nighter and were completely high on caffeine!

Josh:  We have two other best friends: Abbie and Ben, but they don’t cook all too often. Abbie, though we love her greatly, does not really know how to cook. She has even burned water! Ben … well … he can’t really pay attention long enough to measure out a cup of flour.

Kandice:  Please never ask about Lard 101!

Josh:  Yeah... Anyway... Abbie and Ben have now gone off to college while Kandice and I are still stuck at home for the time being.

Kandice:  It’s not that bad, but Josh and I had to figure out something to do so we wouldn’t kill each other with boredom. Thus this idea of cooking and creating a blog came around. Josh and I have been getting together about once a week to bake or cook something that strikes our interest. We enjoy cooking a lot and enjoy testing our creations on our families. We hope that you, as our reader, will enjoy our blog. Feel more than welcome to comment on our adventures, but keep please them clean.
 
Josh:  We hope you'll come back. We expect our first post to be up before the weekend!