Kitchen Gadgets and Mishaps....

Hello All! So in trying to be the good housewife I have been experimenting in the kitchen a bit. I have discovered that baking from scratch is a lot harder than it looks. Also, it is a good thing I did not have high aspirations to be a gourmet baker over nursing! I really love to cook and love spending time in the kitchen. I love trying new recipes and ideas. I love to cook but I have never really baked. I can make a good pound cake and some pre-packaged cookies but really never really made anything from scratch. so I decided to try my hand at it. A major plus when you get married are the fabulous kitchen gadgets people get you off your registry and lovely gift cards to buy what you want that you didn't get. Well, it has been my dream to own a Kitchen Aid Artisan stand mixer. I mean it was the first thing I registered for at every store. Now granted it is over $300 so naturally I did not get one as a gift. However, those Belk gift cards began to add up especially after some returns of the duplicates we had received! Lo and behold I had money for my mixer. So I waited it went on sale for $299, then at the end of July Belk had a bridal completion sale, which was an additional 20% off, and on top of that Kitchen Aid has a $40 mail in rebate. So I capitalized on the great deal and purchased my new Kitchen Aid stand mixer. Deciding on a color was difficult but in the end we went with black because you never know when you will want to change you kitchen color scheme at some point.

Isn't it beautiful

I was overyjoyed with our purchase, now what do I make. I decided now was time to try my hand a baking from scratch. So I went to Bakerrella's blog (because she is AMAZING) and it just so happened she had a recipe for chocolate cookies in a recent post. So I bought the ingredients during our Wal-Mart run and began to make the dough. It seemed easy enough and tasted good too!

So I spray the cookies sheets and proceed to bake 2 dozen cookies.

Well, umm they came out interesting.
#1 They all squished together so it looked like I made a cookie cake
#2 They were VERY thin
#3 The fell apart into crumbles even when cool
#4 My husbands critique was "They taste like fried dough" but of course he ate the majority of the cookie crumbles
So alas my made from scratch cookie efforts were a bust, but I did love making them so I will try again. In addition to the newly acquired kitchen aid mixer we made a few other gift card purchases. This included a Cuisinart Convection Bread Maker. It is the size of our microwave and came with 80 different recipes for bread and it makes jam.
I have not given this a try but intend to try but intend to soon with my hubby so I will blog about when it is done and I hope it will be a better experience than the cookie crumbles. so keep your fingers crossed :)

A little update on me: My blood results were the same as last week a little low so i go back at the end of this week to recheck it. Other than that I am enjoying not being on bed rest and finally getting to know the area we live in. I can even get around a little without Maggie (our GPS). Through all of this God has been so faithful!! He deserves all honor and glory!!!