Tootsie Farkle-Crocker

I got the bug to try out some recipes and bake the other day. I very much enjoy cooking except when it's on a daily basis because then it's just another thing I have to do. But if I've got time on the weekend or if it's for entertaining purposes (i.e. Thanksgiving), I dive right in and lose myself in it. My dilemma is that my oven? Is the worst. It was brand new when it came with the house but you know those developers; bottom of the line appliances are how they roll. My oven has always been a piece of la merde. Especially for baking. If a cookie recipe calls for them to bake for 9 to 11 minutes, the cookies are burned on the bottom and around the edges at 5 minutes, but raw in the middle. When it comes to baking in my oven, I have to adjust the temperature, minimize the cooking time, and generally babysit. It can handle cakes and brownies but anything delicate is just wasting my time.

So, I called my sisters to enlist their help and company to make a day of baking; I gathered up my supplies, any ingredients I already had on hand, made a quick stop at the market for those I didn't, and went to my mommy's house. Because her oven is far superior. Our first order of business was familiarizing ourselves with the recipe...



And prep work...


If you're old and wise you've mastered the art of having your younger siblings do the hard labor - like peeling potatoes, grating cheese that sort of thing but eventually they're on to you and are all chop your own veggies. My sister thought coring the apples was fun, so, yeah go for it. But she's hip to my jive and she was all, you peel. I did have her slice them because she likes to play with knives wanted to. She was last seen running with scissors. Now we could have used canned apple pie filling but that's for punks. We wanted to create. We wanted the risk factor that comes with working with fruit. It's either delicious awesome or an absolute tasteless failure. And we like to gamble. Into the pan the apples, brown sugar, cornstarch, and other ingredients like heaven and nirvana, went. It took a bit longer than was called for to thicken up... and we also skipped the step where they wanted us to soak the sliced apples in water and lemon juice to keep them from turning brown because, brown sugar equals brown apples ANYWAY I mean, what's the point.



Then we had to sit around for a few minutes to wait for the pastry dough to finish thawing out...but not too thawed. Now I know we should have made our own pastry dough but the recipe specifically called for the frozen variety, so, there. Once the apple turnovers were in the oven we got to work on the cheese crowns...



Which was supposed to yield 12 individual pastries but this jerk misread the part that called for one and a HALF packages of pastry dough and only bought ONE. So we only made 8 and considering there were 9 people total that were going to partake? Well, you can see the math conundrum. The bottom of these are lined with brown sugar, cinnamon, butter, and pecans. The rest is filled with a mixture of cream cheese, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. And once these things have had a chance to chill overnight? There are no words. And the glaze that finished off the turnovers was out of this world.





*photos by DorothyZ.