Summer Fruit Thumbprint Cookies

About a month ago, I went blueberry picking. It’s a bit of a drive from my house to the blueberry patch, so I usually tend to stock up when I’m there. And since the price is so much better than grocery stores, you’d be crazy not to put some in the freezer.

When it comes to preserving summer fruit and berries, I’m kind of a hoarder. A stingy hoarder, especially of anything I’ve picked or purchased locally. For those who like to keep their food sources local where possible, you know how fleeting “in season” really is. We enjoy some of the harvest right after we get it, then the rest hides in the freezer until a few months before the next harvest. I did that with blueberries I picked two years ago. In my efforts not to use them too quickly, I almost forgot about them.

This year, I resolved not to do that. And while baking isn’t always popular during the summer, sometimes you have to make an exception for a delicious, fruit-filled cookie. The following is a recipe adapted from an old cookbook that belonged to one of my grandmothers. (The cookbook is featured in the filled sugar cookie post I did about a year ago. Not including the index, the thing has 975 pages. It’s quite educational to see what’s changed between 1950 and now.) The recipe I played with this time is “Sour Cream Sugar Cookies”. Unlike the sugar cookie most of us know, this one contains spices, and either nuts or raisins. I eliminated those ingredients in my version.

“But you eliminated all the flavor!” I can hear someone wail. Well, actually those ingredients were exchanged for something else; orange zest and oil. (Oil is far more potent than extract.)

Since the original recipe didn’t include a fruit filling, I had to guess on amounts for mine. This is a large cookie recipe, and two cups of berries wasn’t quite enough. The following recipe is adjusted. To fill the remaining cookies I used apricot jam from the grocery store. If you don’t want to make your own filling, there will be no judgment here if you use store-bought jam.

Filling

3 c. Blueberries, fresh or frozen

¾ c. Cane Sugar

Place berries in a saucepan and cover with lid. Place over medium-low heat and keep covered until they start to produce juice. Once you have juice in the pan add the sugar. Stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. If you don’t want chunks of fruit in the filling, the mixture can be pureed with a stick blender or counter-top blender. (I used the single-serve container on my Ninja.) Put the pureed filling back on the heat and allow the liquid to reduce until the consistency is like a soft-gelled jam. Remove from heat and set aside.

Cookies

4 ½ c. Cake Flour

½ tsp. Salt

1 tsp. baking soda

3 tsp. Baking Powder (I prefer aluminum-free)

1 c. Shortening (Spectrum)

2 Eggs

2 c. Sour Cream

1 1/3 c. Brown Sugar

1 tbsp. Orange Zest

½ tsp. Orange Oil

Preheat oven to 350°. Mix and sift dry ingredients. Cut in shortening until you have fine crumbs, pea size or smaller. Combine eggs, sour cream, sugar, zest and oil. Add to dry ingredients. Portion dough onto cookie sheets. Use a small spoon to make an indention in the center of each cookie. Place a spoonful of filling in each center. Bake 15-20 minutes.

The original recipe says it yields 7 dozen cookies (2 ½”). I got a little over 5 dozen. Most of my cookies were about 3”. I use a “tablespoon” from the silverware drawer and eyeball my portions. Your yield may be different, depending on the method you use to portion your dough.

These are soft, cake-like cookies. Especially during the summer months, I would recommend storing them in the refrigerator. You may like icing on them, but I would recommend one that dries hard. Otherwise you might have soggy cookies. I like them with cinnamon sugar. Use demerara sugar. It has large, crunchy crystals and tastes like brown sugar.

The Project Queen

Housewarming Gift

I know I’ve been a bit lax with posts lately. In my defense it did take a bit of time to do the gazing globes and make a presentation of the process. My husband and I have also been looking at travel trailers for awhile. Last week, we bought a 1979 Airstream Sovereign. (Which I think will become a separate blog.) The purchase of the travel trailer inspired me to decorate the jar pictured above.

It’s kind of a long story so I’m only going to do a brief recap. After looking at all kinds of RVs, my husband and I decided we couldn’t ignore our soft spot for Airstreams. Through an internet search we narrowed our choices to 2 trailers in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. Airstreams never seem to be available for long, so we made an impromptu trip up north to look at the Ft. Worth trailer, which was at a dealership. Alas, the poor thing needed a lot of work. I would say nearly a complete rebuild. The dealership couldn’t budge on price. But I still had the phone number for the other trailer. Though notice was short, the trailer was still available and the owner graciously took time to show it to us. Turned out a young couple was selling it to raise the remainder of money needed for a house down payment.

Buying a house since the recession is a whole lot harder than it used to be. Trying to sell the Airstream ended up complicating things further for our acquaintances. There was plenty of interest in it, which made our negotiations with the owners a bit bumpy the day after we looked at it. Fortunately, it was resolved quickly, but I felt bad for the hassle the sellers had to put up with. I thought they deserved a housewarming gift.

I decided on a cookie jar, which I gave to them yesterday when they delivered the Airstream to us. It contained chocolate chip cookies, a recipe and some advice. For anyone buying a home, especially their first, I offer this wisdom. When you move in, make sure your kitchen boxes are labeled. Unpack them first, then bake a batch of your favorite cookies before you do anything else. Make the house smell good and give yourself a special memory. Not to mention taking a moment to savor achieving a huge milestone. As it turned, out the recipients of my gift enjoy cookies quite a bit. I didn’t know that before hand. Which made giving it to them even more special for me.

Now, about that jar…

I started with a retro styled jar I found at a craft store.

It has flat sides and looks like something from a 1940s kitchen.

 These are the paints I decided to use.

I started with a stencil. Originally, I was only going to do text on one side.

To make sure everything was placed where I wanted it, the song lyric was done on paper.

To make sure everything was centered the way I wanted it, the pattern was cut apart

between the lines and taped back together.

The jar has panels on the sides. My patterns were made to fit the panels.

They were placed on the inside of the jar.

 Originally, I thought it might be cute to put funny, cartoon houses on the other sides.

But I couldn't find anything I liked. I decided to use the lyrics of 3 more songs instead.

I typeset these remaining patterns on my computer.

I'm going out on a limb here and pointing out that all the lyrics are copyrighted material.

Granted, I didn't use an entire song, and this is a one-of-a-kind gift.

I rarely repeat a project so there are no plans to decorate more jars and sell them.

I strongly advise others not to do so either.

However, you're welcome to try painting jars using the techniques I used.

I chose fonts I felt would be relatively easy to paint over, yet still interesting.

Since I knew most of my colors dried transparent and somewhat light colored,

I used fine-tipped, dark colored sharpies on the glass first. The paint was applied over the marker.

After the paint was dry, the paper was removed. 

To make sure the text was even-colored, I used the markers over the top of the paint too.

A very fine-tip black sharpie was used to draw around all the text so it would stand out further

from the clear glass.

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when working with Gallery Glass paint. It's designed to make faux stained glass projects. So it's usual to create a raised design outline with one of the coordinating "lead" products, then fill in the design with the colored paints. The paints are formulated to flow quite easily into the areas to be filled, so it makes them a bit tricky for other applications. Whatever you do, take your time and don't squeeze the bottle. When doing text choose fonts carefully. I thought the cursive font would be the hardest to paint, but that honor went to "Broadway", the font shown in the top photo. The thin part of this typeface was very hard to do with paint directly from the bottle. I ended up putting dots of paint in the thick areas and using a straight pin to spread it to the skinny ones. It was a bit time consuming, but worth it in the end. It's also a good idea to keep a pin of some sort handy any way. Gallery Glass is a dimensional paint, meaning it has a raised surface. You won't want to leave any air bubbles in the wet paint. Pop them right away, or you'll have unsightly lumps or holes in your hard work.

The Project Queen

Glow-in-the-Dark Gazing Globes

I had several solar light fixtures in front of my house that quit working within six months to a year. Some had to be thrown out last fall because fire ants moved into the globes and ruined them. I don’t know what happened to the others. I opened up the battery compartments, made sure all connections were dirt and rust free, then put in new batteries. It didn’t make a difference. I guess one shouldn’t expect longevity for an item that costs $5.

Still, they had nice, crackle glass globes that deserved a second life. At first, I planned to dismantle the fixtures and use the globes to cover tea lights, but that seemed like a lot of hassle. (Lift the globes; light the candles or turn on the LEDs; do the reverse.) Instead, I decided to make glow-in-the-dark mini gazing globes. Other than removing the solar panel and LED bulb from inside, it was a project that would use the majority of the light fixture. Also, once everything was sealed back together, there would be nothing to do except admire my colorful globes in my planted containers.

The following is a pictorial how-to.

No-Calorie Flavored Water

 Well, duh! When left alone, water is the original no-calorie beverage. But for some reason, humankind is just not content to leave nature alone. (In more ways than one.) Poor water, our most precious resource just doesn’t get the respect it deserves. For some reason, society thinks it needs to be “improved” before they will consider drinking it.

My husband falls in that category. He claims the military ruined water consumption for him, and the way it’s provided to personnel in the field probably does make it unpleasant to drink. Still, it was an obstacle I wanted him to overcome. He needed to lose weight, and strenuous exercise is not an option when you have MS. Neither are the so-called calorie-free “beverage enhancers” with artificial colors and flavors.

Out of desperation, I started experimenting with infusions of garden peppermint and the peel of abundant citrus I had during the winter. My husband actually liked the combination of orange and mint. With a substitute he could tolerate, we began the process of cutting out the sugary fruit syrups he was using in his water. He’s lost 50 lbs. since last fall. Though it pleased me to find a solution, it came with a couple of downsides. The first one was preparation. It takes time to chop mint and peel the zest off an orange. Then the solids would need to be strained out of the water once they did their job. Even though I’m not working outside the home right now, I still have plenty to do. I also knew my mint and citrus supplies would dwindle in the summer. Mint doesn’t like high heat, so it goes on hiatus here in Texas during the summer, getting scraggly with increasingly smaller leaves. In the quest to keep to my single ingredient mission, I found my convenience products in a couple of places. They are in the small bottles pictured above.

The larger bottle is orange oil. The smaller is ingestible mint oil. Note, I said oil, not extract. I purchased the orange oil from King Arthur Flour. The mint oil is produced and sold by Piping Rock. It may be possible to find orange and mint oil in your grocery store. Check the baking aisle first. I will warn you that sticker shock may occur, especially if you get a large bottle of citrus oil from KAF. (They also have lemon and lime.) However, these oils are incredibly concentrated. For a 16-20 oz. container of water, you only need 1 drop of each flavor. I call that economical, as well as guilt-free.

The Project Queen