Wednesday, November 3, 2010

Graham crackers



So today I decided to try the scharffenberger graham cracker recipe which you can find here.

It calls for honey, I hate cooking with honey... it might smell nice and taste nice, but it is horrendously sticky and awful to work with or clean up and I hate hate hate it.

But, I thought, "Yum! Homemade graham crackers, I want some of those. And, I bet I can cut them into cute little shapes with all those cookie cutters I got for Christmas..." So, I decided to attempt the recipe.

Nikolai and I donned the handy baby wrap and got to work on the recipe.

I altered it a bit... so here is my version.

Ingredients:
1 stick butter
2 eggs
3/4 cup brown sugar (instead of white sugar)
1/2 cup honey
4 1/2 cups whole wheat flour (instead of whole wheat and white flour)
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon salt

I also had this great idea to cover one side of the crackers with cinnamon and sugar... but there were some complications
(so, if you want to try that you'd need more sugar and cinnamon)

Directions:
  1. Preheat oven to 350° F
  2. Cream the butter, sugar, and eggs together
  3. Add in the honey
  4. Add in the flour, cinnamon, baking soda, and salt, in parts mixing it thoroughly
  5. Get out your rolling pin and flour the counter/cutting board/flat surface of your choosing
  6. Take a goodly sized ball of your dough and roll it out to 1/8 of an inch (Good luck actually making that happen by the way)
  7. Then either cut your rolled out dough into squares/rectangles/squirrels/whatever and painstakingly move it over to a cookie sheet
  8. Bake 10-13 (they said 6-9 but that didn't work for me but I also didn't use the center rack in the oven) minutes until the edges brown and they smell delicious


    This dough is excessively sticky... it starts out looking really dry and hard to work with, but as it warms up from being smooshed around it becomes awful sticky goo that will take scalding water to get off your fingers....This is why I hate honey.... I'm sure there is some magical way of rolling out dough easily and then cutting it with cute cookie cutters and transfering it to the cookie sheet but I don't know it... (If you do please share share share!) The process of cutting out three crackers, moving them to the cookie sheet, then gathering up the dough scraps and starting over again was so angering that I put the rest of the dough back in the bowl and shoved it in the freezer until I can figure out how to do it more easily... In the end the finished crackers were fabulous even if slightly thick (because it is so hard to roll it out that thin and cut it and blah blah blah) so they're worth making again...but only when I really want them.
    And I'd like to let you know now, I can't figure out why none of my photos will format similarly...so I give up and they'll all just be crooked  
    The pathetically small batch of graham crackers...
    The dough even stuck to the cookie cutters...
    And here is the sticky rolling pin.. sorry the pictures
    aren't more appropriate for the steps..
    Here is the dough in the fridge to make up for the lack of
    mixing pictures...

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