Tuesday with Moron

My friend is part of the Tuesdays with Dorrie blog. Every week she bakes a recipe from a cookbook. Someone in the group picks the recipe for the week and on Tuesday she discusses her results. I'm not that good a baker so welcome to the first edition of Tuesday with Moron.

Hello, my name is Karen, and I will be your moron today.

We have a pot luck tomorrow at work and I decided to make dinner rolls and cranberry sauce. I left work late, had a really long day and still had to go to the store to pick up stuff. By the time I got home I was already completely brain fried. While I was at it I decided to make some cranberry pistachio scones also....cause I really needed more stuff to do tonight.

I started the rolls first since they would take the longest. I started following the recipe and realized that it was only going to make a dozen rolls and I need more like 30 roles. So while the first batch was rising I started another double batch. I let both batches rise for an hour, punched it down and then started looking for my muffin tin. No muffin tin here. No problem, I'll just bake them on baking sheets and hopefully I can make a nice round ball. Easier said than done when the dough is pretty sticky. I finally got 3 sheets of rolls done and let them rise. Once I started putting them in the oven with the egg wash they were browning unevenly and looked really white and pasty in a lot of places. I tried one and it had no flavor. So I basted them in melted butter and popped them back in the oven for a few minutes to get a little more even browning. They taste better and look a little better. So much for cooking light. The inside of the rolls aren't at all light and fluffy they are a little grainy and heavy. I can not get yeast rolls or breads to come out light and fluffy ever.

While the rolls were rising I started the cranberry sauce. This went well except that I let it boil over. I know better than to walk away from the stove while bringing something to a boil but I do it every time. Burnt sugary syrup all over the burner. This is going to be a joy to clean.

Now to start the scones ... (this is where it gets good)
First I forgot buttermilk so I had to make it... 1 tbsp vinegar and fill up to a cup with milk and let sit 5 minutes. Easy enough...I have a cup of buttermilk.

While the milk was curdling I cut butter into the flour. So far so good. Then I added the rest of the wet ingredients to the buttermilk and added all the wet ingredients, dried cranberries, and pistachios to the flour. I looked at the dough and it was really runny like cake batter. I looked back at the recipe and I needed 1/3 of a cup of buttermilk... I used the whole cup...Did I mention I was brain fried?

I hate the thought of throwing this all away so I decided to try to salvage it...I have enough butttermilk in there for a triple batch so I mixed enough butter and flour for a double batch in yet another bowl. Looking back I now realize I forgot to add the extra baking powder and salt too.

I mixed the flour/butter into the existing dough and realized I only had enough sugar and honey in there for 1 batch. What the heck I'll mix it in now...it can't get any worse.

The recipe says to pat the dough out into a disk and to then cut it into wedges and bake it..how do you cut cake batter into wedges? So I made one big disky kind of thing and tried baking it and then cut it after it started baking and being a kind of solid thing. I also made what look like drop biscuits with the rest of the stuff. The cranberry pistachio drop biscuits taste ok...they look ugly but I have breakfast for awhile.

This has been Tuesdays with Moron.