Under Construction

As most of you know, Bob and I both hold down regular day jobs and have Family Secrets Bakery as a side job. This upcoming week is Spring Break for most school system here in Massachusetts and since I'm not traveling with a group of students outside the country or going to some nice tropical place myself, I'm going to spend some time in the kitchen creating new products.

One of the products we've been working on in our spare time are Lemon Coolers. Over 10 years ago I spend some time in Savannah, Georgia on a National Marine Sanctuaries workshop. While touring the city, I picked up some Key Lime Coolers for my husband. They were amazing. Small circular cookies with an overwhelming flavor of Key Lime dusted off with powdered sugar.  Recently a customer asked if we made Lemon Coolers. At the time we were concentrating on the Oatmeal cookies but we've always talked about adding more than just the oatmeal based cookies to our product line.  I started combing through recipes from my side of the family. These recipes were either passed down or given to my mom at one time or another. For 13 years of my life, my family called Louisiana home.  I might not have been born in the southern state, but this is were I grew up and is what I consider home. It was here that I found a recipe for a powdered sugar cookie. Bob first tried a version and the cookie wasn't what we were looking for. He even added a very lemony frosting to add to the top of the cookies. Though good they weren't perfect. I tried another version. This was a comical adventure. I misread a certain ingredient and ended up adding instead of a tablespoon of lemon juice, I added a cup. This made the dough very watery so I tried to thicken it up by adding more of the dry ingredients. Needless to say I knew defeat when I saw it and tried again with a new batch. The third trial came out better than the first trial but still didn't have that citrus kick we were looking for. So this week, I'm going to re-work the recipe and see if I can get a cookie that is light but full of lemon flavor.

Another recipe I'm going to experiment with will be making a Chocolate Pound Cake. I have two recipes for a pound cake. One of the recipes comes from a family member who lived in Kentucky. As far as I know, my mom and I are the only ones to have this recipe. It is a Cream Cheese Pound Cake recipe. Not as heavy as you would think and is very addicting. It is good by itself or with a little bit of apricot preserves on top. I'm going to play around with this recipe and see what would happen if I add either melted chocolate to the mix or some cocoa powder to the mix.  My husband is a chocoholic and will eat any chocolate in the house. His behavior has been a joke in our house. I'm not real big on chocolate. I'm more of the sugary candy kind of person but I do enjoy a piece of dark or white chocolate every once in a while. Every time I'm in the mood for a piece of chocolate, there isn't any because he's eaten it all. I've had to hide it in order to have it when I want it. Just another chocolate item for those who love chocolate.

Two more recipes I'll try to get to this week will be bread recipes. I love lemon poppy seed muffins so I'll try a lemon poppy seed bread from a recipe I've filed away and kind of forgot about until now. My grandmother has always made a killer banana nut bread. It's very moist and though I have never loved bananas, I love this recipe. I also love coconut so I'm going to try making a tropical bread with both banana and coconut and see what will happen.

So as you can read, this week will be a week of experimenting with flavors and ingredients. Not sure how it will turn out but since I love baking and it is relaxing and I'm on break, why not try! I'll let you know later how this week turns out.