Cool Weather = Great Baking Weather

Fall is upon us. This is GREAT weather for baking. The house smells great, the breads/cookies are warm and fresh, and the oven helps warm the house without having to waste money with the furnace running.

I have been baking frequently for my immediate family - rolls for dinner (they go wonderfully with soups and roasts!), cookies and cakes to snack on. I have a few orders trickling in here and there. Please let me know if you'd like to order anything. I am almost always able to bake within 24 hours of the order coming in, so if you needed something the day after ordering....it's almost always possible. I do have a life outside of baking (hard to imagine, I know), so there are times when things come up but not too many that I can't sneak in some baking time.

I did waste $6 the other day at Costco and bought their "homemade" mini cinnamon rolls. The samples they had tasted good (and I was very hungry for lunch at the time), but now that we've been eating them I'm thinking what a waste! I could have made huge homemade ones with as much icing as I wanted and saved my $6 on all the preservatives and junk they put in theirs; plus I could have frozen mine and only used as many as I needed instead of having a bunch of Costco ones that I need to eat before they go bad. Oh well. You live and learn, right? That's why I try not to shop on an empty stomach. Silly decisions.

Speaking of freezing breads, you can freeze all of the breads I make. The dinner rolls I make are brown and serve, so I pre-bake them slightly so the dough sets. I then package them in freezer bags with heating instructions, and you can use them as needed and as many as you need. One order makes 16; you can pull out a few if that's all you needed and bake them til golden. They last in the freezer up to 3 months. The same is true for the cinnamon rolls - I bake them to set and then you can freeze to bake them at a later time.

The loaves of bread freeze well up to 2 months. You do lose some of the moistness (as you would with any bread), but you still get the freshness without the preservatives and artificial flavors. I do double wrap them in plastic wrap and place them in food storage bags, so they are ready to freeze when you receive them.

Happy Fall everyone. I do wish everyone a fun and safe Halloween!