25- Caramel apple bark

You can stick just about anything in chocolate and call it a bark.

This one is chocolate, caramel, pretzel, and granny smith apple.

And it’s a bark!

Okay, I wrote that part last night and today I attempted said “bark”.

Remember when I said that this would be a bark? Yeah, no. The pretzels, although freshly purchased and freshly opened, were stale. Ick.

And the freshly cut apples were too juicy for the chocolate to set properly.

And the caramel, that went on the freshly cut apples, did not stick to the apples.

A mess really.

Won’t be doing that again and really calls into consideration next week’s planned bark. I may have to reconsider.

This is the second week of the Fall theme of November. Uninspired, I know. But there are only THREE CTIATs that count in November. The 4th is Thanksgiving and I will be delivering no cookies to the hospital on Thanksgiving. Sorry, folks on call.

I will make it up to them with the December theme, though.

Also tragedy struck my Pinterest account.

It was deleted. On purpose by the company. Despite my appeals.

Apparently I am too political. Funny other people can post wildly political things in the opposite direction. It was getting too corporatey there anyway.

I would have continued to save political stuff. Sorry, not sorry. I will continue to save political stuff, just not there.

But with it goes all 3200 CTIAT recipes I had saved. Some for future themes, some were favorites, some just looked cool.

That’s okay, I have a hell of a memory and can reconstruct most of it.

Because Pinterest is just a storage vault. And I was expecting something like this for awhile now.

I had been cross-saving some very special looking recipes to another type of vault.

Again, sorry, not sorry.

This won’t slow me down at all!

Probably not as they intended but oh well.

Good thing I have at least 20 cookie specific cookbooks I’ve been saving for a rainy day.

This also gives me permission to be more organized with my saving. CTIAT was organized and I had about 50 different subsections.

But I remember all the subsections and will use them to build CTIAT recipe repository 2.0.

I will rebuild, I have the technology and I can make it multi-level. I can make it better than it was.

Better, stronger faster.

The first bionic CTIAT repository.

Bonus points if you know where that is from.

And a gold star.

Cookie Thursday 2/13/25- Ritz cracker caramel chocolate crack

This is the second Thursday of Baking the Baking Pantry theme. This means that I am using up some of my lesser-used ingredients.

Because I was hosting for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the little voice inside my head ensured I purchased enough crackers for the events. Even though my sister is gluten-free. The other voice inside my head said that I could never only buy one box if they were BOGO (buy one, get one). Twice.

We have a lot of crackers.

Normally, I keep at least one box in reserve in case I make pimiento cheese for a work event.

Yeah, we have four boxes that were unopened and 1 box that was only missing 2 sleeves. One sleeve for each night of the festivities, you know.

And the best Christmas crack crackers to use are Ritz crackers. I know because I’ve tried saltines, Ritz, matzoh, club crackers, digestive, and graham crackers. There is just something about the butteriness of the Ritz that puts the rest of them to shame.

But, of course, I wanted to do a little experiment. I made a ring of unbroken crackers around the cookie sheet, duly lined with parchment paper, and I crushed a sleeve of crackers to fill the center. The ring itself took half a sleeve.

What? I wanted to see what would happen.

I theorized that the caramel would make even a crushed cracker more interesting and the bigger surface area would make it adhere more.

I was half right.

Okay, three quarters.

Yes, the crushed cracker and the caramel interaction was interesting. And weirdly even more buttery.

Yes, the bigger surface area of the crushed cracker edges did make the caramel adhere more.

No, it didn’t adhere quite like I was picturing.

Not a total failure. I must increase the amount of caramel to account for the increased amount of edges.

I give myself a B. With the caveat to try again with more caramel.

Also, I used milk chocolate in the beginning over half of it and it refused to spread evenly while melted. Semi-sweet is the way to go here.

After all, Cookie Thursday is a Thing is all about experimentation.

Cookie Thursday 12/26/24-candied? cranberries

Cookie Thursday is a Thing is taking the day off from delivery to the department. Because Christmas was yesterday and CTIAT is tired. Not to mention I am sure that the entire department overindulged and there will be leftover treats available on the lounge tables.

But I am not idle.

Today is my sister’s birthday and I have been making her birthday cake for YEARS.

She always asks for the same thing- a Tres Leches cake. The cake is more of a sponge that three milks are poured over and smothered with whipped cream. That is already chilling in the fridge.

However, what I wanted to write about and experiment with is the viral candied cranberries that are everywhere! A bag of cranberries is soaked in a liquid for 2-24 hours (or more if you just didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it yesterday), dried, coated in powdered sugar, and baked at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. I thought ooh, an experiment.

I used Prosecco because that was the first recipe I saw but you can also soak the cranberries in Sprite or orange juice. Or you can go the Inception route and use cranberry juice like I just now thought of as I was typing. That would be funny.

I used Prosecco, which is another reason not to bring these to the hospital, because let me tell you, the resulting powdered sugar-coated cranberries pack a wallop. I can definitely taste the alcohol and I don’t think this would go over well at work. Would they be popular? Yes. Would people have to go back to work BuZzEd? Also yes. And I don’t want to contribute to that.

The department is just going to have to be satisfied with their own leftovers.

Next Thursday is a new month!

Cookie Thursday is a Thing turns TEN and I have exciting plans to celebrate.

Happy Hospital Week

Celebrating in the Operating Room.

It happens. And it usually involves food.

Strike that. It ALWAYS involves food.

This week is Hospital Week.

For the first time I can remember Nurses Week and Hospital Week have been separated. With an itty bitty overlap of May 12. May 12 is the day that Nurses Week ended. It traditionally ends on Florence Nightingale’s birthday.

Hospital Week is the week that the American Hospital Association sets aside to celebrate the 24/7 providers of care for their community. A hospital certainly ticks that box.

Food and bragging rights are good for a celebration.

This week we celebrate the workers of the hospitals, including nurses.

At my hospital, the week kicked off with an apple pie contest. Each department that cared to submitted a homemade apple pie. Monday, May 13th is National Apple Pie Day.

That is where the food comes in.

I made the apple pie for the operating room. I used homemade crust. I also peeled, cut, and cooked the apple pie filling. Even though the recipe that I was using said store-bought would be okay. Um, no. Have you met me?

I believe there were 12 apple pies submitted for the contest.

OR won 3rd prize.

There were also cupcakes to feed everyone else.

Because 12 pies are not going to feed the staff that run the 139 beds.

No matter how small the pieces.