Wedding Cake?

I have zero plans to write about wedding planning on this blog (for one thing, reading about me planning a wedding would be even less interesting than reading me writing about paint dry), BUT.

Wedding cake perfection, amirite?

More photos and information on Flickr.

Horse Cookies: Test 1

As I mentioned, I'm going to try my hand at baking horse cookies over the winter. I'm reading through recipes I find online, applying my own knowledge of baking techniques, and taste-testing them on the horses in the barn

Test #1: Peppermint Oatmeal Cookies

Tristan's favorite flavor in the whole world is peppermint, so I thought I'd start there. Many of the recipes online seemed to be based on an oatmeal cookie recipe, and I have one that I love, so I went over its ingredients and modified them slightly.

Chiefly, I swapped in crushed starlight mints for the white sugar, took out the cinnamon and vanilla, and halved the recipe (since it makes close to 100 cookies).

I first tried crushing the peppermints with my immersion blender's processor attachment. No dice. It wasn't nearly strong enough; it mostly bounced them around and chipped them a bit. Duly noted.

Go ahead, be jealous of my c. 1975 food processor. It was new in the box when my mother gave it to me; my grandmother had bought it on sale, stored it, and promptly forgot about it. It is retro and it worked much better than the immersion blender.

This was about the consistency of the crushed peppermint; in retrospect I might've done them a little less.

Swapping in the peppermint for white sugar.

All mixed up - I don't know if it comes through here, but the dough ended up almost pink, and much more moist than it usually does for these cookies, so this was where I started to worry.

Baked! The crushed mint melted a bit, which surprised me. Not too badly, luckily, but those white spots you see on the edges of the cookies are melted peppermint. It did make the pan a bit sticky to clean.

So: the taste test!

Tristan chewed his cookie and then spat it out. So I stuck it back in his mouth. And he spat it out. Whoops. He repeated that three or four times and then I gave up and dropped it in his bucket, just in case.

I got worried, and promptly tried feeding them to several other horses. Luckily, Tristan was the outlier. Here's how it worked out with the other horses:

Justin, Willow, Twinkie, Prince, Carousel, Brody: LOVED IT. Carousel in particular whickered at me for the rest of the time I was at the barn.

Rain, Skip, Monty: Meh. They ate them, but they weren't enthused.

With the horses that either really didn't like it (Tristan, the goober) and the rest that were kind of meh, it seemed to be a texture issue. These cookies were chewier than I had hoped for, which is a great quality in a human cookie, but not in a horse cookie.

My final test is to see how they store; they've been in a sealed container in my kitchen for a week since this initial baking and taste test. I'll do a second round of testing and then report back.

Horse Cookies!

I am an avid baker. One might even characterize me as obsessive. On any given day off, I've usually got something in the oven, and it's usually a new recipe - or a recipe that I want to perfect. Case in point: when I got home from a week away, the first thing I did on my first day back was bake three loaves of bread. Two were for us to have, and one was an experiment in progress. (I'm trying to really nail down a good cinnamon apple swirl bread; soooo close!)

Needed more apples, but the next attempt had too many apples.

Recently, I've been thinking that making horse treats would be a fun challenge. I've dipped my toe in these waters before; I have a carrot cake recipe that I've pared down to be more solid and carrot-y. I feel like there's more to be done, though. Not because Tristan really needs it, or to replace any money I spend on treats - his favorite thing in the whole world to eat is a plain starlight mint, and as treats go, those are dirt cheap.

This is basically Tristan's idea of heaven.

So here's the plan. Over the next few weeks, I will commit myself to trying or tweaking one horse cookie recipe a week. I'll do a mini food blog of it, and I'll taste test in the barn. If I come to any conclusions, I'll let you all know.

Here are some of the recipes I have bookmarked to try:

Easy to Make Horse Treat Recipes

Rockingham Pony Club Horse Treat Recipes

Rick Gore Horsemanship Horse Cookie Recipes

Houston SPCA Horse Treat Recipes (PDF)

COTH Thread with good tips & recipes