Day 5: Using up some ingredients
My house wasn’t bare when I started this exercise. I had some flour, sugar, and various other baking supplies. Tonight I decided to bake, but not use any of the newly bought stuff and not consume, beyond a cursory taste test for quality control, anything I baked. My favorite part of baking is actually giving it away anyway.
I haven’t baked in quite a while. Last year I baked at least every week, after a big bit of baking near the holidays though I got burned out. I still bake on occasion if somebody asks nicely and especially if it’s for a charity. But tonight I baked and it wasn’t for charity.
I have a few apples that were given to me by the actually SweeTango brand for being a big fan and advocate on Twitter without really knowing or expecting that they were watching their non-tagged mentions, but they search for themselves and found me tweeting about them, so they sent me 6 of probably the most perfect SweeTango apples that can probably exist. Just perfect. I ate one on the first day of this decision to be frugal, empathetic, and, eventually, charitable, not knowing how much an individual apple cost - hence the total for the first day.
I had some sweetened condensed milk, marshmallows, and Cocoa Krispies too. So I did some experimenting and tried a different version of a recipe I’d done before, but skipped the apple cider packets and used real apples.
The first thing I did (while waiting for the apple cookie dough to chill) was a variation on Ideas in Food’s Rice Krispy Treat Lace Cookies, but I figured out what the volume was of the given weight of plain rice krispies (about 2 ¼ cups) and used that volume of cocoa krispies. I left most of them flat, but I also wanted to try an idea I had from the first time I made a variation. I wanted to see if I could roll them while they’re still pliable into a tube, this would allow for usage in other desserts as a vessel for cream or other substance. It worked pretty well, I think with a dowel and a hair dryer, this could be a viable usage.
I used my Nomiku immersion circulator to convert some of the sweetened condensed milk I had into dulce de leche (15 hours at 85 degrees celsius) so I could make Nomiku’s recipe for Apple Flavored Cookies Stuffed with Sous Vide Dulce de Leche. (I’m not sure why “flavored” is there, it has real apple in it) Go view the tweet, it has a video.
Made some @SweeTango apple cookies with sous vide dulce de leche filling @Nomiku #baking #fall #apple #cookies #yum pic.twitter.com/wW2asvVB6o
Today I ate one of the scones for breakfast, some of the stroganoff for lunch, and had a 2 egg and ½ ounce of cheese omelet for dinner.
Day 1: $6.45 (I didn’t realize how much my free SweeTango apples were worth)
Day 2: $3.71
Day 3: $2.52
Day 4: $3.80
Day 5: $3.90
Total: $20.38
Average: $4.08 (I’ll try to get this down under $4 as time goes on)