Violet Sky

One of the perks of doing this monthly roundup is realizing that I’ve been doing a whole lot of new baking recipes, but almost no new cooking recipes in several months. I was compiling this list right around the time we meal planned for the week, so it spurred me to put a new recipe on the list. Hopefully it’s good! But onto December’s work.

New Recipes

Gochujang caramel cookies – A friend of mine had recommended these, and then a different friend of mine followed the recipe and won a workplace cookie competition by making them, so I decided to give them a try. They were good! The parts without the heavy gochujang swirl were pretty standard sugar cookie, but still delicious.

Pumpkin cheesecake brioche buns – I got this recipe from Reddit, and it spurred a little bit of guilt I’ve been carrying around. A couple of years ago, my mom gave me a small Kitchenaid mixer with the usual attachments. Rather than try at all to figure out how to get the hook attachment onto the device, I’ve been kneading by hand. It did take me about 15 minutes to figure it out (the attachment had been left on by whoever last used it and was sort of jammed in) but wow, what a great payoff – these were incredible. On the second pass at the recipe, I changed it from 8 buns to 10 and felt that fixed the bread to filling ratio. I’ll definitely be trying some of the other flavor variants.

Revisited Recipes

Dwaeji bulgogi – I can never get the right cut of meat for this recipe, but the flavors are all there. The experience was improved by making the recipe on the grill this time, instead of on a sheet pan in the oven.

Creamy potato soup – Our whole house was swept by illness in December (influenza A, pneumonia, god knows what else) so soup was in high demand. I made some rosemary sourdough bread bowls to serve with this, but honestly, the recipe doesn’t need it – it’s a whole meal on its own.

Cranberry brown sugar pork chops – Half Baked Harvest is a somewhat divisive character if you’re overly online, but I enjoy quite a few of her recipes. This one always makes an appearance during the fall, when the grocery stores are still selling raw cranberries. It could probably do without the cayenne if you don’t prefer sweet heat combos.