For the last few months, I've been cooking a lot of yeast bread.  I freely admit, I used to be an idiot with all things yeast-related.  Didn't matter what it was, how fresh or foul the yeast was, I'd always manage to mess it up.  After years of avoiding all recipes that required me to work with yeast, I found a recipe on Pinterest that claimed to be so easy that even I could do it.  I decided to try and overcome my yeast-related anxiety and give the recipe a shot.  Lo and behold, when all was said and done, I had a gorgeous loaf of bread.

From there, I ventured to try other yeast breads and recipes, almost all with overwhelming success (the exception to the rule was a loaf of bread I under-baked...  Whoops).  I was feeling so amazingly confident that my yeast curse had finally been defeated that I even bought two bulk packages of yeast from BJ's Wholesale, giving me the resources to make about 20,000 loafs of bread.

Well, it seems like every once and awhile, the Culinary Gods look down on somebody and say that they need to be put back in their place.  They're too confident in their abilities and, as such, they randomly determine that a recipe is going to fail for no particular reason.  It's happened to everybody...  The recipe they follow exactly which doesn't do what it's supposed to do, the sauce you've made a million times that won't thicken, the family recipe that you could make blindfolded that, for some reason, just isn't coming together right...  In my case, the Culinary Gods decided I was getting too cocky with my ability to bake something required to rise and sent down their little invisible lightning bolt and zapped my yeast.

This recipe for Kona's sweet bread, by all accounts, is amazing and easy to make.  That is, if you get your stupid yeast to do it's one, very basic job.  I, unfortunately, did not.  As a result, after the hour long rise time, I had a lump of dough that weighed as much as a bag of bricks and looked exactly the same as it did before I put it in to rise.  Not the fault of the recipe, but the fault of me, though I blame the yeast and it's irritability. 

I've been told a million times by professional chefs, even the fine folks at King Arthur Flour who were nice enough to let me poke around their kitchens for a day, that sometimes dough doesn't rise and that I shouldn't think badly of myself for having a batch of dough fall flat (or not rise at all).  That's all well and good, but I think I'm going to have to take this recipe as a sign from the Disney Gods that perhaps I need to lay off my obsession with the Polynesian and focus on other places to eat around WDW...

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Halloween...  One of my favorite holidays.  You have an excuse to dress up, eat tons of candy, and celebrate the darker, spookier side of life.  Being a lifelong fan of "Haunted Mansion" and lover of the weird and spooky, Halloween is my time of year.

When I got the recipe for the Jack Skellington Sugar Cookies, I was over the moon.  I love, love, love "The Nightmare Before Christmas."  I love cookies.  What a perfect match...  It was like Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, like Madame Leota and Tarot Cards, like pumpkins and the headless horseman...  It just seemed to belong so perfectly.  Add to that my recent trip to Disney and seeing these cookies absolutely everywhere, I figured this couldn't be a cooler recipe. 

And then I made them.  Yikes.  The recipe I had?  Not good.  They were bland, they were dry, they just weren't that tasty.  And the sugar frosting?  It was really practically inedible.  Even my son, who I think is in some way related to the Cookie Monster, took one bite and wanted no more.  I can imagine no bigger sin in my son's world then to refuse a cookie, and if this one was worth refusing...  That says something.

Now, to be fair, a lot of the recipes I get are authentic, but they're done in such huge batches that they have to be scaled down by the chefs that give them to me.  After all, I have no real need to do batches of 100 cookies.  Sometimes, when those conversions are made, while technically accurate by proportion, they don't taste quite right.  This recipe was an obvious victim of that phenomenon as, when I made them the second time, I had the very exact same issues: a bland, dry cookie with icing that was gross.  Very un-Disney. 

But at least they looked great.

That all being said, it's not like this recipe is a total loss.  The idea behind it still works...  Just your favorite, trusted sugar cookie recipe (or buy some premade cookies, or premade cookie dough), ice it with white frosting or icing or chocolate, and using a small tipped bag of black decorator gel, and you have your own, edible, Jack Skellington cookies.

But of course, I also made another discovery in this process...  That I don't have the patience to decorate that many cookies.  But that's a problem for a different day. 

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First, a confession, followed by an apology...

My goal in doing this blog is to recreate the food at Disney by using the actual recipes from Disney, preparing them accordingly, and then sharing the results.  But there are times that the food Gods do not cooperate and even somebody who knows their way around the kitchen get stumped by forces beyond their control.  

That is exactly what happened to the treat I was making today, Jamaican Buns from Caribbean Beach Resort.  Seeing as this is where I'm calling home in September and it's probably my favorite hotel, I was pretty excited to try this guy out.

So far, so good

First, I was going to have leave out the coconut due to allergy concerns.  I figured that wasn't such a big deal and I opted to add coconut extract instead.  Then upon raiding my pantry, I discovered that I had no raisins and what I thought was raisins were actually dried cranberries.  Fine.  I'd just substitute the raisins for the cranberries and make a note of it on the entry for this recipe.  From there, it just slid downhill.  I started mixing the batter, but the forgot about it (the convenience of a Kitchen Aid mixer is perhaps a little too convenient) so I suspect the dough was very over mixed.  Then I had to step away for a moment, so I threw the batter in the fridge to keep the butter from melting, and what started as a moment ended up being about 4 hours, so the batter got completely chilled...  Which should never happen with a bread dough, even a quick bread.  Then, for the first time as an adult, I actually broke the yolk of not one, but both eggs, getting a pretty substantial amount of yolk in the whites.  Finally, in the oddest problem I've ever had in a kitchen, I couldn't track down my cookie pan...  I swear, it was the most bizarre thing.  But with a hot oven and a now mostly room temperature dough ready to go, I had to come up with something.  And that something was foil on a wire rack over a pizza stone.  So basically, the most non-cookie sheet I could have possibly made.  So by the time all was said and done, I came up with a recipe that at its core is a Disney recipe, but fate turned it into something else.   


The end result was...  Interesting, to say the least.  While they tasted just fine, if not a little dense, I could tell by looking at them that this is probably not what Caribbean Beach serves to its guests.  

Where to start? They didn't brown, they spread out, the yolk on the whites burned, the tops split, and the foil gave an odd shape.

It was like a deflated, overly moist scone, when (as I understood it), it should have been more like a hot cross bun.  Even after cooking the buns for 40 minutes instead of the 20, all I got was burned edges.  A trademark sign that the dough was too cold and too overmixed.  The hint of a great flavor, the potential behind a great little dish, but in the end, they were completely inedible.  Bummers.

Burned at the edge, raw in the middle.  Can you believe they were in the oven for 40 mins?

My goal is to try and remake this sometime in the very near future, when either I or my kitchen is less cursed, and hopefully we can compare how it ended up this time to how it should have been.  LoL!


So, better luck next time!


Edit:  This recipe was apparently so cursed that, despite scheduling it to be posted yesterday, it never posted and had to be posted manually today.  LoL!

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