On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:05:55 GMT, Taria
wrote:

You should taste my apricot Kolache. I keep a stash of home
grown apricots in the freezer for them. I do my dough in the
bread machine these days. I have done other fillings but the
apricots are so good I just usually go with those. I'll do
a couple of trays next week to take to dad's. We do a
remembrance day on mom's birthday every year. Funny though she
never much baked like grandma did.

I don't do the yeast style ones.
I do the sour cream pastry ones.

I only done biscotti once. For a cookie they are pretty low fat
so I should do them more. Maybe tomorrow?

You do realie that a LOT of the eastern european cookie recipes that
call for sour cream can be very low fat, right?
Some of the Scandanavian ones too. I baked Norwegian kringle
recently. They have no shortening to begin with, and using low fat
sour cream worked just fine. They are a bready little cinnamon cookie.
You just have to experiment with the lower fat sour creams to see
which ones work. Overall, even using full fat sour cream a lot of the
recipes are lower fat because they take little or no added shortening.
Even when they do call for butter, it is usually not a lot and using a
low fat sour cream can balance that out over the batch of three or
four dozen cookies. Especially with things like the pastry style
kolache, or the ones I can't pronounce (let alone spell!) but
translate as "love letters" (1) according to the cookbook I got them
from, where you have almost as much filling as you do cookie.

Biscotti are sneaky.
Some of them have as much fat as a drop cookie, but they have a rep so
a lot of people don't think about it.
One of the reasons I make my own food by preference. I know what goes
into it. I'm not a total food nazi, when you need something for a dish
you need it, but there is no reason to eat overmuch of something
without knowing it. That goes for fats, sugars, salt, and many other
things. If we are having fried corn with supper, I don't want much
more fat and sugar on the table that night for example. DH might
grump about having a cornstarch sauce instead of a roux gravy, and
yeast bread instead of biscuits, on the table with it, but there is no
call to put a pound of fat on the table for one meal if you don't have
to.
Mind feast days get an exemption being special occasions. But a rich
meal a couple of times a year is within reason. They are balanced by
fast days anyhow.

NightMist

(1) a cinnamon meringue with walnuts (black walnuts by preference)
folded in, in a QST folded square of pastry
--

Nothing has been the same since that house fell on my sister.