Cooking and Baking

I don't know if it's the weather, my cinnamon scented room spray, or some other unseen forces, but something recently sparked a cooking/baking frenzy here at our house. And it's not just me. My husband, Jim, has had the itching to be in the kitchen as well.

In the last 10 days we've made 2 pans of apple crumble, 4 pans of cinnamon buns, and chicken noodle soup all from scratch. It all started 2 weekends ago when Jim wanted us to put to good use the box of apples Kyra had picked on a recent trip to Linvilla Orchards. I too had been thinking of ways to deliciously utilize our overflow of apples and had found a recipe for apple crumble. I just so happened to have all the ingredients on hand, so Jim and I went to work peeling, coring, and slicing apples. The crumble turned out so delicious that we decided to make another one immediately after polishing off the first one.
No sooner had I made the 2nd apple crumble when I had a conversation with my close friend, Emily, about some cinnamon rolls she had just made. She said she had eaten 5 in a 3 hour period, which said a LOT about how scrumptious the rolls must have been because Em is a Dietician by profession. As soon as we hung up the phone I found myself on the computer downloading the recipe for the cinnamon rolls from thepioneerwoman.com. Jim was equally excited about making the rolls and even did all the grocery shopping to get everything we needed. So Saturday night we went to work making the dough. It turned out to be hardly any work at all though. Sunday morning I rolled out the dough, added all the sugary, buttery, cinnamon-y filling, and baked them up. We halved the recipe and still ended up with 4 pans of 8 cinnamon rolls! I found a recipe on another website for cream cheese icing and made sure to lay it on thick when the warm rolls came out of the oven.
Somewhere in the midst of all the baking I became inspired to make chicken noodle soup. I'd never made it myself before, but Tyler Florence's recipe on foodnetwork.com just seemed so simple and flavorful, so I took it on. The aromas that filled my kitchen while it simmered were amazing. And then as we were eating it Jim declared it was probably my best homemade soup ever. (I've made other various potato soups, etc.) And it was even better the next day reheated since the flavors had more time to meld together as it sat in the fridge overnight.
Kyra's first soup!

I wish you all could have been here to taste everything, but hopefully the pictures will entice you enough to make the recipes yourself!