Most years, I look forward to baking cookies and other sweet things.  For the past 7 or 8 years I’ve baked my mom’s mince pies, and I always love making Christmas sugar cookies.  The trouble with all that baking is that I end up eating half of what I produce.  This year I’m trying to get in shape for the swimming suit I’ll be wearing every day next week, so the only thing I baked was a pumpkin cheesecake and a batch of oatmeal cookies to take to a friend’s caroling party. 

Then on Christmas Eve I thought I’d try some whole grain baking, since the season felt lacking without at least another batch of cookies.  I started the day with some oatmeal blueberry pancakes.  I saw the recipe on the New York Times website, and it was just as delicious as it sounded.  Ordinarily I think of pancakes as something I can whip up with whatever I have in my pantry, and these pancakes have some ingredients I rarely have on hand, like buttermilk and fresh blueberries.  But it’s well worth buying them; these pancakes were fantastic with a little butter and honey.

My other whole grain efforts didn’t turn out so well.  I made some ginger cookies with molasses, whole wheat, and barley flours.  They sort of resembled ginger snaps, but didn’t exactly taste like them.  We each ate one but threw the rest in the garbage.  I also made a pear tart using whole wheat pastry flour.  The crust wasn’t bad, but a bit cardboard-like.  And the recipe instructed me to put a single layer of thinly sliced pears over the crust.  When it baked the pears became paper-thin so my tart looked like a super-thin crust Chicago pizza.  Basically a cracker with some toppings spread thinly across.  Again, we each ate a piece and threw the rest away.

I’m really starting to appreciate the benefits of all-purpose flour.