"Gotta use up this flour..."

Back at the beginning of the month, which seems an incredibly distant time in light of current circumstances but turns out to be less than 30 days ago, I baked a fancy banana bread for my friends. They enjoyed it, and ate it all, but it used up almost all of the flour I had in the house. I added flour to my grocery list without a second thought, but that was the week when Knoxville decided to start panic buying, and it has taken until this past Wednesday to have flour in stock at Kroger again.

The last bag of flour.

It turned out to be a 5 pound bag, which is larger than my flour cannister will hold. I'm sure there are people who just sit the bag of flour in their cabinet and think nothing of it, but I'm always worried that if I leave the flour just sitting in the bag then bugs of some kind (weevils? mites? centipedes, which are not a bug but are an arthropod?) will get into it, even though I've never seen a bug in my kitchen. Unwilling to leave this flour just sitting out as an insect buffet after I waited almost a month to be able to buy it, I decided that I would use it up this weekend instead.

The first thing I made was scones. I've been using the same scone recipe since 2011, but my recipe is for pear and goat cheese scones, and I didn't have any pears in the house. I did have an apple, though, so I decided on apple cheddar scones instead.

I chunked up my apple:



peeled and finely diced it, and lumped everything into my scone batter:



and baked them. I didn't bother shaping them, and instead just made them like haystacks of dough:



and they came out fine.

That didn't use up enough flour, though, so I thought about what else I could make, and decided on a quick bread. Years ago, Food Network Magazine published a 50 Quick Breads recipe guide in the magazine, and I've never gone wrong using it. I looked around the pantry and saw half a bag of dried figs leftover from when I made a flatbread with figs on it and an almost empty bottle of honey (I had a spare right behind it), so I decided to make the honey bread (number 30) and add the figs to it. Calling this a bread is misleading, though, because it's really a fig and honey poundcake.

The batter came together quickly and fairly easily, and then I decided to try something new. Every time I make a bread with things in it, most of the things sink to the bottom. I've seen people on Food Network talk about how you have to toss your add ins in flour, so that they suspend in the dough rather than sinking, but I've never actually tried it. I saved back an eighth of a cup of the flour that was supposed to go into the batter and tossed the diced figs in it:



The figs were folded into the batter, the batter went into the loaf pan:



(Look! You can see figs floating near the top!) and it worked:



Fig and honey bread with figs in pretty much every bite. I can't really taste the honey, but I can taste the figs, and I love figs, so this is delicious. Next time I have dinner at a friend's house I might even bring this as dessert.

I figured this was enough baking, and decided to pause until Sunday.

This morning I was originally planning to make chocolate chip cookies, but they called for a lot of eggs, and I was worried about using up too many eggs in one weekend. I also used a crap ton of butter this weekend between the baking and a lemon pasta dish, but I had extra butter in the freezer, so I wasn't as worried about that. Changing gears, I decided to make shortbread cookies instead, because I've made them once before, they use the same amount of butter and flour as the chocolate chip cookies, and they only use one egg.

I couldn't remember what recipe I used when I made these before, but a quick google search turned up this really easy one, and it mostly worked with one minor snag.

After mixing up the dough:



I went to eject the mixer blades so I could get the dough out of them, and I accidentally hit spin instead. Little pieces of dough, all over the counter and the stove:



I guess it got mixed a little more than I intended it to.

I got the dough back together in the bowl, pressing it into a ball with my hands, and then dumped it onto my floured countertop. Learning from my recent troubles with piecrust I floured my rolling pin and rolled the dough out to the right thickness. Once that was done, I used my hands to shape it into a square to cut out evenly sized cookies:



I cut them into triangles and got them to the cookie sheet with a minimum of trouble, then separated an egg to make an egg white wash for the top:



The recipe said to put sanding sugar on top, but I didn't have any. I did have leftover gold colored sugar from making Unicorn Fudge a few years ago, so I used that instead, and it actually came out really pretty:



It's sparkly and shiny, and gave the tops a nice crunch.

Tomorrow night, I'll probably make some banana bread, because I have bananas to use up, too.