Sugar & Spice

And everything nice.

Including Crisco. And buttah.

This weekend we made P-Dub's French Breakfast Puffs (p. 66). We now understand why the French are rumored to drink so much red wine. Red wine thins the blood. After you eat one of these overweight puppies, your blood will need a little thinning. Not low cholesterol fare. But, my, they are tasty.

We started by mixing together flour, baking powder, salt and a couple dashes of ground cloves. Ree's recipe calls for nutmeg, which we did not have on hand. But, cloves gave the mixture a nice, tease-of-fall flavor.

Then we got out our little friend, The Beast, otherwise known as the KitchenAid stand mixer. We creamed together sugar and shortening until it was smooth. Eggs were added.

At this point we poured in a third of the flour mixture, then a third of a cup of milk. This was repeated until both the flour mixture and milk were thoroughly combined in the sugar mixture.

Next we greased the muffin tin and filled the cups two-thirds full.

And, of course, we sampled a little bit of the dough. Jo sampled a lot. Lou was disciplined and refrained from sampling a lot. We were good little girls and didn't sample from the pan.

These were baked until the tops were lightly brown.

Next we melted two sticks of butter in one bowl and combined a goodly amount of cinnamon and sugar in a separate bowl.

Now for the fun part...got your glass of red wine handy?

We rolled each puff in the butter so each centimeter of the puff was covered. Then we rolled ourselves in the butter. Wait...no.

Next, we rolled each puff through the cinnamon and sugar, setting each one aside to cool and glow in its sparkling, atherosclerotic glory.

We like to be poetic about cholesterol.

These were a wonderful breakfast treat...

...that we ate at 6:00 in the evening. They's good anytime.

Happily full,