& I’m back. Like Jordan coming back to the Bulls.

My birthday was a few months ago & I took a trip to Chicago! Before this year, I had never traveled somewhere by myself, only to and from my hometown where my family lives and where I live now :) This was something super special for me and I plan on going somewhere every year on my birthday now!

I got to ride a train! I know that’s not exciting lol, but it was like a subway and it goes through the city like a highway! I get excited by these simple things haha, I was so happy to get to go to a new airport too :) Anyways, on the first day, I was dragging my carry-on around the city like Miley in the Hannah Montana movie, really just due to my mid planning, but I feel it added to the experience.

Favorite place there really wasn’t even something I paid to go do. Where I live now, there isn’t any large body of water, at least not for like half a day to a day’s drive, so the first thing I did when I got off was walk to the water. Something about it really made me feel lighter. Like there’s just boats at the harbor and they belong to someone and they just go sail when they want to. So cool fr. There was people just running, like in the city. & they get to see these things everyday, like this is just where they live! What I’m getting at is that where I live, it isn’t very walkable at all, so all of these little things Chicago life has seemed very wow wow wow to me.

I went to a restaurant downtown where all they sell are chicken sandwiches and donuts! Well, I ordered a chicken sandwich and a plain glazed lol :) Best chicken sandwich ever & possibly the fattest donut I’ve ever had!!!! This is the only picture I have of my donut, but look!!

& that brings us to this weekend’s recipe!!! Oh I recommend buying a donut cutter at a restaurant supply store like me, so you can cut the donuts super ez-peasy :)

Glazed Donut Dough:

240ml warm whole milk — 2 & 1/4 teaspoons instant yeast — 54g granulated sugar — 1 teaspoon granulated sugar (separate)— 540g all-purpose flour — 1/2 teaspoon salt — 85g unsalted butter (melted)— 2 large eggs (room temperature) — vegetable oil (for frying)

Glazed Donut Glaze:

360g powdered sugar — 90ml whole milk — 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Let’s get into making the dough. First, in a smaller bowl that you can whisk in without spilling, mix the teaspoon of sugar, warm milk, and yeast. Mix till it is all incorporated, then put it aside. You’re gonna wanna be watching it every few minutes to make sure it begins lightly bubbling, that’s how we know the yeast is working and that the dough will expand when we need it to.

While, you’re waiting for your yeast mixture to begin bubbling, we can make the other mixture! Take a very large bowl and mix the flour and salt first. Just give it a few swirls with your whisk :) Now, what I did was wrong, but it worked either way. What you SHOULD do is whisk together the melted butter, eggs, and sugar until it’s smooth, then mix that into the flour/salt mixture. What I did was throw those straight into the flour/salt mixture and started incorporating it. I recommend doing the first thing lol.

It looks a little grainy here, but I worked it a bit more and then it became smoother :) Now, we’ll combine both mixtures (yeast & flour) and begin kneading and working the dough!!! You’ll wanna keep smushing, pulling, folding, and stretching the dough until it looks like this:

Once it looks like that, it’s ready and you’re done working it! Now, take another large bowl, lightly oil the inside, and throw your dough in there. We have to wait an hour-ish to give the dough time to rise, it should expand to double-ish the it’s original size.

See! It got all fat lol. During the hour you need to wait for the dough to expand, you can clean up and make the glaze! Take another large bowl and throw in the powdered sugar, milk, and vanilla extract. Now, just mix it until it all incorporates. It will look like this when it’s ready! Cover it and throw it into the fridge.

Back to the present lol. Your dough has risen and it’s ready to cut donuts into. Take a large pan or something flat and throw a little flour on it, just so it becomes smooth, then take your dough and start pressing and expanding it like a tortilla. Take your donut cutter and start pressing and spinning it to cut the donuts from the dough. Normally, you’d keep the middle part and make donut holes, but I threw that dough back in to maximize how many donuts I could make.

Put the donuts you cut onto a piece of parchment paper, so they’re easy to peel off when you start frying. You’re gonna wanna be able to grab them quick.

Now, you have time for another cleanup break. We need to wait another 45 minutes for them to expand again and get even fatter. Mine looked like this after the 45.

Now, they’re ready for frying!!!! I’m a little scared of working with oil, so I didn’t preheat it until I really needed to when I had everything ready to throw in. What you wanna do is take a deep pot, like a dutch oven, and pour about 2–3 inches of oil in. Normally, you’d take a deep frying thermometer and wait until it reads 350°F. Yeah, I don’t have one, so I did it old school. I turned the stove all the way up and threw small pieces of dough into the oil until they sunk for a few seconds then floated to the surface. That’s about how I knew the oil was more-or-less ready :)

I didn’t work much with timing on these also, just gauging off the color of the donut and holes. You also don’t want the dough to brown super quick in a few seconds, otherwise the outside will burn while the inside will stay raw. Mine took about 30 seconds or so on each side to brown how we want them. You’ll really just wanna gauge the color and speed at which they’re browning. Not sure if that makes sense?

Anyways, you can start throwing your actual dough in. I began with the holes :) These shouldn’t take super long to fry. You also wanna be spinning it with a spoon in the oil, so they fry evenly.

I only had 4 holes, so I moved onto the donuts pretty quickly. Same steps on the donuts. Gauge the color and speed that they turn into a golden brown. Flip on each side until they are both a golden brown. Ideally, if I had the thermometer, it’d take about a minute on each side. You’ll go through these pretty quickly. I was flipping alot to make sure they cooked evenly, but also because I couldn’t rely on time to tell me.

This is how mine looked all fried up!

Kinda sorta totally amazing imo :)

Remember that glaze you made and threw in the fridge? Go and grab it and give it a stir. It might have set a little bit while in the fridge. Give it a stir, so you can start dipping holes and donuts. Since you’ll go through the frying pretty quickly, everything will still be warm, which is cool. Start throwing your holes and donuts into the glaze. You wanna make sure the glaze gets EVERYWHERE. After that, you’re done & another recipe is under your belt.

They’ll look like there isn’t much glaze on them at this point, but when they cool, they’ll turn white and be so much more delicious. Also, you can flip the donuts if you feel the glaze is falling off too much.

This was a much easier recipe to execute than the conchas from last time :) & I had time to cleanup during, so when I finished I could lie down and call it a good baking day.

Baking has been so exciting and fulfilling, it really does make me smile during. The most important ingredient I think is that it makes me happy to giveaway what I make. There’s nothing like making someone smile. It really was a good baking day fr, I hope you try the recipe and make others around you happy with you make :) :) :)

-Baker Juan Ruiz

Hi! This week, I turned up the difficulty level to like 20 :) & because of that, I wasn’t sure I was gonna write this one, as I don’t even know if the recipe can be replicated, but it all worked AMAZING!

A staple in any Mexican household is the Concha, or Mexican Sweet Bread!

Growing up, we’d buy varieties at H-E-B :) Strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla! My favorite are the vanilla ones! I’m not really sure when or if the bakery opened or if we just discovered it one day, but one day, we bought a box of conchas from a bakery back home (i live away from my family now) & hot dog truly. WOW WOW WOW magic bread. The one above is from this bakery, and this week I decided to try to make conchas myself!

Before I get into it, I wanna mention that this was my first time making bread, like with yeast, and kneading the dough. I’ve done banana bread, but that is more like making a cake with batter :) Also, Concha means seashell in Spanish. The pattern on top of the bread is what makes it a concha, like how seashells have all sorts of beautiful patterns. & you can make whatever pattern you so want; you could idk write your name if you wanted.

Anyways, I’ll do my best to give you the ingredients and steps, but I’m just not gonna promise you’ll also succeed. Either I have some type of magic touch or I got lucky. I think it’s the first one frfr lol

Dough Ingredients: 1kg all-Purpose Flour — 15g salt — 25g instant yeast — 550ml milk — 200g eggs — 15ml vanilla extract — 175g granulated sugar — 150g butter — 60g lard or vegetable shortening

Sweet Topping Ingredients: 200g all-purpose flour — 200g powdered sugar — 200g lard or vegetable shortening — 15ml vanilla extract

Oh btw, since you work all of this with your hands, I don’t have too many pictures. But, I do have the ingredients, the batter and topping when it’s done, and the finished conchas!!!

Made alot of mistakes during the dough-making lol. So, first I made a well with the flour. That means pour all your flour onto whatever surface you want and use a bowl or something to make like a circle in the middle, so when you pour milk or eggs or something, they stay in the circle :) Oh, this is mistake #1 lol. I don’t have so much counter space, so I did this on the glass surface of my stove, which I found out just makes everything 10x stickier and harder to work with.

So, we have our well. Now, I threw the yeast and salt in the middle and gave it a quick mix with my finger. Next mistake, I threw in ALL the milk at once and began mixing with the flour. Ummmm that just makes mush sports fans. You need to add milk gradually as you throw in more and more ingredients. Maybe you’ll need all the milk or not. Anyways, after I made a mess, I added the vanilla extract, sugar, and eggs, and kept mixing. Still had mush because I had added all the milk by accident. Nothing was incorporating and I thought I just needed to keep kneading it, but no amount of kneading was gonna make this mess into workable dough :( Actually, I almost scrapped the whole project at this point, but unlike the cakes that came before, this bread was NOT gonna beat me.

Oh, I didn’t mention, I ran out of all-purpose flour on this recipe too. & adding more flour was my first theory for how to fix it. I got lucky here because I didn’t have all-purpose flour, but I had cake flour, so I threw in portions of cake flour, until the mess became dough and stopped sticking to the stove! I’m a good baker I promise

So we have dough! At this point, roll it into a ball and throw it into a large bowl, so you can wait for it to rise. Oh, I didn't know about this because I’ve never worked with yeast before. Yep, you have to wait for your dough to expand; that’s what the yeast does. & sometimes the yeast just doesn’t do anything, so if you bake, the bread sinks into an abyss.

I actually got tired at this point & sat down and watched an episode of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders show on Netflix. It’s actually genuinely a great show lol. So, I did that then I got back up to make the topping!

The topping is so easy to make! I cleaned off my stove to have a new smooth surface for mixing. First, I threw the flour on the glass, then the sugar, and mixed that together. Next, I added the vegetable shortening and vanilla extract. Now mix!!! It should all incorporate pretty quickly :)

Your dough and topping should look like below once you’ve mixed them completely :)

Now, I watched another episode of the DCC show while I waited for the dough to rise. & it did!!!!

If you have a scale, this is where it’s even more useful. I separated my bread dough into 70g portions, so they’re all the same. Next, we make the balls. Take your dough you just separated and begin rolling the dough with your hands, taking out each wrinkle or lump, making a smooth ball. Do that to all of your dough until you run out of dough. Once, you have the balls, you’ll put vegetable shortening on your hands and rub some onto the top of all the balls. Make sure to press the balls a bit on the edges, so they can spread better. Otherwise, they will come out too plump and not take the shape we want. Once, you do that, you’ll put flour on your hands and start taking portions of the topping to form into little patties that you’ll lay onto the dough balls. Do that to all of the dough until you run out. I ran out of topping before I got through all of the dough, so I’d probably split the recipe in half for the dough when I make these again.

Now, for what makes them conchas!!!! Take a little knife and start making a pattern on the the topping. You can do whatever you want, but I went traditional and made straight lines, like a tic-tac-toe game. I sat down for more DCC for like half-hour to let my dough rise a little more, then started baking them.

Make sure to preheat your oven to 340° F. I baked in batches of 6, then realized I had space for 8 on my pan for 18 minutes each. & I finished!!!!

I think I kinda crushed these & i’m not a flexer, but I’m so happy and proud that I was able to make these first try. Everything about making these was so frustrating and difficult, and overall stressful. But, I really had so much fun anyways frfrfr!!! :) :) :)

Oh, and they tasted GAS :)

Unrelated, the weather is becoming so nice and I’m able to leave my sliding door open during the day & that totally changes the atmosphere in the kitchen. Football season is primarily during the fall and winter seasons, so the DCC show has a vibe about it that I really like. It all takes place during my favorite part of the year, nothing better than cold weather and the holidays :) I even decided to put up my tree early!

It’s not decorated or fluffed yet, but it’s a cute little tree and it really changes the vibe in the room in such a delightful way!

I hope you try your hand at the recipe and that it doesn’t give you as much trouble as it did me, and that they come out so good for you! I decided I want to make glazed donuts next! So stay tuned :)

-Baker Juan Ruiz

if you could hear me laughing rn ahahahahahaha

Welcome Back ahahahahahaha. I think I set this to go live at 7am, do you know where your girlfriends are? ahahahaha I can’t stop laughing

I’ve been planning and thinking about this one all week lol. I was listening to Brina at work on yt, as I do, and on the side was a recommended video of her baking Christmas cookies. & if you know me, Christmas kinda starts on October 1, I’ve already put the tree up and the wreath on the door. Anyways, her cookies are at the same time chocolate chip and m&m, and that’s what I decided to bake this weekend :)

So, let’s get into it. Went to handy dandy H-E-B and I bought a hand mixer, I ain’t whisking no more. Also, the Christmas m&m’s aren’t out yet, but the Halloween ones are! So, mine are Halloween cookies :)

Anyways, let’s get into it. This recipe didn’t have weights, which I now prefer, so I did my best to not pack any of the dry ingredients, so it doesn’t overpower the butter and eggs.

1 cup butter, melted — 1 1/2 cups brown sugar — 1/2 cup granulated sugar — 2 eggs — 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract — 3 cups all-purpose flour — 1 teaspoon baking soda — 1/2 teaspoon salt — 1 1/4 semi-sweet chocolate chips — 1 cup M&M’s (whichever holiday ones are on sale lol or normal ones)

Ok, so first in a large bowl, mix the melted butter and both types of sugars until they’re smooth and thick. After the butter and sugars have incorporated, add each egg one-by-one, mixing each one in, before adding the 2nd one. Then, add the vanilla extract and keep mixing :) I like to add ALOT of vanilla, but I just really like that flavor, so probably still follow the recipe lol. Oh, don’t forget to pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees F!!!

Next we’re gonna mix the dry ingredients. Throw the flour, baking soda, and salt together into another large bowl and whisk them, so they mix. Your mixtures should look like below at this point.

Now, we’re gonna combine the dry and wet ingredients. Slowly, start adding bits of the dry mixture into the wet mixture, making sure they mix before adding more of the dry mixture. Keep doing this until you’ve combined it all :) It should look like below once you’re done!

Finally, we’re going to add the chocolate chips and M&M’s into the dough. Throw em in and keep folding the dough, the chocolate needs to be everywhere. Imagine getting a cookie without any chocolate, yeah we wanna avoid that. Should look like below when it’s all combined! I threw mine into the fridge an hour to chill a bit, but you can do a half hour, or not at all, but I’ve heard chilling the dough helps everything incorporate better and helps the spread once they are in the oven.

Unless you wanted one big cookie, we’re gonna shape the dough into individual about 1-inch or so balls. I was able to make 45! Last step before throwing em in the oven is preparing your flat pan. Cut a sheet of parchment paper and cover the top. Now, we can bake :) I was able to fit 8 balls onto my pan. Bake each batch for half an episode of Wizards of Waverly Place (12 minutes), lol that’s what I was watching while baking. It’s my favorite childhood show :) After each batch, lay the cookies on a rack for cooling. Continue this cycle until you’ve baked all your cookies!!!

These are mine OMG WOW WOW WOW :) :) :) Look at how they look inside

& you’re done!!!

Small surprise now, I’ve been working on creating a logo for the blog, to use as my pfp. Lemme show ya my concept and what I’ve got so far

This is v3 of my first idea, except at this point, I made the hat more puffy. Just easier to tell it’s a hat lol. & I put a cookie, cake, and cupcake on top. On the real one, I’ll replace those with things I either want to bake or what have been my favorites so far. Btw, I like hand-drawing because it feels more personal and drawing is just really fun for me :)

After deciding this was the one I wanted to go with, I started drawing the one I’d like to eventually use

This is my 1st time shading and I’m pretty happy with it! I might try again, but honestly I’m very happy with how it looks so far. I’ll start choosing what I’d like to put on the hat next, but so far, this is what I’ve got :)

Thank You so much for joining me on this one, I’ve been so excited to write this one & this is my 1st time baking FOR the blog, so it’s kinda a big one. Brina might just be my favorite celebrity, so extra excited lol. Oh, you’ll find I have nicknames for like everybody, so in case you got confused, Brina is Sabrina Carpenter. Blondie is Taylor Swift also.

I hope you try the recipe, you couldn’t stop my laugh or wipe the smile off my face while I made the cookies.

-Baker Juan Ruiz

Welcome Back, Bakers! (& so soon too)

In my 1st entry, I mentioned wanting to open a bakery one day. Well, I’m gonna tell ya all about it today. I apologize if I’m all over the place haha.

I don’t really have a name figured out, but I used to want to open a diner, and I named that one Doc’s Diner. Inspired by my gamertag “ThEd0cT0R” & an episode of Doctor Who where the TARDIS turns into a diner with odds and ends and neon everywhere and it’s like Grease, but futuristic as well & that’s what I imagined. Maybe, the bakery will be like that. Doc’s Bakery? My dry cleaners called themselves #1 Dry Cleaners, so it pops up first when you search for the best dry cleaning, idk that’s definitely AN approach haha. Throw my name up there? Ruiz Bakery? El Horno? That means “the oven” in spanish. Idk, just some ideas.

Y’know how in older movie theaters the posters and marquee are lit up by lightbulbs around it? I imagine the sign above the establishment would be like that. For example, Ruiz Bakery in big block letters, maybe in a dark blue on an off-white background, and then lit up by a warm light. Maybe the same thing, but the bakery name in neon would be cool too. BIG windows on the front, I love natural light. Exterior would a slightly different shade of the off-white that was on the sign, but I’d hire an artist to come paint cherry blossoms all over the exterior, they’re my favorite flower. It’s like almost out of a dream, because it is.

The inside would be designed sorta like what I imagine my home library would look like. My favorite feature in a home is wainscoting. I find it very elegant and I think the bakery will reflect that. Walls would be painted white with a pastel blue, probably on the wainscoting. I used to live in an apartment with a “feature wall”, except it was just blood red colored and the other walls were a dark tan lol. I imagine a feature wall on the entrance wall where the cherry blossoms from the outside continue from the outside to the inside, except they’re now blooming into flowers of all kinds, all colors. Rest of the walls would be covered by watercolor paintings of my favorite cities. I really like watercolor, it has a certain vibe that I like. It has this nostalgic quality.

Y’know how I said the outside would be lit up by lightbulbs around the sign? The inside would continue that scheme, it feels happy and wonderful to me, like if you were hugging Paddington the Bear himself. Big chandelier in the middle. WOW WOW WOW The goodie displays will be laid in the shape of a “U”, where the opening is on the side of the entrance. They’d all be lit by, this time flashing warm lightbulbs.

I want families to bring their children and those kiddos feel the same nostalgia and wonder I feel when I think of it. I hope some of my vision came across (maybe I will write about it again if I draw the bakery), one day it’ll be real.

-Baker Juan Ruiz

Hi!!!!! & nice to meet you ☺️

Always loved being in the kitchen. I wanted to be a chef when I was in middle school. Wanted to be a baker at one point. Dropped all of it, I’m an accountant now. BUT, these things (especially the baking) have come back to me in what I think is a new stage in my life. Sometimes it is in time-consuming ways, like binging Hell’s Kitchen & yelling harder and louder than Gordy does (burning the scallops is embarrassing, where’s the respect for the customer). Or, in actual joyful ways, like baking cookies (my niche rn) & giving them to lovely people I know or trying (& failing) to bake cakes lol.

As this is my first blog post, I’ll be writing about what I’ve baked up to now & just little other things in my kitchen that have made me laugh or smile or whatever :) Probably a little about the bakery I hope to open one day too

I picked baking back up a few months ago, and I’ve been loving it so far. & up to now, I mostly stick to cookies. Sometimes the ideas come from wanting to learn basics, something I remember really liking from when I was a kiddo, or from discussions at my with friends.

My 1st try was chocolate chip cookies and lemme tell ya sports fans, they are HEINOUS to master lol. Took me 3 tries iirc. Look at first try!

2nd try also looked like this. But, look at 3rd try!

Absolutely amazing, aren’t they! I forgot to snap a photo of them finished, but I did crush it :) trust 🤝 3rd try was actually on New Year’s Day & I just think that it’s cool that I popped off on the 1st day of the year and what so happens to also be my favorite day of the year.

Making these I learned about lots of little things I didn’t know are ESSENTIAL to baking: room temp ingredients are a must, don’t pack the dry ingredients (mistake on 1st 2 tries), weighing all ingredients is infinitely more accurate than measuring cups, and chilling your dough for a bit can help it mix better like how you rest a steak. I did never learn to brown butter, I always burn it. Idk how people say they see the color change, it just looks yellow to me and then develops black and brown specks & that’s I guess when it’s burned L. lemme show ya

Anyways, I haven’t tried to do this since, keeping it on easy mode by microwaving the butter for 5 seconds instead.

Next, I baked Mexican Wedding Cookies!! I am proudly Mexican and these were staples at the millions of quinceañeras and weddings I went to as a kiddo. LOOK!

I made brownies after! Not from scratch, but I still changed the recipe a bit, so sorta from scratch. I actually did a fair amount of research on brownies and people came to a consensus that making a great brownie from scratch was astonishingly difficult, but you could change the box recipe a bit and come out a winner. Everywhere I read said using the Ghirardelli triple chocolate mix was the play. Iirc I swapped oil for butter and added an extra egg :) Didn’t snap a photo of these, I think it was like 1 in the morning when I finished.

On a whim after the brownies, I decided to make Peanut Butter Blossoms. Got the idea for those scrolling TikTok lol. Not much to say, but they were gas.

Another day at work during daily scheduled chatting time with my friends in the office across mine, my friend Jessica brought up the fact that Reese’s pieces are no longer real, like not real chocolate other pb. & I decided to make my own. Bought some fancy chocolate (don’t remember which one) & the finest pb HEB had to offer.

They are a little misshapen, but they were amazing! & real ingredients! But, I wanted to accompany these with something else, as our other friend in the office is allergic to nuts, so no pb for her. & I landed on Vanilla Whoopie Pies!!! Most of the recipes for these were for chocolate ones, but I didn’t wanna bake something else chocolate & I found one for vanilla ones.

My other friend, Madeline sometimes brings in cakes her mom makes to the office & I like to leave notes on the containers when the cake finishes. Usually, I say that I’m not much a fan of chocolate cake, but her mom created a miracle that day and she made one I liked. Loved in fact. & then I decided to make a cake. A vanilla cake in fact (my favorite).

Historically, I don’t have the stomach to bake cakes. I tend to open the oven & poke the cake so many times until it’s done, but has also sunk in the middle. Sometimes, it doesn’t rise. Other times, I didn’t even decide to throw it in the oven from the disaster I made just mixing.

So, I went to HEB, bought a new cake pan (more on this later), and actual mixing bowls that don’t move on the counter.

So, the cake pan. What happened to the cake pan? Well, I bought one that has like a hinge on the side, so you can unstick the cake from the pan easier. I thought woah! How genius! Turns out those types of pans leak & I had to put a layer of parchment paper under the batter to make it work. After fixing that, the cakes baked fine! I wanted to go big and decided to make a 2 layer one.

One sunk a bit, but I made that the bottom layer lol. Cakes done. Made my own frosting too. Frosting always beat me before too. Most of the time, it came out like incredibly sweet soup or once it just tasted plain rancid.

So, the frosting more than worked. But, I didn’t make enough and ran out of ingredients to make more. It was also, like 10 at night. Couldn’t go out to go buy more stuff.

I couldn’t quite cover the cake and didn’t even want to take it to work the next day. Messaged my wise friend Jessica & a teaspoon of encouragement later and I kept going. I threw the sprinkles on it and decided it was cool to take. Rave reviews the next day, not even trying to flex, but like it was my first cake to work. & it was moist, so moist. Don’t nobody want no dry cake.

After the cake, I haven’t baked since, but I plan to pick it back up slowly in the next few weeks. I might remake the chocolate chip cookies or the Mexican wedding cookies. Those were my favorites of what I’ve made till now. I like to take pictures of what I make and especially seeing people smile when I give it out. So, I’ll be writing about the things I bake and what the story was; why I baked that & what happened while I made it. Sometimes, it really is like Curious George was let loose in the kitchen.

& that’s my first blog post. This week, I was showing a friend some of the dreams I remembered and had written down. They made me laugh & I decided to write them. Anyways, friend said I was very descriptive and they laughed alot at what I wrote and I left and opened my blog.

-Baker Juan Ruiz