The Art of Living (AOL)

This weekend I was able to attend a conference at Shellbourne Conference Center in Valparaiso Indiana. This conference was designed specially for high schooler to learn how to take ordinary tasks and raise them to the level of an art. For example, cooking and baking is culinary arts. It was a lot of fun! Over 75 high schooler girls from around the country took party in it. There were different seminars and competitions. The seminars included how to garden, use tools to make a stool, make different types of salsa from around the world, and how cheese is made and what is paired well with it! I learned a lot from the seminars and the were a lot of fun! The competitions included great cakes, culinary mystery basket, be our guest, and skills gallery. I competed in the great cakes competition with my friend Katie . We made a flour less chocolate cake with a raspberry filling, and we got a silver medal! I was completely blown away by all of the incredibly artistic talent that I saw. This was an incredibly experience and I can't wait to go back next year!

Our cake

Katie, Pat (our coach), and me

Coffee chocolate cake

Inside out german chocolate cake

Carrot Cake

All of the cakes entered

Salsa seminar

Salsa seminar

skills gallery

Katie and I

Chocolate Chip Pecan Scones

Now that Lent is over, it is time to start baking and blogging again! I decided to make a yummy breakfast for my family. Since we are chocoholics it had to be something chocolaty. I was also really excited to try my new gluten free flour, cup 4 cup! This flour is a miracle worker. It makes gluten free baking so simple and it tastes exactly like normal flour and these scones are proof of that! The scones are flaky and have incredible flavor! You can't even tell that they are gluten free! 

Recipe from sugarywinzy.com

Ingredients

• **2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• ⅛ teaspoon salt
• ½ cup (8 tablespoons) butter
• ¾ cup chocolate chips
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ cup milk (can be substituted with skim milk, or if richer scones are preferred, use cream)
• *1/2 cup of chopped pecans

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350 F and line a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
2. Using a pastry blender , place the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and butter in a bowl. Cut the butter to evenly distribute throughout the flour mixture, crumble until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
3. Add chocolate chips. If mixing by hand, mix the chocolate chips with a spatula. 
4. In a separate bowl, stir together the egg, vanilla and milk until well combined. Pour egg mixture over the flour mixture. If mixing by hand, use a spatula to stir the egg mixture with the flour mixture until dough binds together. I
5. Remove dough from bowl and lightly knead on a floured countertop to form a ball. If dough tends to stick, sprinkle flour over the dough and on the countertop. Knead lightly to incorporate the sprinkled flour.
6. Flatten the dough into a disc about 8” in diameter and 1” in thickness. With a sharp knife, slice the dough into 8 equal triangles. Another option is to slice the dough in half to make two dough balls, flatten each ball into a disc about 6” in diameter and 1” in thickness, and slice each disc into 8 equal triangles to get a total of 16 scones. Flour the knife to prevent the dough from sticking to the knife.
7. Transfer the dough slices onto the prepared cookie sheet. Lightly beat one egg and one tablespoon milk. Brush egg wash over each slice and bake for 25 – 30 minutes or until golden brown

*The pecans are not in the original recipe
** I used Cup 4 Cup gluten free flour instead of all-purpose flour