behind the scenes

black and white donuts + behind the scenes of a blog post!

Happy Tuesday, friends! Today I’m taking you behind the scenes of a blog post because behind the scenes stuff has always fascinated me and also because sometimes I get asked what a typical work day is like and by the time I’m finished explaining my answer I’ve usually lost whoever I’m talking to because it takes too long. My days are always different, one day I might be watching TV all day and making cake, other days I might be lying on the floor with all of my cookbooks open, reading about chicken. Ideally I’m wearing sweatpants but sometimes I brush my hair and put on lip gloss and we will get into when and why. Even though each individual day is different, the arc of creating a blog post, which typically happens over the course of a few weeks or months, is generally the same and fun though! So hold onto your butts because we’re about to get detailed. 

I’m partnering with Intel® on this post because their new Intel NUC Mini PC has helped me streamline the blog post writing process and make it even more fun and organized. 

Phase 1: brainstorming and research. I keep a list on my phone of recipes I want to make and add to it often. These are recipes that are inspired by my heritages, my travels, things I’ve learned about around town (like Funeral Hotdish!!), upcoming holidays, seasons, nostalgic food I grew up with, new ingredients, things I see on Instagram, and things I’m just really gosh darn craving. I schedule them out for blog posts based on what makes sense for upcoming holidays and seasons, and if there’s a recipe I want to make but there are already a million recipes for it on the internet and I don’t feel like I have anything to add to the world of, say, pumpkin blondies, I get rid of it.

When I commit to a recipe, I have a brainstorming session of what the outcome should be. It looks like me sitting on the couch, meditating on the theme of… well in this case, the donut. I think about how it should taste, what it should look like, ideally how it should be made, and, importantly, why I’m evening daring to take up space on the internet about it. Each recipe should serve a purpose, whether it’s to share a new idea or new-to-me ingredient or technique, tell a story, create a new design, or put my spin on an already existing idea. 

In the case of these black and white donuts, I’d never seen a black and white donut before and they sounded tasty and cute looking, so that’s the purpose! In terms of flavor, they should reflect the black and white cookie, which is cakey and flavored with vanilla and lemon, maybe a tiny bit of almond, and has a light tang thanks to either buttermilk or sour cream in the batter. The glaze should be thick and it should dry nicely, providing a sweet delicious shell.

Also coinciding with this brainstorming session is a research phase where I read all about black and white cookies and their history, as many recipes for them as I can find, I look at the #blackandwhitecookie hashtag to get design inspiration, and basically try and do everything short of rewatching the entirety of Seinfeld in order to find the black and white cookie mentions, because at that point that’s safely considered *getting sidetracked*. 

Basically I become one with the black and white cookie/donut. 

And then I write a first draft of a recipe, buy any necessary groceries, and start the best part, phase 2: making stuff!

What used to be constant battles of Molly versus the missing/oil-stained post-it note with all of the recipe scribbles or Molly versus counter space versus a laptop that’s balanced on top of the flour canister is now a streamlined system of pulling up the recipe on my TV screen, which is hooked up to the NUC Mini PC. (You’ve rarely seen my TV screen because I always hide it when my photographers, Chantell and Brett, come to photograph recipes! But it’s how I stay sane working by myself most days, because I can have Bojack on in the background and then toggle over to my word doc to make recipe notes.)

I make a version of the recipe according to the draft, taste it, record any notes, and then copy and paste a new recipe draft with any recipe changes in bold. And I also bring in backup in the form of Eggboy. He may not know the first thing about making a donut but he is a really good taste tester! He is not afraid of telling me when a recipe sucks and is articulate in telling me what needs to change. And then it’s up to me to figure out how to achieve those changes. So then I get back to work and continue to test until it’s basically so good that Eggboy just doesn’t have any words and continues to take bites because he can’t help it and it’s as if the donut has taken over his brain. It might take 26 versions, it might just take 3 or 4.

This recipe didn’t take too many versions because I already had a vanilla baked donut recipe that I liked (in Molly on the Range) and my primary focus was on sneaking in the lemon flavor and paying close attention to how that added acidity affected the rise of the donuts. I honed in on baking soda amounts and played around with a few different measurements there. I also tried a couple of different methods of glazing the donuts and found that a combination of dipping the donuts into the glaze and using a spatula to help it onto the donuts created my fave aesthetic.

After this testing period, leftovers get wrapped up and given to people or stuck in the freezer. These donuts will get defrosted and put out for beet harvest next week!

Once the recipe is where I want it to be, I move on to phase 3: prepping its photo shoot. I write down any particular steps I want to document, think about what angles will make the finished product look the best, pick out props and a wardrobe that will match everything, clean the kitchen, prep ingredients and complete any steps of the recipe that I won’t be showing on camera. For these donuts, I made some finished donuts, some unglazed donuts, some that just had white glaze on them, and a bowl each of chocolate and vanilla glaze. This prep usually happens the day before a shoot and I typically am prepping a few recipes at a time since shoot days often include a handful of recipes. I often have an assistant help with this but my kitchen assistant, Grace, just moved to Michigan :(

Phase 4: photo shoot! The morning of a shoot, I brush my hair and put on makeup! The first time in probably a while. And then Chantell and Brett arrive from Fargo and we get to work! Shoot days are fun because it’s so satisfying to play with finished recipes and we listen to music or have movies on in the background and at the end of the day I try to send them home with as many donuts and cakes as they’ll allow me to give them. 

Once I receive the photos, I sit on my couch and do phase 5: write the post. This is great because it’s cozy and also because I can have the NUC Mini PC hooked up to the hot tub-sized TV that Eggboy *had* to get last year to watch bike races. It’s great though because it’s big enough to see clearly from my couch and the NUC is powerful enough to deal with tons of photos on a regular basis without slowing down.

By this time I’ve been thinking about whatever my post is about for so long that ideally the words just flow right out. Sometimes—ok a lot of times—they don’t though and that might be when I get up and walk to the refrigerator, eat a piece of cheese, take a shower, or look at my phone. This is when 90% of procrastination happens. It’s gotta happen sometime!

Once the post is written, I organize which photos I’m going to use and how they’ll be laid out, and edit the recipe. Those get put into the backend of my site either by me or my assistant Hillary, along with any tags and links. And then it’s posted!

Ta da!

*Eats a donut*

black and white donuts

makes 12-16 donuts

Ingredients

Donuts

1 3/4 c (228g) all-purpose flour

1 c (200g) sugar

3/4 tsp kosher salt

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Zest of 1/2 a lemon

1 large egg

1/2 c (120 ml) buttermilk

1/4 c (50 ml) flavorless oil

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp almond extract

1/4 c (59 ml) water

Vanilla Glaze

2 1/4 c (270g) powdered sugar

1 tb light corn syrup

3-4 tb whole milk or buttermilk

A pinch of kosher salt

A splash of vanilla extract

Chocolate Glaze

2 c (240g) powdered sugar

1/4 c (20g) unsweetened cocoa powder

1 tb light corn syrup

3-4 tb whole milk or buttermilk

A pinch of kosher salt

Clues

To make the donuts: preheat the oven to 375ºF. Coat a 12-cavity donut pan with cooking spray and set aside.

In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, baking soda, and zest. In a medium bowl, whisk together the egg, buttermilk, oil, vanilla, almond extract, and water. Add the wet mixture to the dry mixture and stir until just combined. Fill a piping bag or ziploc bag with a corner snipped off with the batter and pipe the batter into the donut pans, filling each cavity halfway. If you have any remaining batter, you can bake it in a second batch.

Bake for 12 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into a donut comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Remove to a rack and cool completely. (A mini spatula helps remove them from the pans!)

To make the glazes, first make the vanilla glaze: mix together the sugar, corn syrup, 3 tablespoons of milk, salt, and vanilla. Add additional milk little by little until the mixture is pourable (you might not need the full remaining tablespoon). You want to be careful not to add too much milk because you want the glaze to be thick and opaque, but if the glaze is too thick it will have a hard time sticking to the donuts. You can always make adjustments by adding more powdered sugar to make it thicker or more milk to thin it out. Place a baking sheet or piece of parchment paper underneath the rack with the donuts and dip each donut halfway into the vanilla glaze, scraping off any excess glaze from the bottom and returning to the rack to dry. Let the vanilla glaze dry, 20-30 minutes if you’re impatient like me, but more like an hour or so if you want it to really be nice and solid, and then make the chocolate glaze.

To make the chocolate glaze, use the same method as mixing the vanilla glaze, and then carefully dip the unglazed half of the donuts into the chocolate glaze. With the chocolate side, I find it’s helpful to use a spatula to help the glaze nudge right up against the vanilla. Scrape excess glaze off of the bottom, place back on the rack, and let dry.

Enjoy!

These are best the day of, but can be kept for an additional couple of days at room temp in an airtight container.

-yeh!

photos by Chantell and Brett Quernemoen

Thank you, Intel, for sponsoring this post! The Intel NUC Mini PC is a small but mighty computer that is shorter than a tennis ball and ready to make photo editing and content creation a breeze. It’s equipped with Windows 10 and the latest Intel Core processors, and videos and movies can be viewed in 4k Ultra HD!

behind the scenes of #girlmeetsfarm

Girl Meets Farm has been out in the world for a day and a half now and life is totally different. I’m exhausted, dehydrated, disoriented, I have a headache... oh wait jkjkjk that’s just what I get for trying to keep up with all of the young people on this bachelor party romp. But actual jk, I’m fine, not hungover, and life isn’t different at all except that a lot of people have now seen my gold Buick boat and I feel exposed. I was like... should I rent a cooler looking car? And they said no, the Buick boat is great. And I think they were pulling my leg but it’s too late to do anything about that now I guess. 🤷🏻‍♀️

One of my favorite parts about this TV process has been learning what goes on behind the scenes. Starting from weeks before the crew arrived up through, well, now, I’ve been learning so much about what happens on the other side of the camera and it’s fascinating and cool! Except for my first gigantic teenage-style breakout since high school due to wearing way more makeup than normal. But other than that, I want to tell you about the behind the scenes of Girl Meets Farm!! In no particular order, here are some of my favorite tidbits:

Every item that has a logo or brand name written on it has to be “Greeked.” I suspected this would be the case because ever since being fascinated by the groceries on 30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray, which looked like they were taken directly from the Kohl Children’s Museum fake grocery store, I have not seen one branded label on a cooking show. I never knew it was called “Greeking” though and it was cool to watch the art directors and culinary team find creative ways to cover labels. For the fridge, we printed out pictures from my wedding and grabbed a photo booth shot of Michelle and me and taped them over the Smeg label. Color coordinated washi tape and gaffer’s tape covered the KitchenAid label and book titles, and tiny dots of red nail polish covered up the Our Family logo on spice bottles. After the shoot I kept most of the Greeking on as souvenirs.

My kitchen got a facelift. In the days leading up the shoot, the art directors wove their magic wands all over my kitchen and turned it into the most put together version of itself. They completely decluttered it and arranged the open shelves using a mix of pieces I owned already and new pieces that they brought that fit in with the vibe. Even though they had taken photos of what it looked like before they rearranged so that they could put it back exactly how it was when they left, I had them leave it the way they arranged it because it looked too good! 

I was able to assemble my own wardrobe. I don’t know how this works on other shows but I am very picky about clothes so I was glad that I could waffle and hem and haw by myself in the Gap dressing room in the weeks leading up to the shoot. I had to get two of everything in case I spilled. Pretty much everything I wore came from Gap or Old Navy, and then I wore a bunch of new aprons from my friends at Enrich and Endure.

Each recipe was filmed twice. The first time going through the recipe was focused on getting clear lines from me describing the steps and talking about the dish, and the second time was focused on getting closer shots of my hands adding specific ingredients, mixing, chopping, etc. Before getting started on filming a recipe, we shot “grabs.” Grabs are closeup shots of my hands grabbing tools and ingredients. So if you see me say something like “I’m going to grab the harissa” and then you see my hand grabbing the harissa, those two shots were actually taken like 20 minutes apart. 

After filming a recipe, the cameramen took beauty shots of the dishes. These are the styled closeup photos that you’ll see in the recipe teasers and online with the recipes. Since I wasn’t in these shots, this gave me about 15 minutes to go outside, review my recipe notes for the next recipe, stuff my face with Trader Joe’s mini crackers, and hydrate.

Every morning I spent an hour in our guest room having my hair and makeup done by Jane! It was the best start to the day. We listened to Rex Orange County, I’d sip my coffee, and she told me all about working as a makeup artist in Los Angeles. She had the coolest stories. About halfway through hair and makeup, Kelsi, a production assistant, would come in with my breakfast, a green smoothie. I was such a Healthy Hannah compared to the pilot shoot, when every morning I got a breakfast sandwiches delivered to me. 

Dinner was usually leftovers from the shoot or takeout, often eaten in bed because we had nowhere else to sit. Our dining room was filled with cameras and monitors and our living room was set up with props. So we’d eat like meatball sliders and watch Mad Men in bed, cause that was another thing, we got to move the TV from our kitchen into the bedroom! Eggboy is completely against having a TV in our bedroom but because we had to move it out of our kitchen, I convinced him that there was no other logical place for it to go. I felt like a kid on a sick day watching The Price Is Right, it was the best thing ever. After dinner I’d get ready for bed and then review all of my recipe notecards for the next day. 

Ok so speaking of recipe notecards, I had a lot of fun organizing all of my notes. Like, straight up school-supply-shopping-on-steroids fun. The weekend before the crew arrived it occurred to me that the best way to keep my recipe notes in order would be to have them in a binder, so I went directly to Target and Michael’s and got all of the prettiest binder making materials. Omg it was so fun. I went with a pink and purple theme and got enough stickers to hand out to the crew in case any of them had any sticker emergencies. And then I bought Gelly Rolls for the first time in 20 years and nearly cried in nostalgic happiness. I made one binder section for each episode and at the beginning of the section I included a page protector for all of my notecards and stickers and then within the section I kept the script that had a flow of the episode all written out and any other related materials, like the sheet music for the Bach that I played with my dad for the episode where he visits. Each section also had a designated Gelly Roll color. During the filming I kept my binder in a designated spot on a table behind the cameras and then would bring just the notecards with me to the kitchen and keep them in a drawer close by so I could reference them at a moment’s notice. 

Alight, those are all of the things I can think of for now! If I think of anything else, I’ll tell you in my upcoming Girl Meets Farm posts, where I plan to share recipe outtakes!! And if you missed the premiere on Sunday, that same episode will be playing again tomorrow! Check your local listings!

-Yeh!

All photos except for the cell phone photos by Chantell and Brett!