(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) - Happy holidays from the Bread Monk.

Join me in the kitchen and I'll show you how to make a special treat for Christmas morning, orange biscuit twists with a beautiful chocolate drizzle.

(calm music) Hmm.

Oh any day.

- Could hit the brake on one side and throttle the other side and you could spin right around.

(laughs) (calm music) - We started collecting and we got outta hand.

Well, there's 167 in here and it went downhill from there.

(calm music) (calm music continues) - Performances are the best part.

Giving people the opportunity to see something new and kind of seeing that, "Oh."

That gasp or, you know, the eyes big or, you know, just the enjoyment of a different type of music.

(calm music) (calm music continues) (calm music) (calm music continues) - Hi, I am Father Dominic, the Bread Monk.

You may remember me from my cooking show on PBS.

I'm a hometown boy here in Peoria, I grew up on the East Bluff and developed a great love of cooking through my mother's kitchen, the Public Library, and watching PBS, big fan of Julia Child back in the day.

And she really inspired me to really enjoy doing things in the kitchen as much as my mother did.

And so I'd like to share that love with you when you start doing your baking for the holidays 'cause that's a big thing, you know.

I want something special for the holidays, but I don't have four hours to make cinnamon rolls, or how do I get it all to work out when I'm trying to make breakfast?

This is a quick recipe for orange biscuit twists.

I've been using it for years and my cousin Chris who's a great baker, tells me that it's his go-to recipe as well.

So it's a very easy way to get a nice pastry for a holiday morning so we're gonna start with a couple of cups of all purpose flour.

And when you measure this, you wanna be very careful that you not scoop hard, but rather spoon the flour into the measuring cup and level it off.

Because otherwise you're gonna get a very compacted cup of flour, it'll be too much.

We're only using half a cup of milk plus an egg, that's all the liquid that's gonna be in here.

So you wanna be careful not to use too much flour.

We're gonna go ahead and add to that tea tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of baking powder and then just a half a teaspoon of salt, okay?

And we're gonna take all that and we're just gonna whisk it together.

And remember, whisking together takes a little longer than you realize.

You have to whisk for a long time to make sure they're fully combined.

Now we're gonna add some butter to this as well and so that will help combine it as well.

But don't just give it a couple of stirs, you wanna stir it more than one time.

All righty.

Now I'm gonna get some cold butter out of the refrigerator because if you use warm butter, you're not gonna get a flaky pastry.

So I have a whole stick of butter here and I cut it into small pieces and I'm just to add that to my dry ingredients, just kind of mix that in there and then I'm gonna take a pastry blender and cut the butter in.

Now I wanna make sure you understand the difference between these two.

Both of these are pastry blenders.

The one here has got wire blades on it and this one has metal, you know, like knife blades almost on it, okay?

This is really good.

If you're gonna start making pie with room temperature shortening, okay?

That will work well.

But with cold butter, that will bend and you will take forever and you will not get a good result.

So look for this kind of pastry blender instead so you won't be quite so frustrated.

So we're gonna simply blend this in until we have something that has the appearance of coarse crumbs, that's an expression you see often in recipes.

So as you can see, I'm cutting the butter in.

All right, that's about where we wanna be.

If you take a look at that, you can see that there are still some pieces of butter and there'll be even more noticeable when we add the liquid, okay?

But they're still pieces of butter, but they're quite small, smaller than peas.

All right, so we're gonna set that aside and then we're gonna put an egg in with our milk.

This is just a half a cup of milk, which doesn't seem like much, but it will be fine.

And then we're gonna put a single egg in there and use a large egg.

If you've got smaller eggs, you might consider using one and a half.

And then we're just gonna whisk that in there.

I love these little things, these little push whisks when you're doing this kind of work, it's really perfect.

You gotta be careful the first couple of whisks, you don't wanna go too hard, okay?

We're gonna set that aside.

And this is gonna go in here, we're gonna make a little well and then just pour that in.

It's best if your milk is cold too because you want it to be cold like your butter is cold.

We're gonna use our famous dough whisk which you've seen me use before if you've ever watched public television and see how quickly that comes together.

This is one of those doughs that you can't like just use a spoon.

At some point you gotta get your hands into it, okay?

So we're gonna set that aside and just start using our hands to squish this together making sure that I get all of that flour that's in the bottom, okay?

There's little bits of flour and it's kind of flaking together.

You wanna make sure that you're not leaving any of that in the bottom so you have your full recipe coming together.

As you can see it comes together very quickly.

All right, I'm gonna get the rest of that out on the counter 'cause it's gonna be easier there than in the bowl I think.

And we're just gonna need it a few strokes, okay?

There we go.

We could actually sneak the rest of that in there, that liquid.

I don't wanna waste that actually.

All right, that looks pretty good to me.

I don't think I want to go too much further.

It's a little bit sticky.

Notice it's kind of sticky, don't think you've done anything wrong, that's fine.

We are gonna actually leave that back in its bowl and let it sit for a while to firm up and in the meantime we're gonna make the filling with sugar and some orange zest.

So we're making an orange flavored filling for these biscuit twists and I've got a half a cup of sugar in the bowl before me, and I'm using this zester.

You can see about the amount I'm getting here.

I'm gonna try to avoid some of these greener parts.

Okay, that should be plenty of zest right there, okay?

We knock that out of there.

And then, yeah, you can do this with a fork or something, it's just easier with your hands, okay?

So if you've got clean hands, just go ahead and mix this together until all of the zest is evenly distributed.

Oh this smells so good.

Yeah, I'm really digging this.

This is like part of the great fun of baking is that you use all your senses.

you know, there's the feel of the dough and there's the scent of the ingredients, taste, the heat on your face from the oven, you know, the visual, you know, pleasures of the various ingredients and when it comes outta the oven, all that sort of stuff and of course taste in the end so you can see there it is altogether.

And now I'm gonna clear a space so that I can roll out the dough and turn these into biscuit twists and we'll get our dough out.

You'll notice our dough has kind of firmed up a little bit.

It may be a little resistant to rolling out.

Don't let that concern you, okay?

But we're gonna lay out a little bit of flour.

I love this.

This is a Victorian flower duster, sometimes called a flower wand and it's marvelously useful.

It was invented for pie making so you wouldn't with your messy hands reach into the flower bin.

I've been using one for years and I love it.

So we're gonna try to get this to be as square as possible.

You can pat it out with your hands, but it does take a while.

But rolling it out is significantly easier and you can see this dough rolls out fairly well.

We wanna make sure that we keep adding small, small, small amounts of flour.

I will tell you too, it looks on camera like I'm putting a lot of flour down, it's the way it works with cameras, but I'm not.

This is a tiny amount, like a fraction of a teaspoon I'm putting down at a time.

So don't be thinking that I'm putting too much flour out 'cause that's gonna stiffen this dough far too much.

This is gonna take a while to get this all the way out and it may be necessary to do a little bit of surgery to kind of cut corners and that's okay.

So we're gonna cut some of these pieces off a little bit to even things out and just kind of piece together.

It's gonna be fine, the dough will stick together just beautifully.

And the way we make the actual biscuits will not in any way be affected by this piecemeal sort of thing.

I wanna make sure that this is gonna come up easily still, not stuck to the countertop.

Now, I'm gonna put the sugar on the bottom half, okay?

Only on the bottom half.

You just kind of spread it out there evenly.

You might not quite use all of it depending upon how big you made yours, but that looks pretty good.

Then we're gonna take this part here and fold it over just like that, okay?

That wasn't hard at all.

And then we're gonna take this and kind of pound it, okay?

Not roll it, but just kind of pound it so that it sticks together as best we can.

Now, if you're wondering about this, my brother Martin turns things on a lathe, okay?

You could do this with an ordinary knife or one of those cheap pizza cutters.

You know, you get at the grocery store, plastic, it doesn't matter.

But, you know, when you get something as magnificent as this for Christmas, you wanna get it out and use it.

So when I do pizza parties, I do it up brown.

Now we're gonna cut this into strips and that one on the end we're gonna lose and that one we're gonna straighten up just a little bit, okay?

And then we're gonna cut this into strips.

Don't be so fastidious that you get a ruler out, okay?

Or the angels will wheat for you.

It's holiday mornings, Christmas morning or whatever, you're celebrating Kwanzaa, or you're celebrating Hanukkah or whatever.

Don't make yourself crazy by thinking that everything has to be utterly flawless in that way.

It's fine, okay?

It's bread, it's gonna forgive you, I say it all the time, okay?

Some of these didn't line up perfectly.

All right, well we're gonna line them up then until they are more perfect, okay?

We're gonna take each of these and you see the sugar comes out a little bit, that's okay.

You haven't done anything wrong, okay?

And you're gonna give it a twist and leave it down on the counter while you twist it.

You'll be happier with the result, okay?

Just like that.

And make twists like that, okay?

And some of these are gonna be slightly different thicknesses that should not really bother you at all.

These are gonna go on a 9 by 13 pan baking sheet, like a cookie sheet with parchment on it.

And I really prefer parchment instead of spray, because the parchment, because it's white, you're less likely to have the sugar on the bottom burn and that could be a problem.

It's gonna go in the oven at 425 degrees for about 10 to 12 minutes, you wanna keep an eye on it and make sure again, that the sugar doesn't burn on the bottom and the top just begins to start to brown.

All right, let's see how these look.

Oh, Luigi, it's so beautiful.

Look at that.

Now, they do not turn quite as dark as you might think.

They don't brown as much as other things, but don't let that fool you and I'll show you why in just a minute.

So here's a batch I made earlier, and I wanna show you something.

You see, they don't turn very dark, okay?

But look at the bottom.

See, you don't wanna go any further than that, or it would've been burned.

That's a lovely caramelized layer of orange sugar right there so there's no reason to be sad about that at all.

Here's one way to finish it off, okay?

I took a little bit of orange juice from our zested orange and I put it in with some powdered sugar and then I threw in some of the leftover orange zest and sugar to give it some extra flavor.

Popped it in the microwave for about 20 seconds so that the sugar all melted and I'm gonna use this to brush it on like a glaze.

This is gonna give it that extra little bit of sweetness, and it really does kind of need some kind of topping, okay?

So a little extra sweetness, a little extra orange flavor.

All righty.

So you can see how... Oh, these are so pretty.

All right.

So, I'm gonna show you one other kind of topping that might be your favorite and that's a chocolate drizzle.

Okay, so this is my favorite way to finish these off because orange and dark chocolate or semi-sweet chocolate is kind of like a Christmas groove.

You know, I love that combination of flavor so I took some semi-sweet chocolate bits, I put 'em in the microwave in like 10 or 15 second increments so I made sure it didn't get overheated little by little.

It's just an ordinary snack bag, okay?

You kind of need it to make sure there's no lumps in it, get it until it's kinda lukewarm, and then just take an ordinary pair of scissors, make sure they're really sharp, and cut yourself a hole in the corner and you've got yourself a bit of a piping bag.

Now I start by pushing it up this way and then I am ready to gently squeeze it as we drizzle over the biscuit twists.

Oh.

Well, that was an eminently satisfying bake let me tell you.

I can't wait to serve these.

You can see we've got both the orange and the chocolate, a little bit of Christmas steak core, but these are not gonna stay on the plate very long anyway, because they're so delicious and they're tender and they've got a great flavor.

And again, you can do it in about 45 minutes on Christmas morning and be ready to feed your family a special treat.

So throughout the holiday season, I hope that you're baking your way through the holidays and especially that you're doing with love.

I'm Father Dominic, God bless and happy happiness.

(calm music) (calm music continues) (calm music continues) (calm music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) - We are in Hopedale, Illinois, at the Willis Snowmobile Museum.

(upbeat music) It is a building that houses 167 snowmobiles.

People coming in and in awe looking around, they just can't believe it and then they don't believe that there's three floors of them.

(upbeat music) Oh yeah, John Deere, Massey, Sno-Jet, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Polaris, Arctic Cat.

(upbeat music) This here is my favorite sled of the bunch.

It's pretty unique that it has two engines, two tracks, two brakes, brake on each side, throttle on each side.

I haven't rode it.

My father rode it and he said you could hit the brake on one side and throttle the other side and you could spin right around.

(upbeat music) My dad and my brother and I just started.

Well, we rode snowmobiles and then I got into an old one that I had rebought, I'd sold and then rebought and then redid it and then dad found one in Metamora and we redid that one and just from then on it was, see, you could find the ugliest one, the ugliest, the oldest, just kinda went from there.

It was fun.

The hunt was fun.

- It's a disease.

It... I don't know, just one of them things it was fun to ride.

First one was given to us, the second one became, we had to have a second one 'cause there was more than one of us to ride and it went downhill from there.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) We started collecting and we got outta hand.

Well, there's 167 in here and 325 in sheds and buildings and lofts and basements and everywhere else and we needed a place to put 'em, store 'em, so we decided we're gonna find a building, fix it up, and put our sleds in it and then it became a museum.

(upbeat music) Well, we bought the building in '97 and we put the first sleds in it in 2016.

It was a rundown, a lot of vines growing inside, roofs caving in, a lot of trash, it was wet, stinky, and needed a lot of work.

We gathered logs from the timber out at my dad's place, sold our own lumber, milled our own lumber, dried our own lumber, and put it up.

There's a lot of work in this building.

If you don't like snowmobiles, you might like the woodwork.

(upbeat music) We call this our grand finale so we take everybody through the other parts of the snowmobile museum and then bring them out here.

We're looking at a 1923 Model T Touring with a snow conversion kit.

Male carriers and doctors used them, I guess.

It was outta necessity, get around in the wintertime.

(upbeat music) We just hope people can come here and relive some memories.

You know, some of 'em used to ride sleds like this.

And, you know, they'll go and say, "Well, I used to ride a sled like that one."

And that's the ones you like.

(upbeat music) We collected sleds and we needed a place to put 'em and we're glad to share 'em with anybody.

(upbeat music) (upbeat bell music) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) - River Bend Runs is an advanced hand bell group.

We have volunteer ringers from Eastern Iowa, Western Illinois, kind of all over.

We're non-denominational, we aren't tied to any church, so we do get to ring some fun things.

- Handbells were first introduced in the United States by P.T.

Barnum.

He was traveling in Europe and heard a group of English hand bell ringers thought, "Oh, that would make a great act."

Brought them back to the United States, dressed them up in Swiss army outfits and called them the Swiss ringers because he thought that that would be much more exotic sounding than English hand bell ringers.

(calm music) (calm music continues) (upbeat bell music) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) - The group is fantastic, just fun to be around.

Everyone's lighthearted, we're all there for the same reason.

If we didn't love music, if we didn't want to ring the hard things, we wouldn't be here.

You know, we wouldn't have taken that step to audition.

There's a lot of fun, quirky personalities, but we all play well together.

- Well, it's a really fun group to work with.

So when I first started directing the group, I didn't know a lot about advanced handbells.

I've learned a lot from them.

I really feel that as a group, we've all grown together.

- We come to this group because it lets us be musical and we're with friends and it's a good time.

We work hard, we work really hard.

You do get some exercise points from it because of, you know, the amount of physical exercise ringing and if you're ringing the big bells, you know, it's two hands to ring some of them so you get a lot of exercise with it as well as the enjoyment of the music.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) And this one is a white chapel.

These are English made.

(handbell dinging) And the reason we use those on "First Noel" which is always our closer, we start with the white chapel (handbell dinging) for the soft part.

(handbell dinging) And we move to the turmeric because it's got more volume to it.

- [Narrator] We do two concerts a year.

We do our Christmas concerts and we do spring concerts.

- Performances are the best part.

Giving people the opportunity to see something new.

Whether they've played some bells at church, they've never heard handbells outside of movies maybe (laughs) and kind of seeing that gasp or that, you know, the eyes big, or, you know, just the enjoyment of a different type of music, it's exciting, (laughs) it's nerve nerve wracking, you're always a little nervous before you perform, but it's just a joy to be able to perform for people and to know what's appreciated.

(upbeat bell music) (upbeat bell music continues) - The best part for me is, as a musician, being able to make music at a very high level and being able to have a group of people to work with that are very expressive.

(upbeat bell music) Having the opportunity to work with a group of people who can make music at a high level is very rewarding.

And just having a group of people who get along with each other, it's a very tight knit fellowship and we do things away from bells together so it's just a really good community thing.

- It really is a great deal of fun and a great deal of satisfaction when you complete the concert and you go, "Wow, that really went well."

(laughs) We try to smile, but it's hard when you're at that concentration level and then to get to the end of the song and went, "Wow."

You know, we feel that when it went really, really well and the dynamics were really, really powerful and you can see all of us just break into a great big smile and we know we nailed it.

(upbeat bell music) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) - Hi, I'm Amy, the producer of "You Gotta See This".

I wanna take this moment and thank you for all the stories and experiences that you shared.

And thank you to our viewers and our supporters.

I wanted to say come back next year 'cause we have a lot of great stories lined up.

Thank you guys and happy holidays.

Here's another great song from the RiverBend Bronze bell ringers, Amy Grant's, "Emmanuel".

And fun fact, I was actually named after Amy Grant, that's maybe why I love the holidays so much.

Happy holidays.

See you next year.

(upbeat bell music) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues) (upbeat bell music continues)