Fruit Bread

Banana Nut Muffins and Peach Bread Loaves

I made four batches of bread last Saturday. Two were recipes I had used previously (Banana Nut and Pumpkin) and two were new recipes (Peach and Applesauce.)

I added craisisns and pecans to the applesauce bread and it turned out so good! The applesauce made it nice and moist.   The peach bread, however, was my favorite. The only substitution I made there was using canola oil rather than vegetable oil.  It seems that it would work really well with any kind of fruit that you wanted to substitute in.

Click for recipes: Peach Bread;  Applesauce Bread.

It worked really well timing wise for me to make the first batch of bread as muffins.  I had just enough time while those were cooking to wash the dishes and get the batter for the next batch into the larger loaf pans. The loaves take a little over an hour - so I had a break for a bit and then whipped up the next batch as muffins again, and then finally ended with the last batch as two loaves.  Start to finish I made 4 big loaves and 48 muffins in about 5 hours. The mini loaves you see in the picture is just the batter that was leftover from the muffin batches.

I love the simple pleasures in life.

I'll be freezing most of it so that we can pull it out as we want it. I've discovered that fruit bread freezes really well - in fact the pumpkin bread I know is better after it's been frozen.

And, of course, the best part of bread making is tasting the bread.  My breakfast the next morning was two slices of warmed peach bread and a cup of hot tea. Quite the satisfying way to start the day.

Wacky Cake

So I made this a long time ago, way back when I still lived at my apartment. I was looking through my photos and realized I never posted it though! It's called Wacky cake but i kind of want to call it Monster Cake as it makes a little face at one point in the prep process.





Funny story first. I was flipping through my America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook and reading through dessert recipes to try to find something simple to make and as I was reading their chocolate cake recipe I laughed at their note about "some recipes even called for us to make holes in the dry ingredients and pour the wet ingredients into those." They dismissed it as way too complicated. A couple years later ATK touts the brilliance of doing just that when they publish the wacky cake recipe in their Best Lost Recipes book. Amusing, no? I thought so.





Anyway. So, my Best Lost Recipes book tells me this recipe came about during WWII when people made do without rationed food. To make a cake without eggs they devised this method of mixing the ingredients in the pan so that when they poured vinegar into the pan it would react with the baking soda and give it a lift - but it has to go into the oven quickly after the reaction in order for the rise to stick. Here's the All Recipes version that's not all copyrighted by America's Test Kitchen though it looks really similar. Wacky Cake. Photos of my wacky cake journey!

You see all the dry ingredients mixed in the pan with the holes made above. Then you pour the liquids into the holes.

Pour water over the whole thing and stir.


Then you bake it comes out all normal looking like any other chocolate cake.



Dust with some powdered sugar and enjoy. Yum!

Pumpkin Bread Recipe

Here is my pumpkin bread recipe. I've made it as large loaves, small loaves, and muffins. All fabulous!

I went looking for my pumpkin bread recipe and realize it's one I found on allrecipes.com (my second favorite source of recipes because of the review feature)


Pumpkin Bread


The recipe indicates that this bread tastes better after it has been frozen and then thawed - and it's true. It's why I make big batches to thaw out throughout the year. (And why I stocked my mother's freezer full of pumpkin bread muffins before I moved. How's your stock doing, mom? :) )


Happy baking!


(Don't forget about the cookbook giveway! Deadline to enter is Friday morning!)

Note for Bakers

Yesterday I made banana bread. Yum! (America's Test Kitchen wins again with their recipe. You all really should buy their cookbooks. Maybe I'll do a give-away again. That would be a good pre-holiday cooking giveaway. Hmmm..watch for one!) I didn't have an loaf pans but did have a tube cake pan. My google-search for how to convert cooking time didn't turn up much - so here's my public service announcement for bakers everywhere.


A recipe that makes one loaf converted to a tube cake pan.


Double the recipe, increase cooking time by 1.5 (If it's directed to cook for an hour - cook for an hour and a half)


Please note these results are not scientific and your recipe could be different - but - there's a starting point!

Cranberry Bread

I found this recipe online last fall during Cranberry season. I just got around to making it though with some of the cranberries that I stored in my freezer when they were available.

Recipe:

2 c. flour
1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. baking soda
1 c. sugar
1 egg
3 T. melted butte
r1/2 c. orange juice
grated orange rind
2 T. hot water
1 c. raw cranberries
1/2 c. nuts (optional)

Quarter cranberries. Sift together dry ingredients. Combine egg, butter, OJ, hot water and orange rind. Mix in dry ingredients and fold in cranberries (and nuts, if using). Pour into greased loaf pan. Bake at 325F for 1 hour 10 minutes. Let cool (wrapped up) in refrigerator for 24 hours before cutting.


I doubled the recipe and I didn't have an orange rind to grind and used Orange-Pineapple juice rather than just OJ - but it turned out SO YUMMY.

Oh, and I totally ignored the "cool for 24 hours" rule and it was still GREAT!

Drizzle Icing

I posted a few months ago about my Grandmother's Chocolate Layer Cake and it's messy, but amazing, chocolate icing. A bit after I made that last cake I saw the idea of icing it on top of a wire rack so the icing could drip off without messing up the serving platter.

I made another of these cakes as a joint Birthday cake for my parents. (Mom was December 31st and Dad was January 26th) The new icing method was wonderful! (Though I think I'm still making my icing a bit too thin to begin with. Less milk!)

First - I don't think I've shown off my Christmas present here:

Isn't she pretty? :)

Anywho - on with the cake!

See how lovely that works? The leftover icing is caught in a jelly roll pan. At the end I slid the wire rack ot the other side of the pan and re-used some of the dripped icing. It worked so well! You do need to wait until the icing is COMPLETELY dry before you move it to the cake plate.

The birthday people admiring their cake. (You can see that I did not wait until the icing was completely cool by the chocolate smudges around the cake.. oh well!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Well, hello there. You look good enough to eat.

During a "there's got to be something to eat in here!" scavenge through my cupboards the other night I came across a hidden container of a few chocolate chips. Cookies! I pulled out my trusty America's Test Kitchen cookbook and looked up their recipe. I followed the recipe exactly and what came out of the oven were The. Best. Cookies. Ever. No, seriously - they were like the kind of cookies you get from a fancy bakery. So. Amazing. They were firm on the outside and chewy on the inside. Let's just say that it's a good thing that I only made a partial batch.

Side note: I baked the cookies on a silicone mat and the cookies cooked SO WELL. The bottoms were that perfect shade of brown and they came off the mat without the aid of a spatula. Very cool.

I did some googling to see if I could the recipe online somewhere else and the only place i found it was locked down under America's Test Kitchen website. (They do free 14 day trials, but after that you have to pay!). So, because I have much love for America's Test Kitchen because I have never once had a recipe turn out badly thanks to all of their time they put into their recipes - I'm going to respect their copyright on the recipe.

However, you too can get the recipe (and many others!) via these options:

1. Website - 14 days to get as many recipes as possible for free - plan your trial period wisely!

2. Buy the cookbook - for only about $20 on half.com.

3. Drive to my house and get the recipe!

Don't hate me for not giving you the recipe. Love America's Test Kitchen.

Why didn't I ever think of that!

I was watching some show on Food network the other day and the chef was making a cake with icing similar in consistency to the one I use on my chocolate layer cake. (The icing that creates a MESS because it's liquidy at first and it runs down the side and puddles at the bottom and gets chocolate all over the serving tray.)

However, the chef on the TV was NOT making a royal mess like I do. How did he avoid this? Why - he put the cake on top of a cooling rack to frost it! What a novel idea. All the extra icing falls down through the holes of the cooling rack and then you just move the cake to a pretty clean serving tray when you're done. Ingenious, I tell you! (And if you've been doing this for years feel free to gloat in your comments. I'm a little slow sometimes.)

Now to figure out how to get my cakes to not be lopsided. . . though asymetrical cakes ARE in style these days. . .

Peanut Butter Cookies

I call these cookies the "first thing I did as a teacher that inspired students". During the early days of my student teaching I made the cookies as a reward for the students one day and I had them all begging me for the recipe and they went home and made more cookies.

I made them this morning for Sunday School since we were doing a mini-wedding shower for a couple in our class. They were quite a hit there as well.


So, I have decided to lay out for you the very intricate process of The Great Peanut Butter Cookies:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F and grease a cookie sheet.
2. Mix together: 1 cup peanut butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 egg, and 1 tsp vanilla
3. Sprinkle Sugar on a large dinner plate.
4. Roll peanut butter mixture into 1/2"- 1" size balls, then coat the balls lightly in sugar.
5. Place peanut butter balls on cookie sheet 1/2"-1" apart.
6. Using a fork press dough balls down lightly in a criss-cross pattern.
7. Bake for 8-10 minutes until slightly brown.
8. Allow to cool for one minute - gently flip cookies with spatula and allow to continue to cool (about 10 minutes) until firm enough to handle.

Do be sure to flip the cookie - - it really helps with the texture. I recommend serving with a glass of cold milk.

Enjoy!

Grandmama's Chocolate Layer Cake

A small disclaimer. I know the cake is ugly. It's lopsided. It's got some weird cliff effect going on. The sides of the cake aren't really iced all the way. But, it tastes GREAT! And, sad to say, this is one of the prettier cakes I ever made. It's not split down the center or anything and from a few angles it almost looks straight. If I were a cake decorator all of my cakes would end up on Cake Wrecks.

Enough of a disclaimer - - this is Grandmama's Layer cake that I ate whenever we journeyed to South Carolina when I was a child. She always had a cake under the cake plate (the same cake plate that now sits in my kitchen) - and it was either a pound cake or a layer cake 99% of the time.

I made the layer cake for my Bible Study ladies tonight and if there's anything left after that it'll be taking a trip to the teacher's lunch room at work tomorrow for them to finish it off. (With a slice reserved in the freezer for my mother of course).

For the cake part - Duncan Hines butter/yellow cake mix. Cool Completely - slice each layer in half so that you have four layers total.

Icing: Melt 1 stick of butter and 1/2 cup of milk.

Sift together two cups of sugar, 1 TBS flour, and 1/4 cup cocoa. Add to melted butter and milk.

Cook over medium-high heat and boil hard for 3 minutes.

Remove from heat. Stir in one tsp vanilla and one tub of milk chocolate icing. Allow to set until slightly thickened (still pourable).

Cut a piece of parchment paper to fit your cake plate. Put one layer of the cake on the cake plate. Pour icing over cake and spread to the edges

Repeat with all layers. Drizzle icing down the side and use a spatula to smooth over the edges. Icing will pool down to the bottom - use your spatula to spread this back up the sides of the cake.

Once covered - allow icing to cool and harden.

Trim off the excess parchment paper with the icing mess to make your cake a bit more presentable (and hopefully yours is not lopsided)

Enjoy with a class of cold milk or a hot cup of coffee!

Making Bread

The other day at an estate sale I picked up this very simple bread tray. Antique reproduction if you will. It is pewter colored and has an engraving on the base of some men in a wheat field and it says "Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread." I don't know why I liked it - but I did. So, when one has a bread tray one should make bread!

(I do believe this is the first picture of me on this blog - hello everyone!)

Here's my preferred recipe for when I have a couple of hours to enjoy the kneading, punching, rising, kneading, baking, smelling, cooling process of making bread. It's great as a breakfast bread lightly toasted with some fruit or jelly on top.

I don't do the bread machine thing. If I'm going to go to the trouble to make brad - I want to really experience it! Besides, there is no where in this small apartment kitchen to store yet another kitchen appliance anyway.

Amish White Bread

2 cups warm water
2/3 cup white sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons active dry yeast (2 packets typically)
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup vegetable oil
6 cups bread flour

1. In a large bowl, dissolve the sugar in warm water, and then stir in yeast. Allow to proof until yeast resembles a creamy foam.
2. Mix salt and oil into the yeast. Mix in flour one cup at a time. Knead dough on a lightly floured surface until smooth. Place in a well oiled bowl, and turn dough to coat. Cover with a damp cloth. Allow to rise until doubled in bulk, about 1 hour.
3. Punch dough down. Knead for a few minutes, and divide in half. Shape into loaves, and place into two well oiled 9x5 inch loaf pans. Allow to rise for 30 minutes, or until dough has risen 1 inch above pans. (make sure you wait for the full rise - not just 30 minutes! I got impatient and my bread was a little flat :( )
4. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.

Enjoy!

For When You Need Chocolate Cake NOW

A friend showed me a link to a 5-minute chocolate cake you bake in the microwave. (No. Really) So, of course I had to try this out.

You can find the recipe here: http://www.dizzy-dee.com/recipe/chocolate-cake-in-5-minutes

I whipped up a quick peanut butter frosting recipe to spread on top:

2 Tbs softened butter (room temp)

1/4 cup cream peanut butter

1/2 c powdered sugar

beat together

beat in 2-3 tsp of milk (room temp) gradually until you reach desired consistency.

Not counting the "let the cold stuff get to room temp" time - it probably took me 20 minutes to get the ingredients together, make it, wait for the cake to set, frost, and clean-up.

I thought this a very good cake for the chocolate craving you may get - I wouldn't bake 20 of them to take as your pot-luck contribution - but it was very good! I enjoyed it warm with the peanut butter slightly melting into the cake the most. And, of course, I recommend a nice cold glass or organic milk to go with this tasty treat!