Category Archives: baking

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July 31, 2011

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baking, bread, Food & Drink

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Making the most delicious banana bread

Have I ever mentioned that I love to eat bananas? To fuel my habit of eating them, I almost always buy more than I can eat before they go bad. Rather than putting them out into the compost where the rats will eat them, I throw them in the freezer once they are over-ripe.

Then every so often, I make them into some of the best banana bread I’ve ever tasted.  I always make two loaves at a time. The best part of that banana bread is the fact that it’s semi-healthy because you use yogurt instead of butter.  To make this delicious bread, I follow a recipe from Craftzine but I go heavy on the bananas, lighter on the nutmeg, and heavy on the cinnamon and ginger. The ginger gives the bread a nice bite.

First, I defrost 8 or more bananas (in case some aren’t good enough to use). I used to peel them while frozen but after a while my fingers were way too cold.

Eww… frozen and now defrosted bananas

All the ingredients ready for mixing:

The finished batter:

And after baking for an hour, the delicious product, so good that we eat some right away:

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July 11, 2011

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baking, bread, Food & Drink

Making beer bread… again

After my last attempt at beer bread I decided to try again, this time with fresh baking powder. This time I made the plain variety from Bake at 350 using Anchor Christmas Ale:

I only baked the bread for 50 minutes at this time, in the hope that would make the bread fluffier with a softer crust.  The bread was somewhat less dense this time but still had a rather hard crust. I’m not certain why the crust is so hard but the bread is pretty tasty warm out of the oven:

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June 26, 2011

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baking, desserts, Food & Drink, side dishes

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Baking plantains & peaches

I purchased a plantain because I know that I like them but have never made them at home. I prefer the non-sweet version so I decided to try out baked tostones.  While I had the oven on I decided to whip up some baked peaches since we had some very ripe peaches.

The recipe for tostones all called for green plantains. My plantain wasn’t green but I think it turned out fine anyhow.

I sliced up the plantain into thick slices and tossed with salt and just a drizzle of olive oil.

After spreading them out on a baking sheet that was covered in olive oil spray and baking for about 15 minutes, I flipped and smashed them with the bottom of a cup.  They baked for another 15 – 20 minutes and were done! I enjoyed them but next time I’ll be sure to have some dipping sauce to go along with the tostones.

At the same time, I sliced up some peaches, tossed them with some brown sugar, cinnamon and honey and baked them until soft. Delicious!

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June 16, 2011

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baking, beer, bread, Food & Drink

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Making beer bread

Since I came across this recipe for different types of beer bread on Bake at 350, I knew I wanted to try it. My previous experience with beer bread was delicious. A softball party for team “Beer Me” was the perfect opportunity to bake up a batch, or two as it turns out.

I decided to make a loaf of the orange nutmeg for the party and a loaf of gruyere and rosemary for my husband to take to work.

The recipe calls for self rising flour which we don’t have and I’ve never used it before. My husband pointed me to wikipedia which says you can make your own self rising flour by adding 1 tsp of baking power and 1/2 tsp of salt to regular flour. I combined those ingredients with a bottle of beer (Avery White for the orange nutmeg bread), 3 tablespoons of sugar, zest from an orange and freshly grated nutmeg.

For the gruyere and rosemary bread, I used a bottle of Real Ale Pale Ale.

I then baked the breads for 1 hour at 350. The bread smelled wonderful.  When I took it out, the orange rosemary bread was drizzled with a fresh squeezed orange juice and powdered sugar glaze.

The gruyere rosemary bread was covered with butter.

While the bread looked tasty, it wasn’t quite as good as I hoped.  The baking powder must have been too old because the bread turned out too hard.  I also think a sweeter bread would have been better.

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May 31, 2011

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baking, desserts, Food & Drink

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Making… Smores pie?

What’s a Smores pie you say? Well, it’s down right delicious of course! The second I saw it in my Vegetarian Times magazine, I knew I had to make it. Memorial Day seemed like the perfect occasion!

Vegetarian times taught me that marshmallow fluff is vegetarian! No gelatin like normal marshmallows (this is good for my vegetarian friends).

My husband consented to allow me to use his Malley’s dark chocolate that was still left from Valentine’s Day. Malley’s is a delicious chocolate company in the Cleveland area.

I had to break it up and put it in a bowl:

Heat soy cream to a simmer:

And then pour the soy cream over the chocolate and whisk in one egg, some vanilla and a pinch of salt:

The chocolate mixture was then poured into a prepared graham cracker crust and baked for 25 minutes. The edges of the pie crust were covered with foil to keep them from getting too brown.

After cooling for an hour it was time to “spread” on the marshmallow fluff.  Well, marshmallow fluff is not the kind of stuff you spread. It’s more like a plop:

Somehow I spread it out enough and then put it under the broiler until it was brown on top:

The finished product was very rich and delicious. Definitely more flavor than a campfire smores!

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March 13, 2011

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baking, beer, desserts, Food & Drink

Making stout into cake

Yes, I really did bake two cakes this week. The second one was for my husband’s birthday. This is the second time I’ve made this chocolate stout cake from use real butter.  Yes, the recipe really is in that blog post after you scroll past all of the pictures.

This year, I changed two things from what I did last year. I substituted half of the butter for applesauce to make the cake moister (which worked) and I used a milk chocolate icing that my husband bought rather than the fudge icing I used last year. I recommend the fudge icing. Both years I used Guinness in the cake because we happened to have some and it’s not fancy enough for my local beer snob to drink.

Guinness, butter, and applesauce, oh my!

Heating the stout and butter, and then after the butter melted, adding the applesauce:

Mixing in the cocoa powder:

Mixing eggs and sour cream:

Adding the chocolate mixture:

Ready for the oven!

Out of the oven!

First layer iced:

Done!

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March 13, 2011

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Making a breakfast birthday cake

I got to do some more baking recently for a coworkers birthday. This baking was special because the celebration had to be at 9:30 am.  So instead of a dessert cake, I came across this Cinnamon Apple Cake recipe from Cooking Light that is perfect for breakfast! Also, I was amazed by the insane number of outstanding reviews it had, so I knew I just had to try it. An added bonus is the fact that the cake is relatively low in calories.

My husband bought the largest organic Fuji apples I have ever seen so I ended up chopping up just two of them and still had way more than the 3 cups called for. To make apple chopping easy, I used my peeler / slicer / corer contraption from Williams Sonoma, given to me a few years back by my mother-in-law. That thing rocks if you bake with apples often!

So many apples…

Dry ingredients combined:

(P.S. My apple corer contraption is the same red as my Kitchen Aid mixer, another awesome baking gift from my mother-in-law)

Mmmm… apples all cinnamon’d up and ready for use!

Folded into the dough – I noticed this recipe seemed to have more apples than dough, which of course makes it delicious. Also, I used extra apples. I spread some on top too because I had so many. And maybe I ate a few of the chunks.

The cake was baked in my 9” springform pan and that worked out just fine. I think next time I will bake it for a bit longer because I don’t think it was quite cooked all the way. I subtracted the 5 minutes for my larger pan as the recipe suggested but I think that was too many.

It earned rave reviews from my coworkers (and myself). Definitely worth making again.

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January 25, 2011

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baking, Food & Drink

Trying to replicate fat free ginger cookies

The Whole Foods near us makes these absolutely amazing fat free ginger cookies. The fat free-ness of the cookies is not the draw for me, but rather their wonderful texture – a bit firm around the edges and perfectly chewy on the inside. These cookies are not anything like ginger snaps. In fact, the cookies are so good that when I decide I want one and the store doesn’t have them I get kind of upset. Just ask my husband.

Before Christmas I decided to try to find a recipe for to make these cookies at home. Of course the internet delivered because others apparently have the same fetish for these cookies. They’re that good. Here’s the recipe from David Lebovitz that I used.

I’ve now made these cookies twice. If you read that recipe, I haven’t tried cooking down the applesauce, but I intend to next time. I also have not used the candied ginger. Instead, I just use a bit more ground ginger and cinnamon. I figure you can’t get enough of those delicious spices.

The first time I made them was when we were at my Mom’s house in Ohio for Christmas. They came out pretty well, although they were a bit softer than I wanted them to be after baked.

The second time was just this past weekend. This time, the dough wasn’t as sticky after being mixed up. I think it needed to be stickier. My guess is that the egg whites I used here were smaller than the ones I used at Mom’s (I think they were different sized eggs). Then I refrigerated the dough for more than a day so that probably made it even less sticky.

Once the cookies were done baking, they hadn’t spread out this time like they were supposed to. I had to take a cup and smash them so they were somewhat flat. Despite that, the texture of these cookies was better than my first attempt with the outside being firmer and the inside chewy. Because the cookies didn’t spread they are pretty small looking. Next time I will roll them into larger balls to start. I’ll probably also try adding a third egg white because we use smaller eggs at our house.

The dough after being mixed:

Making the balls and rolling them in sugar and cinnamon:

Ready for the oven:

Out of the oven and squashed by a cup:

And finally, the chewy center:

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January 24, 2011

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baking, Food & Drink, Gifts

Making my own vanilla extract

I like to bake. I try not to do it to often because I REALLY like to eat what I bake. Luckily, we bring baked goods to work for co-worker’s birthdays so I can bake and share fairly often.

That means that I go through a lot of vanilla extract. Recently, I came across an article in an old print version of Craftzine (this link doesn’t work on mobile devices) that tells you how to make your own vanilla! Of course I had to try it. Supposedly you make so much that you can even give batches away as gifts.

The instructions in the magazine are pretty detailed so I won’t rewrite them all.

To prepare to make my own vanilla, I first purchased 1/2 lb of vanilla beans (planifolia) for super cheap at Vanilla Saffron Imports.

I also picked up a handle of Tito’s Vodka and a 4 oz bottle of Nielson-Massey Vanilla extract.

The ingredients:

The article recommends seeding your vanilla batch with good vanilla extract that you’ve purchased to make the process go faster. I did that, but only used half of my extract bottle and instead doubled the beans that I put in my jar.

My jar filled with 2 oz of vanilla extract, 12 vanilla beans split down the middle and then topped off with Tito’s Vodka:

After 4 – 6 weeks I should be able to pour some vanilla out of this jar for use in my normal baking exploits. Each time you do that, you can top the jar back off with vodka.  For now, I’ve stored the remainder of my vanilla beans with some sugar as the package recommends. Hopefully they’ll still be good when I need them for my next batch. I’ve not worked with vanilla beans before. I’ll let you know how this experiment turns out.