Cinnamon Swirl Bread

Oct 17, 2015

I’ve been sitting on this one for a while.

Why, you ask?  It’s cinnamon swirl bread, which is a total no-brainer.  Gooey, cinnamony goodness spiraling through a tender, crumby loaf.  And it is.  But for some reason when I made it a few months ago, I wasn’t totally in love with it.  The filling was awesome, but the bread was just…fine.  The texture was good, but the outside was crustier than I wanted and the bread’s flavor (it tasted like…bread) was a disconnect from the sweet filling.

But I’ve come to see the error of my ways, because you deserve cinnamon swirl bread in YOUR life too.  I’ve made a few adjustments to the recipe to make the bread and filling feel like they’re part of the same recipe, including adding a teaspoon of cinnamon and a little extra sugar to the dough.  The filling was perfect just as it was.  

Unleavened Almond Bread

Apr 20, 2014

I apparently don’t read directions well, which is why my stash of unleavened bread ended up molding with a few days to go (fridge, schmridge). So Sabbath morning I needed to make something to take me through the last few Days of Unleavened Bread.

I considered just making the same soft unleavened sandwich bread that I’d made a few days earlier, but decided something a little sweeter was in order. My Aunt Paula had sent me this recipe, one of their favorites, so I gave it a try.

I’m a sucker for almond flavor to begin with, and this was super simple to whip up. I took the sugar amount down a little, but it’s up to you how sweet you want it. I also used a combination of white flour, whole wheat flour, and almond meal, which gave it an awesome texture. All-in-all, this one’s a keeper!

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Flaxseed Muffins

Apr 5, 2014

Last weekend I decided to make a few changes. Little changes. Healthy changes.

By and large I lead a fairly healthy life—I eat well, exercise a lot, take care of myself (except the working too much and lack of sleep). But I’ve slipped into some bad habits (*coughtoobusyforbreakfastcough*) and feel like my body isn’t quite firing on all cylinders. But since I’m pretty overwhelmed with life right now, I knew I couldn’t do anything that required too much thought or effort.

So I made a list last weekend of a few things I was going to work on during the week. The first has turned out to be somewhat life-changing. It’s simple—before I go to bed I fill up a big glass with water and put it by my bed, and the minute I wake up, I down it. I’m not allowed to get out of bed until that glass of water is gone. And boy, is it crazy what that will do to purify and rev your system!

The second is pretty simple, too, and is something I used to be good about. I made sure I had a quality breakfast every single day at work. Some mornings this was a smoothie with fruit and greens and yogurt, and other days it was these delicious, high-fiber muffins.

Grandma’s Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Mar 27, 2014

I don’t like banana bread.

There—I said it.

Cue the shock and hand-wringing and exclamations of my lack of humanity. I’ve heard it all. But I still don’t like banana bread.

THIS banana bread, however, is pretty freaking awesome.

I got the chance to fly out to eastern Washington in late January with my dad to visit my Grandma and some other family on his side. I see most of them maaayyybe every decade, often longer, so it was a great chance to catch up and reconnect. My grandma had baked some banana bread that I ended up snacking on all weekend. It was dense and moist, like a flat little cake, and studded with chocolate chips. I loved it.

She gave me her recipe and I played with it a little, including using all whole wheat flour, leaving out the coconut (partly because I forgot), and using dark chocolate chips. I also baked it in two shallow dishes instead of making a regular-size loaf, which I think actually was the best thing I could have done for even cooking and keeping everything moist.

Soft, Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookies

Feb 16, 2014

I’m on a hunt for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. This is probably not it, but it IS good, so I wanted to share.

This particular recipe’s claim to fame is cornstarch, which gives the cookies a fluffiness and softness that many chocolate chip cookies are missing.

These are a little sweet for my tastes (mine run more toward these whole wheat dark chocolate chip cookies) but they had a great, traditional chocolate chip cookie flavor and were quite easy to whip up.

If you have an amazing chocolate chip cookie recipe I should try, send it to me! I am determined to find the perfect recipe!

November Cakes a.k.a. Gooey Delicious Orange Buns

Dec 29, 2013

Have you ever read a piece of fiction that describes some kind of food in such rich, real detail that the food becomes real to you?

It’s a talent, writing about completely made-up food in a way that’s so real to the reader that they have a visceral need to create (re-create?) the food in their world. As an avid reader, I’ve certainly run across these kinds of fictional foods from time to time, but rarely has a recipe captured my imagination like the November Cakes from Maggie Stiefvater’s “The Scorpio Races”.

In the middle of a chill, windy, haunting Irish November, Stiefvater describes these rolls as “oozing honey and butter, rivulets of the creamy frosting joining the honey in the pit of my hand.” Pretty amazing, right?

I actually tried a recipe for this a year or two ago, but was disappointed with the dry, somewhat bland results. When I saw this particular recipe and heard people rave about it, I knew I had to give it another try.

And these were everything promised. The dough itself isn’t that sweet, just an orange-tinged yeast roll. It’s the combination of the honey-caramel glaze (which I also spiked with orange extract) soaking into the rolls and the sweet white orange-flavored icing on top that elevates this to complete indulgence.

Cinnamon Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

Nov 25, 2013

This one’s for you banana bread lovers out there…

…of which I am not one. It’s one of my shameful foodie secrets. I’ve tried loving banana bread, I really have. And I don’t hate it. I just don’t LOVE it.

So when I saw this recipe that includes cinnamon and chocolate chips (two of my favorite things!), I thought that this would be the open door into me loving all banana baked goods…muffins, breads, and cake, oh my! (well, actually I love banana cake, so that doesn’t really count)

Overall this bread had awesome texture and flavor, and the whole wheat flour (I used white whole wheat) made it dense (read: hearty and filling) without being heavy. The cinnamon almost made it a touch too intense—in some ways, I felt like the recipe would be better with EITHER the chocolate chips or cinnamon—but both worked really well with the banana. So while it didn’t change my mind, it IS probably the best banana bread I’ve had.

Quick No-Knead Bread

Apr 8, 2013

One of these days I’m going to put together a whole list of bread recipes and how long they take from start to finish—that way, when you want to make bread but only have, say, two hours, you’ll know which ones you can choose from and which ones have to rise overnight and are out of the question. Because every time I’m browsing bread recipes, I fall in love with one, and then realize that it has to rise for 12 hours before baking. Baking fail.

This one falls somewhere in the middle, at about 4-5 hours.

I hadn’t tried a nice, simple artisan bread in a long time, only soda breads and the like. So it was nice to smell the yeast doing its thing, see it rise all puffy and wet, and get golden and crusty after baking. There’s a sense of accomplishment in that, not to mention how tasty it is!

Brown Soda Oatmeal Bread

Apr 5, 2013

Last summer I tried making bread for the first time, and was shocked by how well it turned out (I’d been scared of baking with yeast for forever). That kicked off a veritable bread-baking spree, where I tried all manner of artisan yeast breads. But for some reason I’ve only made soda bread once before now, a traditional Irish soda bread which I wanted to try after we went to Ireland and ate it there.

And yet, when I tried this recipe, it made me wonder why I ever bother with the finicky-ness and waiting of yeast breads.

This bread is totally easy and delicious. Now, to be fair, this isn’t authentic Irish soda bread, which only has four ingredients and definitely doesn’t have any sweeteners. But it still is soda bread, and there’s something special about it versus its yeast-based counterparts. Something about the chemistry of the ingredients (maybe the soda and buttermilk?) makes it moist and soft, much more resistant to drying out in the open air. Soda bread in its modern form became popular in the U.S. during colonial times because it was cheap, fast, and easy, and that’s still the case today.

That’s right—best of all? There’s no rising time for soda bread, so that means you can have hot, fresh bread within an hour or so of deciding you’re craving it.

So we’ve got an hour til you have fresh bread in your hot little hands. Start your engines…

Healthy Peanut Butter Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

Apr 3, 2013

First, while we’re on the subject of “healthy”, don’t forget that the healthy living challenge and sweet slow cooker giveaway is available through next Monday (April 8th), so go here to enter to win—super easy, no personal info or signing up for anything required.

So, cookies. Cookies are the perfect fast, easy dessert, something you can just whip up if company comes over unexpectedly. And my mom’s chocolate chip cookie recipe is endlessly adaptable. You can add any kind of chips, make the cookies regular or peanut butter or chocolate, add oatmeal or nuts, or pretty much tailor them to your exact specifications. We’ve also made a lot of small tweaks over the years to make it as healthy as possible.

I am all for dessert, but if I have the opportunity to make it healthier, I’ll totally take that bet. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, we have a fair amount of diabetes and such in my family, so we started making a lot of healthy swaps when I was a kid, like honey instead of sugar, whole wheat flour instead of regular, that kind of thing. But interestingly, our cookie recipe stayed mostly the same until only five or so years back, when we started playing around with substituting oil for the butter-flavored Crisco it called for. It’s taken some experimentation, but it’s a lot better for us and I think we’ve got it down!

Bookmark this baby, because this recipe will be your new best friend.