Sunday, February 5, 2012

Holiday Baking 2011

A quick rehash of this season's holiday cooking: because I've been a negligent blogger.

My last Thanksgiving treat - leftover cranberry sauce bread. I view such recipes as a reason to make extra cranberry sauce, not get rid of it!

I also made the standards: cinnamon rolls, pecan pie...

apple pie...
and pumpkin pie, not pictured this time around.

My main Christmas baking this December was gingerbread men. Lots of gingerbread men:

But for the holiday dinner, I made up a three layer cake from this recipe - a caramelized apple spice cake with brown sugar swiss meringue buttercream:

The finished dessert (and yes, that is a pie in the background as well)!

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Gingerbread Waffles

In December, my friend Cherie hosted a Chaos Cooking event. The idea is that everyone comes bearing ingredients, and cooks. It's kind of a demented potluck.

Since Cherie owns a waffle iron, I decided to make peanut butter waffles, with grape jelly and bananas to top:


I was inspired, and asked for a waffle iron as a holiday gift:

For my first homemade waffles, I decided to keep the holiday going and make this recipe for gingerbread waffles.

Waffles are very similar to a quickbread recipe - wet ingredients (butter or other fat, eggs, milk or other liquid, andin this case, some molasses) added to dry ingredients (flour, leavening, spices):

Ready to go:

The leftovers, ready to make like Eggo and go in the freezer for weekday breakfast!

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Whole Wheat Cheddar Bread

Whole Wheat, with salt, ready for yeast and water:

Kneaded, rolled, and cheesed:

And ready to rise:

Alas, it did not rise well. Too much cheese? It was delicious anyway.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread

I tried a new sandwich bread recipe, involving a loaf that I was not to knead, really, but stir vigorously, and knead a little bit. Here's that dough:

Risen a bit:

And then it went into the fridge for a day, and got giant!

The resulting light, fluffy, 100% wheat loaf was delicious...even though I didn't grease my pans well:

Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Cheesecake Blondies

Instead of a regular chocolate base for cheesecake...cheesecake blondies:

First, the blondie batter - lots of rich brown sugar and butter:

Then the cheesecake:

And a swirl!

Friday, April 29, 2011

Cracked Wheat Bread

Back to some bread, especially since I haven't posted in a while!

Bulgar. The base for this cracked wheat bread published by the NY Times:
Do not be fooled - this recipe is...more complicated that the much more famous "minimalist" loaf!

It involved a sponge, a dough, lots of rising...

More rising...

And when all was said and done, I probably need to make it again to get my loaves a bit lighter. But the flavor of this one is amazing, and worth another baking!

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Chocolate Ginger Banana Bread

I don't know why I didn't think to combine these three of my favorite things before - chocolate, ginger and bananas:

But a friend shared a quickbread recipe for just that. All mixed up and ready to go:

It didn't last 24 hours. And I didn't share!