Category Archives: bread

Banana Junkie

So yesterday in my Tylenol with codeine induced haze (I had my wisdom teeth out, I don’t just pop it for fun), I made a delicious discovery.


The discovery of banana bread. No sugar added, oil free, heavenly banana bread.

The recipe can be found over at Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. I swapped the chocolate chips for an ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate all chopped up and used a mixture of all-purpose and wheat flours. This recipe was easy to whip together, popped right out of the pan and tastes like a dream. Dreena is a genius. I’m putting her cookbook on my wish list for Christmas.

In the meantime I will devour this banana bread. And perhaps share with Kyle. =)

All sorts of New!

I’ve been bread baking. Thanks to Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day. Awesome book, truly awesome.

It kinda looks like an armadillo.. a garlicky armadillo!

I’ve only used their master recipe so far, but altering the spices, I’ve made oregano garlic bread and vanilla bean cinnamon bread! So easy, so delicious. I’m SO proud of my newfound baking skills.

Just look at that texture!

I’m also really hoping that the library “forgets” I have their copy.. haha!

I happened to whip up an awesomely simple soup the other night as well. Mmm.. soup.. mmm… egg drop soup! So simple, so delicious!

Mmm.. soupy...

Egg Drop Soup
3 cups water
1 beef bouillon cube
3/4 cup pasta of your choice
1 cup arugula, torn
1 egg, beaten

Boil water and dissolve the bouillon cube. Pour in alphabet noodles (or pasta of your choice), toss in arugula and boil until pasta is al dente. Turn off the heat and slowly drizzle in the beaten egg while stirring the soup gently with a spoon. You’ll see the egg cook itself in the hot soup and get all cool and thready looking. Then you get to devour it! Yum, yum!

Also.. NEW BANGS! Love em! I’m trying to grow out my hair. I’ve had it short for years and just need a change. To alter the monotony of the growing out process, I decided to try out some super-short bangs! I’m so glad I took the plunge!

New bangs!

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

My friend Kindra has been going through some stressful times. Its not anything I can help with, so I decided to bake her something yummy. She always loved when I brought in anything I baked because it was something new to try! Now I work at a different branch than she does so we don’t get to see each other often.

I didn’t know what to make her at first. Brownies were too normal and I needed something that would be warm and comforting.

Cinnamon rolls. Perfect!

I remembered a recipe I found over at Love and Olive Oil for pumpkin cinnamon rolls I’ve been meaning to make FOREVER.  I’ve been a bit scared to make cinnamon rolls since the last time I made them was in high school.  At a lock-in.  Like I was paying attention to how to make them..  But it seemed like the perfect recipe to whip up and I’ve been hoarding cans of pumpkin (I’ve got about 7 15-ounce cans and 2 32-ounce cans in the cabinet.. >_>) I had no choice!

I didn’t do much to the recipe except swap out some flours and reduce the sugar and butter in the filling. I also left off the icing. I’m not much for icing on my cinnamon rolls. I’m a bit of a weirdo in that regard.

These are totally my new favorite cinnamon roll. They were just sweet enough and all about the dough and the cinnamon. I gave half away to Kindra and stuck the ones I didn’t eat in the freezer to keep myself from continuing to eat them like candy. Make them. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Nomnomnom

Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls from Love and Olive Oil
For the dough:
1/3 cup skim milk
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
2 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 package active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups bread flour
1/2 cup rye flour

For the filling:
1/3 cup sugar, scant
1 teaspoon molasses
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 tablespoon melted butter

In a small saucepan, heat milk and 2 tablespoons butter until warm and butter is almost melted. Remove from heat.

In a large mixer bowl, combine pumpkin, sugar and salt. Add milk mixture and beat with a mixer (a stand mixer if you’ve got it) until well combined. Beat in egg and yeast. In a separate bowl, combine flours. Add half the flour mixture to the pumpkin mixture, beating on low speed for about 5 minutes. Add remaining flour and mix thoroughly. The dough will be very soft. Don’t worry. Turn the dough into a lightly greased bowl, turning the dough a bit to grease all sides. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise in a warm place until its doubled, about an hour.

Punch the dough down, turn onto a lightly floured surface and knead until the dough is nice and pliable. Use enough flour to make it easy to work with. Roll the dough into a 12×10 inch rectangle. I’m always horrible at this part. I don’t measure when I roll out, so I ended up with 16 mini cinnamon rolls rather than 12 average sized guys. That’s ok with me, though. =)

In a small bowl, combine the sugar, molasses and cinnamon. Brush the surface of the rolled out dough with melted butter and sprinkle the sugar mixture over the top. Beginning with the long side of the dough (it’ll seem backwards if you’re like me), roll up jelly-roll style. Pinch the seam to seal, then with a sharp knife gently slice the dough into roughly 1 inch slices. Place the rolls into a greased 9 inch square baking pan. Cover with plastic wrap and allow to rise 30-45 more minutes, or until the dough is doubled again.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Bake the rolls about 15-20 minutes or until they’re golden on top. Here she says to remove them from the pan and to wax paper, but I didn’t do that. I actually let them cool in the pan. But I’m lazy. You could remove them from the pan and let them cool on some wax paper on a cooling rack. Or you could just devour them hot like I did. Mmmmm… hot cinnamon rolls…

Ramblings of a pumpkin deprived mind…

Tastes like fall!

Tuesday: the craving hits. (Well actually it hit about 2 weeks ago and just got out of control Tuesday)

The weather is cool and fall is here fast approaching. I want what every hot blooded woman wants at this time of year. That luciously versatile and full bodied fall treat. Pumpkin.

More specifically, I thought my favorite banana bread recipe would be the perfect experimental jumping point. My craving led me to scour six (yes SIX) stores for any sign of pumpkin. Of these six, I found only one that had the goods. My fantabulous little Kankakee Natural Foods! They always seem to come through for me.

Go K3NF!

I hurried home with my purchase and promptly threw together a batch of banana bread! Aside from being a little dry (next time I think I’ll add in some milk or some extra pumpkin), it tasted just like pumpkin pie. Now I’ve got enough for the week and hopefully this will cure some of my pumpkin crazies.

Of course, if that doesn’t cure it, there’s always this nifty little surprise Kyle picked up for me the other night…

I cut it up and I now have a metric butt-ton of pumpkin to nosh on!

Choppy, choppy!

SCORE!

Pumpkin Banana Bread
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup wheat bran
1/4 cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup pumpkin puree
3 mashed bananas
1/2 cup liquid egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl, set aside. Combine pumkin, banana, extract and egg whites and add mixture to dry. Stir until just combined, then pour into a lightly oiled loaf pan. Bake 45-50 minutes and allow to cool completely before attempting to remove from the pan. I know its hard, but we don’t want it to crumble into a million pieces do we??

Enjoy!

Beetsa Pie

Crab Pizza

I haven’t made many pizza doughs from scratch.  I’m usually in too much of a hurry and just end up buying the pre-made stuff.  Well today, in honor of Kyle’s fantasy football draft, I decided to make homemade pizza with homemade dough!  I was planning on making a plain old whole wheat type dough until I got an email from one of my many food blog subscriptions; the awesome people of (never home)maker.  Now this wasn’t the first time I’d seen a recipe for beet pizza dough. I’d seen it before over at The Cooking Photographer but I’d forgotten about it!  I got so excited I could hardly stand to wait until today to make it!

Roast Beef Pizza

I ended up following the general recipe from (never home)maker but changing a few ingredients.  It was so incredibly easy and SO tasty!  I know most people would be put off by pink pizza crust, but Kyle and I were all for it!  The recipe makes enough for 3 smallish pizzas.  I chose to make two and stick one in the freezer for the next time we want to make pizza.  Hey all I’ve gotta do is remember to take it out of the freezer right?  Sounds.. simple enough.. we’ll see I guess!  Anyway, after a coating of garlic spiked olive oil for each pizza and a quick 5 minute tour of the oven, they were topped with yumminess.  Onto one went some roast beef, sweated Vidalia onion, sweet red peppers, hot giardiniera and low-fat mozzarella.  Onto another went a beet puree with chopped sun-dried tomato and garlic, sweated Vidalia onion, sweet red peppers, imitation crab meat, danish blue cheese and a bit of low-fat mozzarella.  Both very different but both deliciously devoured!

Hey, don’t just take my word for it, whip up a batch of dough and try it for yourself.  Maybe make some garlic knots out of the leftover dough while you’re at it.  It’s a yummy warm snack for a cool evening.  Welcome fall!

Beet Pizza Dough
1 packet active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
1/2 cup beet puree (unsalted canned beets pureed with enough liquid to make an applesauce consistency)
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon honey
3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt

In a medium bowl, sprinkle yeast over water, mix with fingers and allow to sit for 5 minutes to bubble up. After the 5 minutes are up, add in the beet puree, olive oil and honey, stirring with a wooden spoon until well combined. In a large bowl combine flours and salt, making an indentation large enough to pour the beet mixture inside. After the beet mixture is poured in, mix it all up!

Mix me, mix me!!

Now its time to get your hands dirty! (I hate that part – dough sticking to my fingers is so nasty! But so rewarding…) Knead that dough until its nice and elastic, then coat it with a bit of olive oil and cover it with a wet towel. Now you have to let it sit for 2 hours. But hey, after that you get to roll it out, bake it quick-like at 425 degrees for 5 minutes, top it and finish it off! Then try not to eat it all in one sitting!

Best. Banana Bread. Ever.

Oh my. I have found my MUST HAVE banana bread recipe. And guess what? It has NO REFINED SUGAR! I adapted this recipe I found over at Sweet Tooth, Sweet Life to suit my needs.

Normally I like a good banana bread but this one sends me through the ROOF! It’s so delicious! The only changes I made to her recipe:
-Using the full 1/2 cup of applesauce in place of the oil, applesauce, yogurt combo (though since I found no applesauce in my house I used blueberry pear baby food)
-Completely omitting the sugar, I found the bananas to be plenty sweet for my taste
-Trading 1/4 cup of the whole wheat flour for 1/4 cup of wheat bran
-Swapping the blueberries for chopped up strawberries (Kyle isn’t fond of blueberries)

I’m drooling just thinking about it. So delicious piping hot with some Brummel on it. Mmmmm…

My only problem was I couldn’t wait longer than 15 minutes to dig into it and tried to take it out of its happy little loaf pan too early. It fell apart on the bottom. So it doesn’t look so pretty. But that’s ok – I’ll devour it anyway!

Mmm... nanner bread...

NOM!

Chocolate Pane Francese

Yesterday during some downtime at work I stumbled across a recipe for a heavenly treat. It was over at Chocolate and Zucchini, but, though it looked so deliciously decadent, a sourdough starter is a teensy bit out of my comfort zone. However I was not to be deterred! Armed with this awesome bread idea, I turned to that bread baking cookbook my mom gave me to suit my novice bread making skills!

I took the Pane Francese recipe and altered it a bit to include the ingredient of the hour! Since I had never made such a bread before, I went light on the cocoa powder and added in some chopped up bittersweet chocolate.

We were having issues with our internet service so we had to wait around all day for the company to come out and reattach the apartment to the telephone line… Then we had to reset the router… Only the determined bread maker can maneuver around the modem and router that have taken up a temporary residence under my mixing cart!

Haha!

Let me say this: the bread smelled utterly amazing while it was baking. Kyle and I were chomping at the bit to try it. Normally I can control myself and at least wait until the next morning to slice into a loaf – but not this bad boy! It made it about 5 minutes before the knife came out and the beautiful crust was broken.

Oh. My. God.

This bread was heavenly. Chocolatey but not sweet, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. Wow. Perfection in loaf form.

This is going to be a staple in my house for sure.

Chocolate Pane Francese
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
3 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon turbinado sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup ice cold water
1/4 cup skim milk
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped

In a small bowl, sprinkle yeast over warm water, mix with fingers and let stand until foamy. In stand mixer, using hook attachment, combine flour, cocoa, sugar and salt. Add yeast mixture, milk and water then beat on medium speed until well blended, adding bittersweet chocolate about halfway through. On low speed, beat the dough until elastic and shiny, adding flour by teaspoons if the dough is too sticky. The dough should be sticky, but touchable.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap, a towel or the lid to a large bowl (as long as the dough can breathe it’s all good) and set in a warm place to rise until doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hours.

Sprinkle dough with flour and turn out onto a well floured surface. Knead by hand for a few minutes to incorporate the flour and make the dough easier to work with. Cut the dough in half and roll each half into long rectangles. Starting at the short side roll dough tightly, pressing down each seam as you roll. They will be long loaves, so don’t worry!

Cover lightly and allow loaves to rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 475. Transfer loaves to greased cookie sheet (or sheets in my case since my oven is so tiny). Set aside for 15 minutes to allow them to get slightly puffy.

Place bread in the oven and reduce heat to 425. Bake 20 minutes or until crust is nice and crispy feeling. Turn off the oven, crack the door and allow bread to sit in the cooling oven for 5-10 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately transfer to a cooling rack. Then DIG IN!

Bread Mania

Like I mentioned earlier, it has been a BUSY month. My 27th birthday was a few weeks ago and my adorable cousins came in from out of town to surprise me at the bank!

They colored pictures, which I hung up by my computer.

They spent all afternoon baking cupcakes and brownies, which they decorated with fresh fruit, frosting and dark chocolate they shaved themselves! Mom and Grandma helped a little, of course!

And shared lots and lots of hugs!

We all went out to dinner that night, the girls, Mom, Dad and Grandma!

The girls spent the night with me, sleeping over in my itty bitty apartment. I forgot how much fun sleepovers were! We ate spaghetti (with my Grandma’s delicious sauce), painted our fingernails and toenails (with only minor spillage), and walked to Dairy Queen for some much needed deliciousness!

The next night was spent at my mom’s with pizzas on the grill along with spaghetti pie for dinner. The girls also put on a talent show they had been rehearsing for 3 nights!

It was a fantastic surprise brilliantly organized by my Mom, Grandma and Aunt. It was the best birthdays I’ve had in a long, long time!

I love you guys!

That weekend my mom gave me one of her old bread making books. Since then I’ve been trying my hand at breads, which is why I haven’t been posting too many recipes. I still don’t have a recipe today; the rye bread I made that was so delicious was just too crumbly.

Something I need to work on. It toasts up wonderfully, but it’s a bit dangerous to grab out of the toaster!

I also did a retake on my Turbinado Wheat Bread, using some lime zest and reducing the sugar. It wasn’t fantastic, too tart, but it sure looked pretty!

I love making bread, it’s so very therapeutic. Plus I’m not as tempted to eat the batter! When I find a truly fantastic bread recipe I will definitely post it, don’t you worry!

Turbinado Tornado

Do you ever have those days where the carbohydrate monster consumes you?

It rages and wars until you feed it? Does yours enjoy homemade bread as much as mine does? If it does, then you’re in luck!

I’ve made challah bread before, but I wanted to try making a sandwich-type bread that I could toast without making an gooey mess. Or a crumbly, firey mess for that matter. I went to K3 Foods and picked up some stone ground wheat flour as well as some turbinado sugar, which I’d never used before. Then I turned to my trusty Kitchen Aid manual for some of their bread recipes!

I followed their recipe for Basic White Bread, but substituted in some of my wheat flour. The result was deliciously moist, but dense enough to hold up to slicing and toasting! Perfect with a swipe of almond butter with a morning bowl of Grape-Nuts! Mmmm! Fortunately for me, when sliced and toasted you can’t see how lopsided the poor loaf is.

They’ll be shaped better with practice! I promise!


Turbinado Wheat Bread
1/4 cup skim milk
1 1/2 tablespoons turbinado sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 package yeast
3/4 cup warm water (105-115 degrees F)
1 1/2 cups stone ground wheat flour
1 – 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Place milk, sugar, salt and butter in a small saucepan. Heat over low heat until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and cool until lukewarm.

In a warmed mixer bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add milk mixture and all of stone ground flour and 1/2 cup of all purpose flour to equal 2 cups. Using dough hook on mixer on lowest setting, mix about one minute. Add remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time. (I found that I used only that 1/2 cup more of all purpose along with a tablespoon of water – it was pretty dry and I was worried about how well it would mix. It turned out fine this way) Mix until dough clings to hook and cleans the sides of the bowl, roughly 2 minutes. Knead about 2 minutes until dough is smooth and elastic; it will be slightly sticky to the touch. (SLIGHTLY lol)

Remove and place into a lightly oiled bowl, rolling to ensure all of the dough is coated. Cover and allow to rise in a warm place for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Punch down dough and place on a lightly floured surface. I floured the surface with the little bit of millet flour I had left that wasn’t enough to make anything out of. Using a rolling pin, roll dough out to about 9 x 14 inches. Starting at the short end, roll the dough tightly. Pinch to seal the seam. Pinch the ends of the roll and fold them under. Place the dough seam side down in a greased loaf pan. Cover and allow to rise again for about an hour or until doubled in bulk.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake the loaf about 30 minutes. Remove from pan immediately and cool overnight on a wire rack.

Mmmm… your carb monster will thank you!