Bluebeery Bread

I finally bought it!

The awesome Wild Blue beer of my dreams! Blueberry flavored beer! Mmm!!

Yeah I know, I hadn’t heard of it before either. But, you see, over at Sugar Plum, there is an awesome recipe for Brewberry Brownies. Since I read that post about a month ago, I’ve had a taste for the elusive beer. I finally discovered that my local Ultra (Skultra to those of us that live around here haha) carries it. I got the LAST CASE on the shelf.

Go me!

I wasn’t really in the mood to make brownies, so I decided on beer bread. I used a recipe from my Grandma’s Best cookbook, swapping out a few herbs for ones I thought would go best with the exotic beer.

It smells incredible while baking and turns out nice and crusty on the outside while wonderfully moist and blueberrylicious inside!

Bluebeery Bread
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1 12-oz bottle Wild Blue beer

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a loaf pan with butter and set aside. Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, sage and ginger. Add beer and mix well. Pour batter into loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let stand for 10 – 15 minutes and remove from loaf pan to cool completely.

Challah Swirl

Happy long weekend to you all! I love this time of year. Everyone fires up their grills and cooks up some awesome grub, Bobby Flay style! I love Bobby Flay, he’s so fun to watch. I caught his story on that “Behind the Chef” thing on the Food Network one day, such an amazing story, too. You should try to watch it sometime!

Sadly I don’t own a grill. I know enough people that do have one to sustain me for a while I believe. =) Such as my parents with their awesome grilled quesadillas!

My recipe has nothing to do with grills or meat, however. Oooh I just got an idea. When I get my own grill I could bake it in there! Perhaps it would first be a better idea to learn to not burn a hot dog on the grill as my first outdoor chef-ing experience..

I’ve been searching for a bread recipe that doesn’t seem too complicated for my novice bread-making hands to conquer. After getting an email about 55 Knives, a blogging cookbook that was put together and just came out for download, I noticed one contribution was from a blog named Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy. I giggled at the name and browsed around her site. I stumbled upon a post for Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Challah. Now I’ve never had challah before. That I can remember. But it looked so good… this was my ticket!

I mixed up the ingredients and leaving it to rise while I watched my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dvds (the original tv series, mind you) and had an unfortunate little mishap. Despite the 90 degree weather we’ve been having, the one day I decide to make bread the temperature decides to drop to the 60s. Two hours later when I checked on the dough, it had definitely not doubled in size. I moved it to sit on my dinky little warm oven where it promptly rose the way a nice yeast bread should. Good little bread **pat, pat**. I didn’t have time for the rolling process until today, but the recipe said I could leave the dough in the fridge for up to 5 days before I’d have to freeze it.

Now as far as the filling goes, I used three different options. Since I made only half of the recipe, I made some mini loaves. One with goat cheese and a jalapeno-peach “jam” I made up on the stove, one with cinnamon and coffee, and one cinnamon raisin. I had a few problems with the centers of the last loaves baking through, but humidity is a killer. Next time I’ll just have to have the air on!

Challah Swirl Bread
(half recipe: makes 2 regular sized loaves)
1/2 cup plus 6 tablespoons lukewarm water
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 large eggs, whisked
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter (or canola oil)
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

From here I just followed the directions posted on Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy (I linked the page a little earlier). She has great step by step instructions written up!

A New Take on the Bean Cake

I have this one really awesome ingredient in my cabinet.

Oops haha! I didn’t notice that “keep refrigerated” type on there before.. oh well!

Anyway, I wanted to make something with these little guys! The poor things were starting to feel neglected, having lived in my cabinet for 3 months! As luck would have it, I remembered seeing a recipe for a garbanzo bean cake.

“Why couldn’t I do the same with my adzukis??”

Well I could! And I did!

TADA!!

Man-o-man-o-man this cake is so moist and delicious! Who’d have thunk it?? Plus it has pretty speckles, contains lots of fiber AND it’s gluten free!

Adzuki Cinnamon Cake
1 cup adzuki beans, cooked and drained
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown rice flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup pineapple juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Generously butter a one pound loaf pan and dust with granulated sugar.

Puree beans in food processor until smooth – mine were of a crumbly consistency since the beans were a bit on the al dente side. Pour beans into a large bowl; stir in eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, cinnamon and pineapple juice until well combined. Pour mixture into the loaf pan and bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. After removing from the oven, sprinkle a pinch of kosher salt on top. Cool thoroughly, slice and serve!

Tomato Basil Bread

I’m so proud of this recipe! The original recipe I discovered on Fran’s House of Ayurveda (her Olive Walnut Bread) and thought it sounded delicious. Of course, empowered by my banana bread success, I sought to convert it to a gluten free recipe. I glanced in my pantry.. no olives. Why does this always happen? I did, however, have one sun dried tomato and one plum tomato. I changed changed a few ingredients here and there and Tomato Basil Bread was born! I know walnuts and tomato sounds like an odd combo, but the result was just divine. In the future I might add a tad more oil or take the bread out of the oven sooner to keep it a bit more moist, but on the whole I was pleased with the results!

Tomato Basil Bread
2 cups brown rice flour
1/2 cup GF all purpose flour
1/8 cup flax seed
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 large egg
1 plum tomato, diced
1 sun dried tomato, diced (more if desired)
1 cup skim milk
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons agave nectar
1/2 cup walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a loaf pan. In a large bowl, thoroughly combine flour, flax seed, baking powder, salt, and basil. In your mixer, combine milk, olive oil, egg, and agave nectar until well blended. Add in flour mixture along with tomatoes and walnuts. Pour mixture into loaf pan and bake 45 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean. Enjoy with some hummus or walnut butter.. mmmm..

Banana Bread Bonanza

Last night I had a conundrum; I wanted to bake banana bread but did not have a gluten-free recipe for it. Sure, I had a recipe for regular banana bread (taken from the Grandma’s Touch cookbook my mom bought me years ago) but I vividly remember the last time I tried to convert a recipe to gluten free. Let’s just say it turned out to be chocolate GOO rather than brownies. Haha! But I really wanted banana bread.. so I gathered up my courage and converted it anyway! As I’m happily adding ingredients into my mixer, I was horrified to see that the recipe called for 1 CUP of bananas rather than 1 banana in itself. No wonder the mixture looked so runny. I grabbed some banana chips off the shelf of the pantry and crushed up a handful or so of them and threw them into the mixture hoping that would solve my problem. Well I don’t know if it solved things or not, but the bread came out beautifully and is a big hit at the bank! Hooray for banana bread success!

Banana Bread
1 3/4 cups brown rice flour
1/8 cup flax seed
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
Handful crushed banana chips
Cinnamon, to taste
3 tablespoons olive oil plus 1 tbspn butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 mashed banana (I just broke up the banana and let the mixer mash it in)
1 cup skim milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, beat together oil, sugar and egg. Add bananas and milk; combine well. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Pour batter into a greased and floured 5 x 9″ loaf pan. Bake for 50 minutes or until inserted toothpick comes out clean.