Banana Cranberry

   So I've been slacking again in the bread department. It's hard when you have 1,000 ideas and try to make them all happen in the same time frame :) Anyway, I made banana cranberry bread last night. I have a board meeting today after work and thought a little snack would go nicely at the 6 o'clock hour. I also made homemade cinnamon butter.

   I used my traditional banana nut bread recipe, but I substituted nuts for cranberries. Who doesn't love cranberries?! And I was concerned some folks attending the meeting might have a nut allergy. Greek yogurt is all the craze with cooking now so I substitued plain Greek yogurt for the sour cream in this recipe too. Here we go:

   Banana cranberry bread: In a medium bowl, sift 2 cups flour, 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tsp salt. In another medium or large bowl, cream together 8 tbls butter (1stick) and 1 cup sugar. Then add 2 eggs, 1/4 cup sour cream or plain Greek yogurt, 1 tsp vanilla, and 2 very ripe bananas (the original recipe says 1, I always do 2). Mix well, preferably with a mixer stand on 3 or 4 speed. Add flour mixture and 2 cups cranberries. You can also add 1 cup of chopped walnuts at this point if you want to.

   Bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Make a tinfoil tent over the loaf and bake an additional 25 minutes. (The tent prevents over-browning the top). Toothpick check for doneness.

   The butter: 1 stick softened butter, 1/4 cup white sugar (can use brown), 1 tsp vanilla and a heaping spoonful of Greek yogurt. **Caution - I made this combination up. I didn't have cream cheese or I would have used that instead of yogurt. The yogurt made it very light and fluffy, similar to Roadhouse cinnamon butter. The meeting will be a trial an error for the butter. The bread I'm sure about :)

High Protein Pumpkin Muffins

   For those of you who love bread products but also try to eat healthy on a regular basis, here is a recipe I found (and tweaked a little) for high protein pumpkin muffins. They are made without flour or sugar.

Ingredients:

15 oz. can pure pumpkin

1 cup all natural, no sugar added applesauce

3 eggs

5-6 scoops protein poweder, vanilla flavor

1 cup rolled oats

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 tablespoons pumpkin pie spice

1 tablespoon each of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon

1 cup Stevia all natural, no calorie sweetener

Mix pumpkin, eggs and applesauce. Sift dry ingredients separately and then add to wet ingredients 1/2 a cup at a time. You may need to add more rolled oats to get a good muffin batter consistancy. Don't add too many or they will come out dry!

Preheat the oven to 350. Spray muffin tins with non-stick cooking spray. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Set on a rack to cool for 10 minutes and then remove the muffins from the tins.

**Each muffin has approx. 112 calories, 1.7 grams of fat, 160 grams of potassium, 10 carbs, 3 sugars and 14 grams of protein.

Amish Friendship Bread

   A coworker who knows my love of bread baking brought me a starter for friendship bread. It takes several days of squishing and mushing in the bag, 5 days into it, you feed it with a cup each of flour, sugar and milk. On the 9th day, you feed it once more and take out four 1cup servings to bag and give to friends. You use the rest of the dough/batter to make your bread at that time.

   I chose to use all the starter dough/batter and make 6 loaves of bread. It takes about 2 cups of starter for each recipe and each recipe makes 2 loaves. You add the list of ingredients that should come with the starter your friend gives you. It's roughly 3 eggs, 1 cup each of sugar and milk, 1 and 1/2 cups flour, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 tsp baking soda and powder, vanilla and salt. Lastly you add one large package of vanilla pudding mix. Stir it together. 

   Take a cup of sugar and a tbsp of cinnamon and mix. Grease 2, or in my case 6, loaf pans and dust with cinnamon sugar mixture. Pour in the batter leaving at least 1 inch at the top for rising. Dust the tops of the loaves with the remaining sugar mixture. Bake at 350 for 50-60 minutes. The bread is amazing. Very moist and sweet - good for breakfast. 

   Now, I just need to get the starter recipe from my coworker. :)  Stay tuned.   

St. Patty's Day

   We went to our hunt camp for St. Patrick's Day. I do love all the holiday festivities, theme parties and cooking that goes along with this holiday and I didn't want to miss out. So I made some rye bread and bought a cornbeef roast to take to camp to make some reubens.
   I started the dough on Wednesday night. Bread flour, rye flour, sugar, honey, yeast and water. I let the sponge rest for a whole 24 hours. Thursday night, I added the dry ingredients: bread flour, salt, yeast, and caraway seeds by pouring them over the sponge to let it bubble through. After about 3 hours, I added the oil and kneaded it all into a dough. I let the dough rise over night. Friday morning, I punched it down and covered it again to rise Friday while I was at work. Friday night, I punched it down one more time and then divided the dough into 2 torpedo loaves. While the oven was preheating to 450, the dough rises a little bit more. Bake at 450 for about 15 minutes. Then turn the oven down to 375. This helps the crust form.

   I didn't slice the loaves until Satuday once we got to camp and began making dinner. But the inside was exactly perfect. Light and fluffy with a chewy crust. The caraway seeds give rye bread it's amazing flavor.

   We put the cornbeef roast in the crockpot for about 6 hours with 1/4 cup brown sugar and a 12 oz. bottle of Guinness - my favorite recipe for cornbeef! Add some thousand island dressing and sourkraut. Delish!

Confession

   I have a confession to make. I bought and used dough from the grocery store ::gasp::. I know - it's embarassing. I had intentions of making my own dough for calzone and stromboli while we had company in town...but we had such a fun and exhausting day that I was too tired to mess with it. So, I picked up a few bags of dough from the publix bakery (good substitute).

   We made a chicken and broccoli cheddar stromboli - 3 diced chicken breasts, cooked; 1 can broccoli cheddar condensed soup; 1 head of cooked broccoli; 2 cups shredded cheddar cheese and a 1/3 cup milk. I used a technique with the dough that I saw on my new favorite website "Pinterest.com". You roll out the dough into a rectangle, and then cut slices on the sides, leaving a solid piece of dough in the center for your filling. Pour the filling in the middle and lace the strips over each other like so:

Bake @ 375 on a pizza stone for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and easy to lift with spatula.

   For the calzone filling - 16 oz. ricotta; 8 oz. shredded mozarella; one egg; garlic powder; salt and pepper to taste. Roll the dough out into a large circle. Pour cheese filling onto one side (half) and fold over other side, pinching to seal the dough like so:

Bake @ 375 on a pizza stone for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and easy to lift with spatula.



Entertaining

   I hosted a Pampered Chef party Sunday - my first one. The consultant wanted to bring bread dipping sauces so I decided to make homemade French bread. Although my last few attempts had bombed, I gave it another shot. I also wanted to provide a dessert since the party was around dinner time. Instead of digging out someone else's recipe, I brainstormed to make my own and came up with strawberry cheesecake dessert pizza with homemade cinnamon pizza dough, which we could make on a Pampered Chef pizza stone! Win.

   French bread attempt #8 - I used the second recipe I tried months ago, but this time I followed the instructions more closely, only adding half the flour mixture to the yeast mixture forming a batter and let rise for 3 hours. After 3 hours, I added the rest of the flour, kneaded into a dough, let rise again for 1 hour. Knead again. Cut into 3 pieces and shape into baguettes. Let rise for 1 more hour. Cut diagonal slashes on the tops of the loaves. Prepare the oven at 450 and place a baking sheet on the lowest rack. Move the other rack to the top of the oven. Once the oven is preheated, place your loaves on the top rack. Throw and hand full of ice cubes on the bottom baking sheet. This will create a steam in your oven that gives you a really nice, crispy crust. Bake 25 minutes. The loaves came out perfect for the dipping sauce and the ladies loved it.

   Dessert pizza attempt #1 - I prepared my pizza dough as usual except I only used 1/4 the amount of salt and added 1 tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of cinnamon. I let it rise for 3 hours, knead, rise 1 hour, knead, rise 1 hour. As my guests arrived, I was just stretching my dough to fit the retangular stone baking pan. I baked the dough at 350 for about 12 minutes, then added the sweetened cream cheese, crushed graham cracker crumbs and strawberry sauce. I baked that for another 10 minutes. Using a plastic spatula, lift the crust to check the underside for doneness. Top with fresh strawberries and cut into medium squares. Serve warm. Note: Although this was my first time making this dessert and I wasn't following a recipe, it came out really well. It was really delicious - just the right amount of sweet and cinnamon :)

Tasting Party

   Fall is on its way and I've had several customers and friends ask "When will you have pumpkin bread?". The answer is, now! I actually received three recipe suggestions from a few friends, all for pumpkin bread. How in the world could I decide which to make for market by this weekend? A tasting party of course!
   Last night, I went by the grocery store to pick up a few cans of pure pumpkin, a few extra spices (cloves and all spice), and some whole milk (don't use skim milk for cooking!). I made each recipe, one at a time. After mixing the ingredients, I placed each loaf pan full of batter next to its recipe so I could keep track of them, as I prepared the oven.

   All three recipes called for a 25-30 minute bake time. However, each of them was originally for either muffins or cupcakes. So, when baking something in a more concentrated form, like in a loaf pan, you will need more time. It took about 45-50 for a toothpick to come out clean. After 10 minutes of cooling, the loaves slid right out of the pan onto my cooling rack.

   For the tasting party, I lined a large cookie sheet with tin-foil and placed the loaves on it, labeling them Pumpkin #1, Pumpkin #2 and Pumpkin #3. One recipe (the one for cupcakes) had seperate directions for cinnamon cream cheese frosting. I originally wanted to put cream cheese INSIDE the bread, but opted not to because I couldn't keep it cool all day - especially for market. My husband had the brilliant idea of making a cream cheese spread and offering it with market samples and then having a few 8 oz. tubs for sale. So I made a cream cheese spread as a variation to the icing (not nearly as much confectioners sugar) to accompany the loaves to the tasting party.

   Aside from one person, the office unanimously loved Pumpkin #3, which was the suggested recipe of my good friend Lisa Berg. Thank you Lisa! #1 and #2 were very similar except one called for water and the other called for milk. #3 called for 5 different spices, which clearly came out in the delicious fall flavor of the bread. Some feedback indicated #1 & #2 were a little more moist and that would be b/c they were made with a 1/2 cup more oil than #3.

   Conclusion: Pumpkin #3 will be the recipe for market, however I will add just another 1/4 cup or so of oil to make it as moist as the other two in the trial. The cinnamon cream cheese spread was also a huge hit and I think I will have to bring some to market, whenever I offer the pumpkin bread. They go wonderfully together! Yu-umm!