Pumpkin Bread

If you haven't read this piece from McSweeny's, you are missing out. The first time I read it, I laughed so hard I cried.

At this point, I try to keep canned pumpkin in the house at all times in case the urge to bake strikes. I was planning to make some more muffins, but Scott requested bread. Pumpkin bread, you say? Happy to oblige!

Notes: I adapted this recipe only slightly. If you're not a big fan of cloves, I'd knock it back to a 1/4 teaspoon. You can really taste them. I don't mind, so I left it as is. If you wanted a more pumpkin pie flavor, add in some ground ginger.

Make this when you're planning to have company over. Your house will smell amazing.

This bread is chewy and delicious and everything fall should be.

Ingredients:
1 2/3 cup flour
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup pumpkin puree
1/3 cup butter, melted

Directions: Heat the oven 325.

Grease a loaf pan.

In a large bowl, whisk together all the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center and add in the butter and pumpkin. Mix with a spoon until just combined.

Pour the ingredients in the prepared loaf pan and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Let cool for 10 minutes, remove from loaf pan and transfer to a rack. Serve and enjoy!

Cornmeal Brioche French Toast

Scott and I have been lucky to be able to live in several different places. In every town we've lived in, we've had our favorite restaurants. Hands down, the best breakfast belongs to the The Courier in Urbana, IL. I was particularly in love with their almond french toast. Someday I will try to recreate it, but until then, every time I eat french toast, I think of the many happy breakfasts we had at The Courier.

Notes: I make french toast next to never, but we had an older loaf of brioche in the fridge this weekend and I decided to try it out. It came out pretty well.

I made a cornmeal batter because I like the crunch. I should have whisked it together in a bowl first and then poured the batter into a flat dish to dunk the bread because the cornmeal settled to the bottom. Live and learn! It was still tasty.

Keep your butter or other fat handy while you're cooking. If the pan starts to look dry, add more. A couple of my pieces wanted to stick to the pan.

You will notice that MY french toast has bananas on it because I enjoy fruit in my breakfast bread products, unlike some other benighted person that lives in my household.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup cornmeal
1/4 cup of flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon cinnamon
4-6 slices of brioche
Butter or coconut oil for the pan
Confectioners sugar, fruit, and/or maple syrup for topping

Directions:

Heat a large skillet or griddle on medium-high.

In a bowl, whisk together cornmeal, sugar, cinnamon, and flour. Add in the milk and vanilla and whisk. Transfer the batter to a flat dish like a pie plate, cake pan, or 8x8 glass baking dish.

Drop a pat of butter into the pan and swirl it around to coat the bottom. Take a slice of bread, lay one side in the batter, flip it over and lay the other side in the batter, and then add it to the hot skillet. Let it brown on one side and the flip and let it brown on the other side. Add more butter if the pan starts to look dry.

When the slices are done, dust them with confectioner's sugar and/or fruit and enjoy!

VTMK: Chocolate Zucchini Bread

I've become quite taken with vegan baking. I'm afraid this is for entirely unprincipled reasons, namely laziness and frugality. I love to bake, but I don't love having to run to the store when I realize that I don't have eggs or buttermilk (this is a problem, as you'll recall, because I am an impulse baker). I also don't love keeping eggs and buttermilk on hand because I don't use them that often and they end up spoiling (thus wasting money).

Vegan baking solves these problems. The staples in vegan baking are things I usually have either in my pantry or in my fridge already. The finished product turns out just as delicious as the non-vegan kind. It's a win-win.

Notes: I adapted the bread from this recipe. The original only calls for brown sugar, but it wasn't quite sweet enough for my taste. I wrote it with the added sugar.

This is a great way to use up extra zucchini. You could also replace the applesauce with a mashed up banana if you have one.

I will add my proviso here that this recipe is vegan to my knowledge, which is limited, so procede with caution.

Ingredients
1 1/2 cups whole wheat or spelt flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup grated zucchini (about one medium zucchini)
1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup raw sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
1 chia egg (1 tablespoon of chia seeds + 4 tablespoons water)

Directions: Heat oven to 350. 

Add all the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa, sugars, baking powder, cinnamon, salt) to a large bowl and whisk to combine. 

Add the wet ingredients (water, vinegar, vanilla extract, applesauce) to a measuring cup and stir to combine. 

Mix up your chia egg in a small bowl. Add the wet ingredients, the grated zucchini, and the chia egg to the dry ingredients and stir to combine. 

Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for 40-45 minutes until a tester comes out clean. Cool in the pan for about 15 minutes then turn the loaf out on to a cooling rack to cool the rest of the way. Enjoy!

Spelt Peanut Butter Banana Bread

I have a love/hate relationship with Target. Sometimes it feels like I'm in some kind of bizarre maze. You think you know where some item is and yet it isn't there. So, then you have to start playing mind-reader. "OK, how did the person who designed this store decide to classify food storage jars? Home decor? Kitchen? Storage?" You find yourself wandering from section to section, up and down all the aisles with the ever-increasing suspicion that there someone standing over you wearing a white coat and holding stop watch.

The love part of the relationship is that Target prevents me from going to a store I have a hate/hate relationship with, which is Wal-Mart. The other thing I love about Target is that they can put on a mean clearance sale. They usually are nice enough to put the clearance items on the end caps of the aisles. So, I can walk down one side of the grocery section and find everything that's been marked down, which is how I ended up with spelt flour.

I'm still not 100% sure what spelt is. According to the source of all questionable, but quick knowledge, Wikipedia, it's a sub-class of wheat. Although it contains gluten, apparently some people with gluten issues can tolerate it better than wheat flour (I cannot confirm this). I've been trying to use more wheat flour when I bake to up the nutritional content, so I figured spelt would be similar. I found some on sale at Target and decided I would see how it worked.

Some people are impulse buyers, but I am an impulse baker. If the urge to bake hits me, I will drop what I'm doing and head for the kitchen. Scott has on one occasion had to convince me that 9:00 PM the night before a vacation is not the time to try homemade granola bars. The other day I realized I had two bordering-on-over-ripe bananas sitting on my counter. Once banana bread come to mind, there was no stopping me. And it allowed me to test drive the spelt flour.

Notes: I've made banana bread before, so I decided it was time for a twist. The combination of peanut butter and banana has always been a favorite of mine; I used to eat them together as a sandwich as a kid. Peanut butter banana bread sounded pretty cool to me.

One of the keys to this dish is a whisk. The directions I had instructed you to put the banana in first, which prevents whisking. I did not whisk in the brown sugar and I ended up with a few undissolved bits that burned on the bottom of the bread. It was still really tasty, but I'll be sure to dissolve that sugar really well next time.

The spelt flour worked well. In appearance, it's much finer than regular wheat flour. It's still drier than white flour like wheat is, but it's not as dry as wheat in the finished product. I'm going to try making pizza crust out of it and see how it works.

Ingredients (adapted from Smitten Kitchen's):
1 1/2 cups spelt flour
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 cup natural peanut butter
1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon of kosher salt
2 ripe bananas
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350.

Melt the butter (I was lazy and did this in the microwave because I didn't want to get out a pot). Add the butter to a large bowl. Whisk in the brown sugar and peanut butter.

Add the beaten egg, vanilla, nutmeg, cinnamon, and your mashed bananas.

 
Sprinkle the salt, baking powder, and flour over the wet mix.

 
Combine them with a spoon or spatula just until it forms a batter. The batter will be slightly sticky, but wet.

Pour the batter into a loaf pan that has been buttered or sprayed with cooking spray.

 Bake at for 45-50 minutes until a tester comes out clean. Cool the bread on a rack for about 30 minutes.

Once the bread is cool, turn it out of the pan. Slice off a piece and enjoy with a nice glass of milk!