Date & Nut Truffles

I got a huge package of dates from Trader Joes, thinking I could just snack on them plain. I tried a few and I wasn't too crazy about them (maybe they were just poor quality dates, I don't know). So I started searching out recipes to make with them and found these truffled energy bites from Sally's Baking Addiction. I really like the carob-based energy bites that you can find at health food stores, so I thought this would be a good alternative. But...something is just off about them. There is no added sweetener in this recipe, so they are not sweet at all. They taste nutty. Virtuous. While they look pretty on a plate they are just kind of blah. I rolled them in ground flax seeds, which doesn't necessarily add anything, taste-wise, to them. They aren't terrible, though. Just boring.

Ground Cherry Muffins

I have been doubting the efficacy of keeping a blog like this, until the other day when I was able to dig back in my archives to look for a recipe I made months ago in order to come up with this Ground Cherry Muffin recipe. It really helped to be able to look back and alter an old recipe!

The CSA sent us more ground cherries this past week. Over the past year, I had made coffee cake and a different muffin recipe with them, but this time I thought I'd use the Peter Hunt Blueberry Muffin recipe and swap in the ground cherries instead.

2 cups flour (PH calls for pastry flour. I used a combination: 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour, 1/2 cup almond meal)

3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

3/4 cup milk 

4 tablespoons melted butter 

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 cup gooseberries
2 tsp TJ's Flax Seeds with Blueberries (optional topping which I would not use again)

Preheat oven to 400. Mix and sift dry ingredients. Stir eggs, milk, butter, almond extract and blueberries together, and mix with flour mixture. Spoon into muffin tins. Bake for 12-15 minutes.

The muffins came out well; I like the bit of almond flour which adds a little nutty flavor to them. I thought that dusting the tops of the muffins with the TJ's flax seed mix would be a nice little health bump - I only used 2 tsps - but it actually tastes kind of weird. Conclusion: Peter Hunt's muffin recipe is infinitely adaptable; using ground flax seeds as a garnish is not a good idea.

Carrot Bread with Cider and Olive Oil

Every so often, a recipe will pop up on my Facebook feed or be printed in a magazine I'm reading that not only sounds delicious, but also features ingredients I already have in my kitchen. Such was the case with this Carrot Bread with Cider and Olive Oil from Smitten Kitchen that I made last week. It came together quickly and baked up perfectly. The blend of spices in the recipe was really nice and paired well with the cider and carrots. The olive oil kept the cake moist. But, for some reason, I was kind of underwhelmed with this. It was a tasty fall snack but I think I'd only make it again if I had excess cider and carrots to use up.

No pics this time!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies

Depending on how I look at it, I am either lucky or unlucky to have an office mere steps away from a coffee shop that sells the most addictive chocolate chip cookies ever. Problem is, these cookies are about 5 or 6 inches in diameter - aka, huge - and I do not have enough willpower to save half for later after I start eating one. The other day, I was craving one badly, but I held back when I realized I had the ingredients at home to make my own cookies. I ended up making these peanut butter cookies from Smitten Kitchen  which were really similar to peanut butter blossoms, except the chips were mixed in to the batter instead of placing a Hershey kiss on top. Verdict: they are pretty good. I hold back from calling them stellar because I ended up using some natural peanut butter from Wegman's that was strangely flavorless. While I love natural peanut butter for PB&J's (or, directly from the jar on a spoon), in my opinion it does not work well in peanut butter cookies. Skippy or Jif is the way to go. So if I make these cookies again I will have to get some Skippy to get the peanut butter flavor I like. For some reason, peanut butter cookies are more "fall-ish" to me than anything pumpkin flavored!


                                                       

1 year baking diary anniversary recap!

I cannot really call this a "blog" - first off, my photography SUCKS and I am the first to acknowledge that. Secondly I don't make up any of my own recipes, I just use what other people have come up with, sometimes substituting ingredients according to what I have on hand - but I will classify it as my Baking Diary. Over the past year, I have made a combination of old favorites and brand new (to me) recipes, had many successes and a few outright failures, and had fun sharing these goodies with family and friends.

About mid-way through the year, I calculated how much butter I used in previous recipes and realized in horror I had used EIGHT POUNDS of it. So, starting in the spring I made a conscious effort to choose recipes calling for little to no butter, and I can honestly say that I preferred the recipes in the second half of the year to the butter-heavy recipes in the first half of the year. Coincidentally - or not! - I also ended up using less sugar in the second half of the year. So I could classify several of these as relatively "healthy" desserts and snacks.

I went through the archive and came up with a recap of favorites and failures!

Old favorites (always on heavy rotation in my baking repetoire):
-Chocolate chip banana bread
-Walnut Jam Cake
-Cranberry Tart
-Chocolate Cherry Zucchini Cake
-Peanut Butter Blossoms
-Lemon Crunch Blueberry Muffins


New favorite cookies: 
-Chocolate espresso shortbread
-Chocolate walnut cookies
-Pecan, Oat and Dark Chocolate Chunk Cookies


New favorite cakes: 
-Mexican Lime Icebox Cake
-Roasted Banana Cupcakes with Honey Cinnamon Icing
-Macaroon Cake


CAKEWRECKS (kinda scared to ever try these again): 
-Orange Glazed Polenta Cake
-Spiced Honey Cake
-Fresh Plum Cake


Honorable Mentions: 
-Old Fashioned Blueberry Cake. This cake came together beautifully, however, the strong molasses flavor paired with the sweet blueberries made for a weird combination. I guess if you are a huge fan of molasses, this could be perfect for you. Maybe next time I will use a lighter molasses variety.
-Peach Beer Sorbet. This was Out of This World Delicious and sooo easy to make. It tasted like summer on a spoon. Perfect in every way. I have a tiny bit of this left in my freezer and I will be sad when it is all gone!

Apple Slab Pie

Does anyone else have this problem? You go apple picking, get overzealous, and then bring home a couple dozen apples too many and you have NO IDEA how to use them all? That happens to me every year. My kids thought it was so great to take an apple out of the bowl, take one or two bites, and then return the apple back to the bowl (I either ended up finishing most of the half-eaten apples and then turned the rest into applesauce). But for the other apples I had, I found this recipe for Apple Slab Pie  on Smitten Kitchen that called for 8 cups of apples - perfect! That ended up being about 8 large apples, if I remember correctly.

In addition to using up a ton of apples, this recipe was perfect for many other reasons. I have never had a slab pie before but I like it better than apple pie. The crust-to-filling ratio was perfect. You could eat it in your hand and it was not messy at all (surprisingly!). It could feed a crowd - as you can tell in the photo, mine was cut into 15 slices. The crust cooked through uniformly and it was a golden brown on top. Bonus - you could prepare the apples and the crust dough the night before baking it, which is what I did.

While I do bake a lot, I have not always had a lot of luck making homemade pie crusts. I was nervous to try this because I was making it to serve to guests, so I was extra careful when I was mixing up the dough, making sure I wasn't handling it too much because I wanted to keep the butter as cold as I could. It ended up rolling out perfectly the next day, and baking up to a crispy golden brown.

I thought it tasted great using a mix of apples from the orchard but I think if you just used macintosh or golden delicious apples, it could be just as yummy.

So. Incredibly. DELICIOUS. Better than regular apple pie! 

Macaroon Cake

I love, love, LOVE anything almond flavored. So I knew I'd have to try this cake. I got the recipe from "Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream Desserts" book, and like she describes in her write-up, it is light, fragrant, and has a candied outside and gooey inside in the best possible way. This was a crowd pleaser, and gone within 24 hours of making it. The only negative about this cake is that almond flour is pricey, so even though it is super easy to make and the kind of cake you could have on hand for everyday, the price of the almond flour alone makes it more of a "special occasion" cake, to me. There is no white flour or butter in the cake, so that is a plus!

1 3/4 cups almond flour
6 large eggs, separated, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups sugar
Grated zest of two oranges (I used dried orange zest, about a tablespoon)
4 drops almond extract (don't be tempted to use any more; this was plenty!)


Preheat oven to 350. Butter the bottom of a 9" round cake pan and line with a round of parchment. Butter the parchment. Dust the pan with flour and shake out the excess.

With an electric mixer, beat egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl until pale and thick. Add zest and almond extract, followed by the almond flour, mixing very well.

Use clean beaters to beat the egg whites in a large bowl until stiff peaks form. Fold them into the yolk and almond mixture until well combined, being careful not to deflate the batter.

Pour mixture into prepared pan. Bake 40 minutes, or until cake feels firm to the touch. Remove from oven and cool completely in the pan on a rack.

          

Again, the photos don't do it justice but this cake was perfect. 

Plum and Gooseberry Muffins

My CSA keep sending plums so I keep making plum desserts. This time, I used the remaining plums from last week's box and added gooseberries form this week's box to make a variation of a Smitten Kitchen receipe (original seen here)

6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, browned and cooled.

1 large egg, lightly beaten

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1 1/2 cups flour

3/4 tsp baking powder

3/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

Pinch of ground cinnamon

Pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

1 tablespoon orange zest, fresh or dried

1 cup pitted and diced plums

1 cup gooseberries

Directions:

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter twelve muffin cups.

Whisk the egg with both sugars in the bottom of a large bowl. Stir in the melted butter, then the sour cream. In a separate bowl, mix together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon,nutmeg, and poppy seeds, and then stir them into the sour- cream mixture until it is just combined and still a bit lumpy. Fold in the plums and gooseberries.

Divide batter among prepared muffin cups. Bake for 15 to 18 minutes, until the tops are golden and a tester inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Rest muffins in the pan on a cooling rack for 2 minutes, then remove them from the tin to cool them completely.

These muffins lasted for three days in an airtight container.