Thursday afternoon.  Naptime.

After a session of sorting through the pile of stuff in the basement (you know the one, that mish mash of things to put away, things you’ve been looking for and couldn’t find, things to donate, and things to throw away), I trudged upstairs and thought about dinner.  My weekly menu (just an entry in Google Calendar) told me there wasn’t anything to prep ahead of time for the main course and salad, but it didn’t say chirp about dessert.  And if there’s no dessert, you can be sure someone in this house is going to notice.

What can you whip up at 2:15 that will be ready by 3 p.m., when it’s time to do the school run?  Yogurt cake, that’s what.  I’ve tried similar recipes from several different sources, so this is the adaptation I use now.  This week’s version is lime yogurt cake, but next time I might make lemon, or skip the citrus and just add vanilla.  No plain yogurt?  Use sour cream.

Quick Yogurt Cake

1 cup plain yogurt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
zest and juice of 1 lime (or lemon or orange, or 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla)
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt

Heat oven to 350 degrees.  Whisk the wet ingredients together in a large bowl.  In a smaller bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients.  Add the dry to the wet and whisk until smooth.  Scrape the batter into a greased and floured pan (I used a 9″ springform, but a regular cake pan or loaf pan would be fine with wax paper or parchment on the bottom before you grease and flour.)  Bake for 35-40 minutes (almost an hour for a large loaf pan), until a toothpick or knife in the center comes out clean.

School’s out!

Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes (or as long as it takes to pick up the kids from school).  Loosen the edges of the cake from the pan with a knife, and turn out onto a rack to cool.  Sift a little powdered sugar over it or serve it with raspberry sauce, warm jam, or a drizzle of chocolate if you’re feeling fancy.  Then put on the kettle and have a slice while you quiz this week’s spelling words.

Still some for dessert

Moist, tender and barely sweet, the only bad thing about this cake is the wailing when there isn’t any left for an after school snack the following day.

It’s been a busy week or so at the Home Baked house.  Rehearsals, concerts, karate belt tests, garage makeovers…but not very much photo-taking or blogging.  We still needed food to fuel all that activity, though.  I don’t have a photo of the “best pumpkin pie ever,” but apparently I’ll have to make it again for Thanksgiving.  The not-so-secret secret?  Start with a real pumpkin, not a can.  I have always skipped this step, because, really–what’s wrong with letting someone else cut up the pumpkin, cook it, scoop out the pulp, and puree it?  That seems like an awful lot of work to do before you can even get to the pie-making stage. 

But this year my kindergartener went on a field trip to the pumpkin farm and returned with a cute little pie pumpkin, and she asked if we could make it into a pie.  Who could refuse?

I learned that if you use a pie pumpkin, the process is not so arduous.  Rinse it off, cut in half, scoop out the seeds and strings.  Then roast it as you would any winter squash.  I put the pumpkin, cut sides down, in a pan with a little water and covered it with foil.  Then I slid it into a 400 degree oven.  In less than an hour, it was tender, and when cool, the flesh slipped right out of the skin. I barely mashed it with a fork and had exactly two cups of pulp–perfect for the Joy of Cooking pumpkin pie recipe.  I did this step early in the week, and kept the pulp in a container in the refrigerator.

Fast forward to Sunday, after a long day of cabinet installing, karate, cleaning and singing.  It was nearly 6 p.m. and everyone was hungry.  Chicken was ready in the slow cooker, and while the vegetables were cooking, there was just enough time to assemble a pie.  I had a disk of dough in the refrigerator, so I rolled it out, whisked up the pumpkin filling, and put it in to bake.  Warm pumpkin pie was ready shortly after we finished dinner.  We worked hard all day and deserved a home cooked meal!

Now, I’m still going to use canned pumpkin.  It’s great to keep in the pantry–I got some out this morning and had muffins ready in 30 minutes (20 minutes was baking time). You may have noticed my love of muffins.  They are everything I want in a baked good:  quick and easy to make, satisfying our sweet tooth without guilt.

I still have half a can left…do I see pumpkin pancakes in our future?  Thanksgiving is so close…I’ll be getting a couple pie pumpkins this week so I can roast them ahead of time.  What’s your favorite pumpkin recipe?  Are you planning ahead for your Thanksgiving feast?

Over the weekend, in addition to our usual Halloween tricks, our family gathered to celebrate a very special aunt’s 97th birthday.  A grand occasion deserves a grand cake, and this Smitten Kitchen recipe received so many raves that it seemed a sure thing.  Not to mention, it reminded me of the “Johnnie Walker” of family legend, a chocolate/peanut butter/ice cream concoction that the birthday aunt invented for her nieces and nephews long before Dairy Queen was churning out Blizzards.

Trick or treat, give us something good to eat…

Sometimes I enjoy baking a cake more than I enjoy eating it.  I’d rather have a nice slice of pumpkin pie, or maybe some tea and a scone.  Cakes laden with frosting so sweet your teeth hurt are not my thing.  But I do enjoy the engineering and, dare I say, artistry that go into a big layer cake, so I try to find recipes that taste as good as they look.

This three-layer chocolate peanut butter cake is a perfect party cake (so long as your guests aren’t allergic to peanuts–in our house, the peanut allergies have thankfully been outgrown).  It’s achingly rich, so whether you make it in 8 or 9 inch pans, you’ll have enough to serve at least two dozen people.  It looks sophisticated, but it tastes like an over-the-top peanut butter cup.  The chocolate cake may be the moistest I’ve ever made (which also makes it fragile–if you make it, don’t skip the part about freezing the layers before you stack them).  If you’re lucky enough to have some cake left over, it keeps nicely in the refrigerator for several days so you can carve slivers off it between meals.

We are not what anyone would call an “outdoorsy” family.  But this October has been so much like the blazing autumn of our imaginations, instead of the usual raw and gloomy reality, that even we made time to walk to the park on a recent sunny Sunday.  After an hour or so of romping through two playgrounds, you need the promise of a snack, a little something, to carry you and your wilting offspring all the way back to the house.

This was the little something waiting for us:

Dolly’s Crisp Toffee Bars, from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Chocolate Desserts.  My son, fooled by the resemblance to our regular chocolate chip cookie bars, took a bite and said, “I thought they would be soft!”  It was not a criticism.  This cookie is a crispy, crunchy, buttery surprise.  There’s no leavening to make these chewy or cake-like.  Just butter, brown sugar, flour, vanilla and salt.  Oh, and the chocolate and nuts.

These mix up in a moment.  I didn’t have the walnuts the recipe called for, and I was even short on almonds.  The kids aren’t walnut fans, anyway, though I’m starting to include them in recipes whether they like it or not.  It’s my duty to develop their palates, right?

I can imagine these beauties gussied up with a thin layer of chocolate spread on top, perhaps with a dusting of finely chopped nuts.  Maybe I’m just trying to recreate the toffee bars my friend Kathy’s mom used to make.  I remember them fondly after nearly 30 years.  (Kathy H., if you’re reading this, maybe you can get me the recipe!)  Logistically, a better idea might be to dip the cooled bars in chocolate.  Or slice them smaller, drape them in ganache, and now they’re a candy bar with a nutty, buttery cookie center.  Hmmm…some of you may be getting these for Christmas.

A couple of directions are essential to this recipe.  First, fill the sheet pan with small clumps or spoonfuls of dough, and then press it down into the pan.  The dough is quite stiff and won’t spread otherwise.  Second, cut the bars in the pan while still hot from the oven. Then let them cool completely in the pan before taking them out.  These bars are so crispy, you’ll just shatter them if you try to cut them after they’ve cooled.

Crisp Toffee Bars
not really adapted from Maida Heatter
 
2 sticks unsalted butter
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup nuts, chopped into medium-size pieces (I believe any kind would be good in these)
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cream the butter in the mixer; add salt, vanilla and sugar and beat well.  Add flour with mixer on low.  Scrape the bowl with a rubber spatula (Are your spatulas rubber? Mine are all silicone!) and beat until mixture holds together.  Add the nuts and chocolate chips and stir until evenly distributed (I just use the “stir”–very slow–setting on the KitchenAid).

Place small spoonfuls of dough (I used my mini ice cream scoop, but you can also use your fingers) in an ungreased 10″x15″ jelly roll pan.  Press the dough firmly with your fingers to make a thin, even layer.

Bake for 25 minutes, until golden brown.  Reverse the pan from front to back halfway through if your oven doesn’t bake evenly.

Let cool in the pan for just a minute, then cut into bars with a small, sharp knife.  Leave the bars in the pan and go take a walk in the park.  When you return, serve the cooled bars with hot coffee or cold milk, and start thinking about what to make for dinner.  You’ve already taken care of dessert.

I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to bread.  I dabble.  I read some tips over here, I get some advice over there, and I try random recipes.  I think it has resulted in some pretty good bread.  But my goal has been to find a sandwich bread to replace the 89 cent honey wheat loaf from Aldi that the kids will deign to eat in their lunches. Their requirements:  it shouldn’t be brown, no obvious seeds or nuts, not too chewy, not too crumbly and no hard crusts.  Yeah, they want Wonder Bread.  My requirements:  some whole grains, not too much sweetener (lots of HFCS in that Aldi bread…), not too much fat, and not too much work.

The latest contender: Cracked Wheat Bread from the Moosewood cookbook.  Naturally, I only tried this because I already had a big bag of cracked wheat (aka bulgur, though apparently they’re not exactly the same thing) in the pantry.  The recipe calls for both whole wheat bread flour and all-purpose flour.  I’ve been using all Eagle Mills All-Purpose Flour with Ultragrain.  We started buying this flour at Costco, because it was the only unbleached bulk flour available there.  A little research tells me it is a blend of white whole wheat flour and regular refined white flour.  So, it’s not 100% whole wheat, but it’s a step in the right direction.  And the cracked wheat is a whole grain, so I feel this is a good compromise.

I’ve made this recipe twice, and learned a few things.  First, a little kneading by hand halfway through really helps the kneading action of the KitchenAid dough hook.  Also, don’t forget the salt.  Ahem.  Finally, I’d really like some new loaf pans.  A typical bread recipe yields two large loaves (9″x5″-ish), but my loaves usually end up kind of wide and squat.  The second time I baked this bread, I used one large loaf pan and one small, dividing the dough into 2/3 and 1/3 portions.  Both pans had proportionally more dough, and so rose more out of the pan and had that typical rounded shape I was looking for.  To be honest, these sizes are great for our family.  Two slices from the small loaf makes a perfect sandwich for a kid.

But what’s the verdict on taste?  I really like this bread.  The cracked wheat gives it some texture, but the butter adds enough softness to balance it.  I especially like this bread toasted.  It doesn’t crumble, and it has a fine, uniform texture, without big air pockets.  And it keeps well in a sealed plastic bag for a few days.  I’ve been slicing one loaf and freezing the second until we’re ready for it.  But best of all, the kids have eaten it without comment or complaint.  A winner!  (I may start sneaking in a greater amount of whole wheat flour and see how far I can go before anyone notices.)

Cracked Wheat Bread
adapted from New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant

1/2 cup cracked wheat or bulgur (mine was labeled “cracked wheat/burghul, #1 Fine”)
1 1/2 cups water
1/4 cup butter
4 tsp salt
1/4 cup honey

1 Tbsp active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water

1 cup milk
5 1/2 to 6 cups unbleached all-purpose flour with Ultragrain (or a mix of 2 cups white whole wheat flour and 3-4 cups white flour)

Cook the cracked wheat in the water for about 10 minutes, stirring as needed, until the water is absorbed and the wheat looks like hot breakfast cereal.  Add butter, salt and honey.  Meanwhile, proof the yeast in the warm water.  In a large bowl, mix the cracked wheat mixture and milk.  When the mixture has cooled to lukewarm, pour in the yeast and stir.  Mix in the flour until the dough is stiff enough to knead.  Knead it a minute or so by hand, and then transfer to the stand mixer with dough hook and knead for about 8 minutes on medium-low speed.  (Or knead it all by hand for 10-15 minutes.)  The dough should remain soft and a little sticky.  Place the dough in a greased bowl, turning to coat the dough.  Cover and let rise until doubled, about 90 minutes.

With floured hands, punch down the dough and knead it for one minute in the bowl.  Shape into two loaves and place in greased loaf pans.  Cover and let rise until doubled, about 30 minutes.  Bake in a preheated oven at 375 degrees for 30-35 minutes (mine was closer to 40 minutes for the extra large loaf).  Cool completely on a rack before slicing.

‘Tis the season 🙂

I cannot take the least bit of credit for this recipe, but it’s so good I feel compelled to share it.  It’s a rhubarb-apple coffee cake that is perfectly balanced–not too gooey or too dry, not too sweet or too spicy.  A cake that would be wonderful for a special occasion, or no occasion at all.  Go get the recipe at Whipped, a great local (Chicago!) food blog, and then share some cake with your neighbor.  In fact, invite them over, because your house now smells so good, nobody will notice the unfolded laundry or the dishes in the sink.

(By the by, the cake I made has mostly apples, and very little rhubarb, since it isn’t really rhubarb season in October.  I feel confident that this cake would happily accept all rhubarb or all apple–whatever you have on hand.  Oh, and I promise to lay off the apple recipes for a while!)

Mixing up the batter

Crunchy crumble topping

Almost ready for the oven…

Lest you think we only eat bread or cake around here, I wanted to share an actual dinner, with vegetables, even!  In fact, it’s from a venerable vegetarian cookbook, New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant.  The edition in our kitchen isn’t looking so new, my husband having brought it to the marriage 10 years ago, and who knows how long he had it before that.  It could use a little tape around the binding these days, which just goes to show how much we use it.  Some recipes are classics, and we wouldn’t think of using any other version:  Hummus with Tahini, Country-style Moussaka, Spicy Szechuan Noodles, Mississippi Mud Cake, Tart Lemon Tart…and these delicious zucchini boats.  Granted, they are not yet a hit with the small people (though one said the filling was good), but I am happy to eat the leftovers for lunch.

3 medium zucchinis
2 Tbsp. olive oil or butter
1 cup finely chopped onion
1 tsp. salt
6 oz. cream cheese (I used low-fat)
1 1/2 cups finely chopped almonds
1/2 cup bread crumbs
2 cups grated cheese (the original calls for Swiss; I used sharp cheddar)
1/2 tsp. nutmeg, or 1/4 tsp. mace
1/4 tsp. allspice


Cut the zucchini in half lengthwise and scoop out the insides with a spoon.  Save the pulp and chop it.  Saute the onions in the oil until soft; add the salt and zucchini pulp and continue to cook until zucchini is soft.  Remove from heat and stir in the cream cheese until it melts.

Meanwhile, mix together the almonds, bread crumbs, grated cheese and spices.  When the cream cheese has melted, combine all ingredients in a bowl.

Fill the zucchini shells and place them in a greased 9″x13″ baking dish.  Add a little water to the bottom of the pan (about 1/4″ deep).  Tightly cover the pan with foil and bake covered at 350 for 30 minutes.  Uncover and bake for another 10 minutes or so, until the filling has browned a little.

This is the perfect make-ahead recipe; it reheats beautifully.  I haven’t tried freezing it, but I think it would do well.  I am trying to think of other vegetables that could get this kind of cheese filling…obviously yellow squash, but what else?  Leave a comment with your ideas!

Perfect leftovers for lunch

After I made those apple cider doughnuts, I stumbled on a recipe for caramel apple doughnuts.  They were baked in those special doughnut pans, and then dipped in caramel.  Sounds good, right?  But a couple things bothered me:  the need for special baking pans, and the caramel sauce made from melted caramel candies.  I was sure I could do better.

First, I made homemade caramel sauce.  It’s easy and takes about 10 minutes.  Then I baked the doughnuts in muffin pans (the recipe even said it was adapted from a muffin recipe).  I drizzled the sauce over the warm muffins, and this is what I got:

That doesn’t looks so bad.  They didn’t taste bad, either, but they weren’t what I had in mind.  The batter was too wet–it had too much butter and sugar (too much?!?)–and I used Granny Smith apples, whose tartness I hoped would give a nice contrast to the sweet caramel.  Instead, they were a little too tart, and the muffins were more like a gooey carrot cake.  I had been looking for something with a little more heft.  Something I wouldn’t mind eating for breakfast or dessert.

So I tried again.  This time I began with a tried and true muffin recipe, and adapted from there.  And I found what I was looking for.

Oops! I left the honey out of the picture.

2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup light brown sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 cup softened butter
1/2 cup buttermilk
2 eggs
1/4 cup honey
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup grated apple (a sweeter variety–I used Honey Crisp and Fuji)

Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F.  Whisk together the dry ingredients, and then rub in the softened butter with your fingers until it is completely incorporated.  Whisk all the wet ingredients together (I like to do it right in my 2-cup measuring cup), stir in the grated apple, and pour the wet mixture into the dry.  Stir just until the batter comes together, no more than 20 seconds.

Wet ingredients into dry

Fill greased muffin tins 3/4 full of batter (this makes 12 standard size muffins) and pop them in the oven.  Immediately turn the temperature down to 450 degrees F.  Bake for 12-15 minutes, or until a toothpick or skewer comes out clean.

Golden brown muffin perfection

Look at the rounded tops!

Now, you can stop right there.  These are excellent muffins, and you can have them on the breakfast table in 30 minutes flat.  Even less, if you substitute apple sauce for the grated apple.  Wouldn’t they be good spread with a little apple butter?  But remember, I had some of this:

Drizzle the caramel sauce over the warm muffins, and try not to eat them all before your family and friends get home.

Plum tart

Simplest Apple Tart

Back at the orchard, we could have picked up some apple cider doughnuts to go with our fresh apple cider.  But I’ve been waiting to make these, so that’s what we did on Monday.  (That’s about all we accomplished.)  And now that I’ve made them, it’s going to be hard to stop making doughnuts.  I compared a several recipes, which were all similar, so I stuck to this one.  It’s a cake doughnut, with buttermilk, butter, and reduced apple cider.  I used whole grain flour, so I needed a little more liquid in the batter.  One grated apple did the trick.  These were not difficult, and my five-year-old helped when it was time to cut them out.  The recipe makes so many (I used a smaller cookie cutter, too) that I only fried up half the batch.  I froze the others (all cut out and ready to go) on a cookie sheet, and then transferred them to a freezer bag when they were solid.  Next time we want doughnuts, I’ll thaw them for as long as it takes to heat the oil, and it will be faster than a run to Dunkin’ Donuts.