Baking Equipment

One of the cookbooks we recently checked out from the library was Rose's Heavenly Cakes (2009) by Rose Levy Beranbaum, an award-winning baker and cookbook author. Made famous for her 1988 The Cake Bible , Rose gives precise, detailed recipes. We learned a lot about the importance of weighing ingredients with a kitchen scale (maybe we should start...), layering and frosting cakes (well, cupcakes are portion-ready for sharing with our classmates and students), and what baking equipment and ingredients she recommended (even though her favorite $2,000 kitchen scale is way out of our budget).

We're on the hunt now for measuring spoons and cups by POURfect for their accuracy and unusual and practical sizes, and have added to our dream list of kitchen equipment: 5-quart Artisan Kitchen Aid stand mixer, Cuisinart & KitchenAid food processors, silicone spatulas, and... Rose also liked Korintje cinnamon by Penzey's for its mellow and sweet tones (versus the spicier Vietnamese cinnamon), Holland Blue poppy seeds (apparently there's a grade of poppy seeds?), and Dutch processed cocoa powder by Green & Black's and Droste (for their rich 20-22% cocoa butter amount).

 

Watermelon Oatmeal

Watermelon and oatmeal- two entirely different temperatures and textures, yet blend so deliciously together. Watermelon, rather, watermelon juice is a refreshing, light strawberry-kiwi flavor that we used to cook rolled oats. The extra juice from cut-up watermelon this morning served as inspiration as we were contemplating what liquid to use to boil the oats in the stove-top pot. Water, juice, tea, or even coffee have all flavored oats well. If you don't have extra juice, pureeing the watermelon itself would work as well. Hmm, how would canteloupe do? Maybe a little thicker? Tomorrow's culinary experiment.

Watermelon Oatmeal
1/2 c rolled oats
1 c watermelon juice
1 sweetener
dash of cardamom

- Pour oats and juice in a stove pot pan. Bring to a boil, remove from and let thicken for several minutes. Add sweetener. Divide between two bowls and sprinkle on cardamom.

Breakfast Bowl of Champs

Watching commercial ads by Kellogg's of the American Olympian hopefuls to compete in the Olympics 2012 in London, we were inspired to make our own breakfast bowl of champs. To help you seize the day with utmost energy and focus, it's necessary to have a good breakfast. Cereal with fruit and milk scores big on meeting daily nutritional requirements with its whole grains, vitamins and minerals, and protein. For fruit, we chopped up crunchy fuji apples instead of the customary bananas and berries (which are delicious too but apples offer a nice change of routine). We also added orange zest to amp up the antioxidents and add a bright flavor. Likewise a few leaves of herbs, either lemon verbena or mint, offer nutrition and an interesting flavor element to a normal breakfast bowl. We went a step further from convention by adding chilled flavored coffee to the milk. For the bowl this morning we had extra buttertoffee flavored coffee in the refrig. Berry-flavored ones are great as well, especially ultra sweet Dunkin' Donuts Strawberry coffee. For lactose intolerant, almond milk works just as well, and is actually what we prefer. For serious crunch, try Kashi's Go Lean cereal with sweetened fiber twigs, soy protein grahams, and honey puff cereal, which has "as much protein as an egg." (Sorry, Kellogg's) The 13g of protein and 10g of fiber keeps us full longer and satisfied throughout the day. One last thing, use your favorite cereal bowl. This combo must be properly attired! We love Anthropologie's large mugs with handles, but more on this later.

Breakfast Bowl of Champs
1 cup of Kashi Go Lean cereal
1 Fuji apple, diced
1/2 cup almond milk
1/2 cup cold flavored coffee
zest of 1/2 orange
optional- two leaves of lemon balm herb or mint
1 sweetener

Pour cereal and apple in your favorite cereal bowl. Combine milk and coffee in a cup. Pour liquid over cereal mix when ready. Top with zest and the herbs.

Look at your trees! Pear delight!

We love to go on afternoon walks around our neighborhood and recently noticed two trees at one neighbor's yard. Approaching the trees to get a closer look at the drooping branches, we notice mini bosc pears growing, two to three bunches per branch. Feeling them, the fruit's skin was still hard, so we waited, watching them daily, eagerly planning ways to use them when the fruit ripened. We'd mull over ways to use them- roasting pears wrapped in foil in the oven with blue cheese chunks and balsamic vinger to caramelizing wedges in the saute pan with sliced onions to pureeing them as a pearsauce cousin to apple sauce. Today we saw two squirrels nibbling on the pears, so we knew the fruit must be ready. Sure enough, the fruit felt ripe. Glancing at our neighbor's house for any sign of movement and seeing none, we grabbed several and stuffed them in our pockets and walked onward, grinning up to our ears. We gave them a scrub at home and bit into delicious fruit, truly picked right off the tree. What a purely delightful feeling to be full of pears! We can't wait until tomorrow's walk!

Pumpkin Banana Loaf

Inspired from a recent browsing at the bakery at The Fresh Market, a southeastern chain specializing in local fresh produce, we decided to make our own pumpkin banana loaf. The bakery offers "nut breads," dense short loaves with flavors of banana nut, zuchinni nut, and an intriguing pineapple coconut. While easy to have put a loaf in our cart, we decided to make use of the extra bananas and opened pumpkin can in our refrigerator. We found a Low Fat Pumpkin Bread with Pepitas by Skinny Taste, but wanting to use our bananas and not having pepitas (pumpkin seeds), we adapted the recipe to as follows.

Pumpkin Banana Loaf
1 3/4 c. flour
3/4 c. sugar
1 tsp b. soda
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1 egg
1 banana, ripe, mashed
1 c. pumpkin (from a can of pure pumpkin)
1 tsp. vanilla

1. Preheat oven to 350. Spray a 9X5" loaf pan.
2. Stir dry ingredients together in a large bowl. Mix in a separate bowl the wet ingredients. Add the wet to the dry, mixing until just combined. May need a little bit of water to loosen the batter; if so, add 1 Tbsp add a time. Careful not to overdo it or else it won't bake properly.
3. Pour into pan.
4. Bake 38-43 minutes.

Baked Eggplant with Red Apple Balsamic Vinegar

We took a day trip to Tampa and what wonderful shops they have! Stopping at a Starbucks, we noticed next door Joe and Son's Olive Press, a store specializing in high-end extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegars, and speciality oils like walnut oil and sesame oil. Even thought the store had been closed an hour, the owner motioned us in and explained in detail the lineup of products that were stored in staineless steel containers. Encouraged to sample the oils, vinegars, and tapenades, we were intrigued especially with the basalmic vinegars, trying whites such as vanilla honey, cinnamon pear, and coconut and reds in berry flavors, like trend-setting blackberry, candy-like blueberry, and the more classic fig. We picked the Red Apple Basalmic, a smooth, tangy, sweet, balsamic that smelled like sweet candied apples. The owner poured, corked, and sealed the bottle using a hair-blower-like gun. For the small bottle at 200 milliliters, it was a moderately priced splurge at $10.99. Back home, we used the vinegar in a baked eggplant foil packet in the following recipe, Baked Eggplant.

Baked Eggplant Packets
1 large eggplant
2-3 Tbsp red apple balsamic vinegar
Cut the eggplant into half-moons and divide into two foil packet sheets. Pour 1.5 Tbsp of balsamic into each packet and close up the packages. Bake an hour at 375. Make sure to use a spoon to scrape out all the caramelized sweet and meaty eggplant. The balsamic is amazing- not acidic but not too sweet.

Banana Chocolate Chip Cake Bites

Looking for a moist biteful of banana muffins with chocolate-chips? This recipe, Banana Chocolate-Chip Cake Bites, is just the answer. We adapted Hungry Girl's recipe by usng a ripe banana instead of applesauce, almond milk for the soy milk, and 1 egg for the egg substitute because of our pantry and refrig inventory. Also we doubled the recipe, which yielded twenty-four mini muffins. Using a tablespoon ice cream scooper for the dough made it easy and fast to scoop the batter out as well as produce equal sized muffins for equal baking. The banana flavor melds well with the maple syrup, almond milk, and a dash of cinnamon. Enjoy at breakfast, snack, dessert, or any time!

Banana Chocolate Chip Cake Bites

2 cups, flour
1/3 cup, brown sugar (packed)
3 sweetener packets
3 tsp, baking powder
1/2 vanilla unsweetened almond breeze
1/4 c, sugar free maple syrup
1 egg
1 banana, ripened and mashed
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 cup mini semi-sweet chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray 2 12-count mini-muffin pans.
2. In a bowl, stir together the dry ingredients (first 4 ingredients).
3. In another bowl, whisk together remaining ingredients except the chocolate chips. Add the flour to this wet mixture, stirring until just combined. Divide evenly into prepared muffin cups. Sprinkle chocolate chips on top.
4. Bake, about 9 minutes.