Rice Pudding

I can't remember the exact date of this attempt, but I do remember how delicious it was! Catching up with unposted recipes, I give you, Rice Pudding!

Ingredients:

1 and 1/2 cups cooked rice
2 cups milk (I used Lactose-free 1% and fat free--Lactaid brand)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg (beaten)
1/3 cup white sugar
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:


1.) Combine the rice, 1 and 1/2 cups milk, and salt in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring until thick, about 15-20 minutes.

2.) Add in the last 1/2 cup of milk, egg, and sugar into the mix, stirring constantly. Cook another 2-3 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in butter and vanilla.

3.) Top with cinnamon and garnish with a cinnamon stick. Refrigerate 6-8 hours to serve cold.

Found on Allrecipes.com under Old Fashioned Creamy Rice Pudding.

Cranberry Scones

After some time off for a summer staycation, I returned to work refreshed and also ready for a coworker's surprise bridal shower! I had volunteered to make heart-shaped scones, perfect to get in the mood for wedded bliss. Allrecipes.com came to my rescue again with a recipe for simple scones. I needed a recipe with sour cream instead of buttermilk since I couldn't find it in any of my go-to grocery stores this time of year (June--I guess buttermilk tends to be holiday seasonal). I also attempted self-rising flour once again, though you can definitely make them with all purpose or whole wheat pastry flour. Finally, I substituted Craisins (dried cranberries) for the raisins or currants, since I've had them in scones before and the bright red color is another great symbol of love. Thus, my Cranberry Scones were born!

Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour (or self-rising flour)

1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon of baking powder (omit if using self-rising flour)

1/4 teaspoon baking soda (omit if using self-rising flour)

1/2 teaspoon of salt (cut back to about 1/4 teaspoon if using self-rising flour)

8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter (the original recipe recommends it being frozen, but just keeping it at the back of my fridge worked fine for me)

1/2 cup dried cranberries

1/2 cup sour cream (I used lowfat Tillamook brand)

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and soda if using, and salt. Use a cheese grater to grate the butter into flakes, then slowly add it in with your hands. Stir in the cranberries.

2.) In a separate bowl, combine the sour cream and egg with a fork until smooth. At this point, you can also add in the almond extract for extra flavor. Then slowly add the sour cream mixture to the flour mixture until the dough starts to form. Use your hands to get the dough fully formed and shaped into a ball (if too sticky, add a little more flour).

3.) Shape the dough into hearts (I made two elongated lumps and squished them together in a "V" to make a heart shape) and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake approximately 15-17 minutes or until golden but not too brown. Cool slightly (about 5 minutes), then remove from the sheet and serve warm.

The directions on Allrecipes.com give options for making Cranberry-Orange Scones, Lemon-Blueberry Scones, or even Cherry-Almond Scones, which gave me the inspiration to add almond extract--and I think that's what really makes these scones pop! The bride-to-be loved the treat and took the extras home to her groom, who ate about six in a row. I'd say that's a success!

Banana Donuts

While I admit I'm a bit behind on my baking blog posts, I certainly haven't been behind on my baking. I made these delicious Banana Donuts on June 27, during my summer staycation off from work. I can't remember the exact motivation for donuts--perhaps I had browning bananas at the time, perhaps I just wanted to make something delicious to deliver to my mom. Either way it was a fun endeavor with a pleasing result.

In attempting to make my banana donuts, I knew I wanted to find a recipe where I could use self-rising flour. I still had some leftover that my mom had given me after making Jamie Oliver's deliciously easy pancakes for Valentine's Day, and I wanted to put it to good use. A quick search found me a great recipe from King Arthur Flour with directions on how to adapt it for self-rising flour. I cut the baking soda, lowered the amount of salt, and included the cinnamon since I was using bananas and they pair well together. I then borrowed a quick cinnamon-sugar recipe from the website Kitchn, and had the donuts ready in no time.

Ingredients:

1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 and 1/4 cups white sugar
1 and 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/2 cups mashed bananas
2 cups self-rising flour

For the topping:

1/4 cup white sugar
1 Tablespoon cinnamon

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Beat together the oil, eggs, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt. Stir in the bananas.

2.) Slowly stir in the self-rising flour until the batter is smooth but still has some lumps of banana. Pour the batter into a donut pan (sprayed liberally with nonstick cooking spray) until nearly full.

3.) Bake approximately 18 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center of the donut comes out clean or with a tiny bit of crumbs attached. Remove from oven and loosen the edges with a plastic knife. Wait 5 minutes, and then transfer the donuts to a wire rack.

4.) While the donuts are warm, dip them into a bowl filled with the cinnamon-sugar mixture topping. Coat thoroughly, then turn over and coat the other side. Serve while warm, if possible, though the donuts taste good at room temperature as well.

Perfect Pancakes by Jamie Oliver

My mom sent me this Tweet from Jamie Oliver (celebrity chef extraordinaire) months ago, along with a care package of self-rising flour. Turns out it is the easiest way to make pancakes when you're craving them, and they always turn out fluffy and light! Try adding blueberries, chocolate chips, or other additions to customize to your tastes. Perfect!

Ingredients:

1 egg
1 cup self-rising flour
1 cup milk (I use fat-free or 1%, lactose free milk by Lactaid)
Pinch of salt

Directions:

1.) Whisk ingredients together. Pour onto a hot griddle that's been lightly coated with canola oil (you can tell it's ready when a drop of water placed on the pan starts to sizzle). Allow the edges of the pancake to harden and then flip it. Cook another minute or so, checking the underside for doneness.

That's it!

I saved this recipe for Valentine's Day (I had a lot planned and didn't want to lose time on an extensive, complicated endeavor), and poured the pancakes into a silicon heart-shaped mold for a breakfast filled with love. And chocolate chips. It worked great and gave me plenty of time to set up gifts, make bacon (another way to show your love), and get ready for a date at Gameworks. But really, you can use these pancakes for any occasion!

Green Sour Cream Pound Cake for St. Pat's!

Happy St. Patrick's Day! It's the one day out of the year where my baking can match my clothes. Green, after all, has always been my favorite color. This year St. Patrick's Day also fell within the week of Spring Break at the college where I work. It's fairly quiet on campus, which makes it the perfect time to bring in treats to colleagues who have been working so hard to make it to mid-semester.

So I knew I would be baking something green well before the day arrived. I just wasn't sure what. I wanted to make something from scratch and use the ingredients I had. I'm not sure how the idea of "pound cake" came into my head--it must have popped up in my Internet search for recipes using self-rising flour (I had a leftover container my mom gave me for pancakes). But most of the those self-rising baked goods also called for buttermilk--which I did not have. In my fridge, however, was a small tub of sour cream. I knew this could be a good substitution for some baked goods. In fact, a few donut recipes appeared when I modified my search for self-rising flour and sour cream. But I was most drawn to a post for Sour Cream Pound Cake from farmflavor.com. It might take a while to bake, but sounded super easy to put together. And the instructions on my green food coloring bottle said I only needed to add 1/2 teaspoon into any cake batter to get that green tint. Perfect! My St. Pat's Green Sour Cream Pound Cake was born.

Ingredients:

2 sticks of butter (16 Tablespoons), softened but not melted

3 cups sugar

5 eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

3 cups self-rising flour (sifted)

8 oz. sour cream (I use Daisy Lite)

1/2 teaspoon liquid green food coloring (I used McCormick)

Optional strawberries, green, grapes, whipped cream, and green frosting to decorate

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. In a very large bowl, cream the butter and sugar together with an electric or stand mixer. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing after each, then add the vanilla and mix again.

2.) Alternate adding flour and sour cream until all ingredients are combined. Add the green food coloring last, mixing until thoroughly combined.

3.) Pour the batter into your pan of choice (that's been heavily greased with butter/flour or nonstick cooking spray). The original recipe calls for an hour and a half bake time for a tube/bunt pan. For my shallow book-shaped pan (slightly larger than 9x13 inches) I had to cut that baking time down significantly, checking after 30 minutes (still too wobbly), and ultimately baking only about 40-45 minutes total, until the top and edges were slightly brown and a toothpick inserted into the center came out clean.

4.) Remove the cake from the oven and let cool to room temperature before refrigerating overnight. Serve the next morning with strawberries, GREEN grapes for St. Paddy's, and any whipped cream or icing you choose.

I was a little nervous bringing the finished product to work the next morning after baking. Would a green cake be appetizing? Would the center be too solid or not solid enough? Despite a clean toothpick test, I hadn't cut into the cake or baked any side cakes to try first since the batter was just barely enough to fill my pan. And I didn't want to ruin the look of the finished cake before my coworkers saw it.

Turns out I didn't need to worry! The cake received rave reviews by my supervisor, our administrative assistant, and all the librarians and staff that had a piece. Nearly half the cake was gone by lunch time! The center was moist, the flavor was sweet, and I now have a go-to pound cake recipe for any time of year!

Classic Cinnamon Rolls

In my family, I started a holiday tradition upon which we have cinnamon rolls for breakfast Christmas morning. And I bake them. The smell and the taste is wonderful to wake up to on such a special occasion, and it gives me something to do in the early hours I'm up before the rest of my family now that I'm past the age of present peeking (mostly). The last few years I've utilized pizza dough to create Easy Breezy Morning Cinnamon Rolls for Christmas breakfast--which are always fun to make, delicious to eat, and don't require yeast (so they get done a lot faster since the dough doesn't need time to rise). But before I discovered this pizza dough hack, I made my yeast-less cinnamon rolls with biscuit dough. And while that recipe has remained a family favorite for years--my handwritten version safely tucked within a fat, orange binder with other old school, paper recipes--I've never actually posted it here. But when this year's Christmas rolled around and I just couldn't find whole wheat pizza dough at my local grocery stores (or any pizza dough, really), I went back to the classic and made cinnamon rolls that hearkened to my early years as an unofficial baker. 

I'll call these my Classic Cinnamon Rolls. It turns out the original recipe (which I adapted slightly) comes from a Cooks Illustrated recipe by Raquel Pelzel, published May 2002 (That's where I got some of the language like "shaggy" dough and "wet sand"). My mom had copied the pages with diagrams to know how to shape the rolls correctly (which are probably safely tucked away within her own recipe binder). But since I don't have those original copies, special thanks to Ed Santiago for his recipe archive scans of the pages:

Ingredients:

For the dough:
Flour (for dusting)
2 and 1/2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
2 Tablespoons sugar
1 and 1/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 and 1/4 cups buttermilk
2 Tablespoons melted butter

For the filling:
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup white sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon melted butter

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt for the dough. In a separate bowl or large measuring cup, whisk the buttermilk and melted butter for the dough.

2.) Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until a shaggy dough forms, about 30 seconds. Then knead the dough until it is smooth and not shaggy. Pat into a 12x9-inch rectangle and spray the top of the dough lightly with nonstick cooking spray.

3.) In another bowl, combine the brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and salt for the filling. Add the melted butter and stir until the mixture resembles wet sand. Then take half the mixture and pat a thin layer onto the rectangle of dough, pressing down but not too deep.

4.) Roll the dough into a log, crimp the edges, and cut into your desired amount of cinnamon rolls. Lay them into a round cake pan sprayed with nonstick cooking spray and sprinkled with the other half of the filling mixture (save just a little to sprinkle on top of the rolls as well). Press the rolls flat and dust the tops with the cinnamon mixture.

5.) Bake the rolls for approximately 23 minutes, checking early for even browning. Remove from the oven, let cool at least 5 minutes and then ice with your favorite icing. If you don't have a recipe, it's easy to make!

From my previous cinnamon roll recipe, here's a simple Icing Recipe:

Combine 1 cup powdered sugar with 2 Tablespoons of your favorite milk-like product (soy creamer, buttermilk, half and half, or just plain milk). Be careful when you pour the sugar, then stir thoroughly. Drizzle over slightly cooled cinnamon rolls and you're done!

Now for some pictures of the process!

Yes, the outfit is a must!

Fall Fun Including Pumpkin Donuts!

It's true, I've been a little behind in my blog postings, but that doesn't mean I haven't been ready (as always) for fall (and pumpkin).

One need look no further than my recent grocery store purchases to confirm my commitment to all things pumpkin once late September rolls around. As I happily shared with a fellow pumpkin-loving Facebook friend, this season I've thus far sampled: pumpkin granola, yogurt, cream cheese, cake bars, black coffee (K-cup pods from Target), Starbucks lattes, waffles, pancakes, cereals, and M&Ms (pumpkin spice LATTE flavored).

Fall-themed cereals alone!

Then my mom purchased me this assortment from Trader Joe's:

Not all of these were spot on--I'm less impressed with the Nestle chips.

But the biggest foodie plans for the season revolved around my sort of annual Halloween party get-together of former coworkers (we try to do this every year). I love putting together a menu of fall and spooky-themed items, many of which I've employed in the children's department of the library and many that I've just made up on the spot. Caramel apples were a must, seeing as how I hadn't yet made any caramel apples this fall (and it was October already), and spider cookies (made from Oreo cookies dotted with candy eyes) was a fun delight I'd tried before. Running short of time, I bought a prepackaged Duncan Hines chocolate cupcake mix (dark chocolate fudge if I remember correctly), but I couldn't skimp on something pumpkin flavored. Usually I make a nice Pumpkin Dip with cream cheese, but this time I'd had an idea to do some sort of pumpkin cake for a long time. Inspired by the MyRecipes.com Boo-tiful Pumpkin Cake, I thought I'd go a little smaller scale with Pumpkin Donuts (hey, I had a donut pan and not a bunt cake pan). With a quick Internet search, I found a four and a half-star recipe for Glazed Pumpkin Donuts on AllRecipes.com that I quickly modified for my purposes.

Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat pastry flour (sifted)

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 and 1/2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup pumpkin puree (I used Libby's Canned Pumpkin)

2 eggs

1/4 cup of milk (I used Fat-Free Lactose Free Milk)

1/4 cup butter, softened

Directions:

1.) Preheat the oven to 325 degrees and spray your donut pan with nonstick cooking spray (you could try with a muffin pan, but it really helps to have a donut pan to make donuts).

2.) Sift the flour, brown sugar, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, salt, and baking soda into a large mixing bowl. Add the canned pumpkin, eggs, milk, and softened butter. Stir to combine ingredients (an electric hand mixer on low speed was especially helpful) until the batter is thoroughly combined but not overmixed (just make sure there are no large lumps of butter left. Those were the hardest parts to break down).

3.) Pour the batter into the donut pan, filling almost to the top. Wipe away any excess batter around the edges with a paper towel (this will help the donuts look more uniform later). 

4.) Bake approximately 8-10 minutes (I started with 8 minutes but the donuts were not yet firm when I took them out--they should sort of spring back when touched rather than leave an impression. I baked for an additional 2 minutes until they started to brown around the edges just a tad).

5.) Remove the donuts from the oven and allow to cool to room temperature before removing from the pan (otherwise they will stick to the pan and fall apart). Once the donuts are completely cooled, flip them over and frost them any way you like. I used Philadelphia Pumpkin Spice Cream Cheese spooned into a plastic baggie with the tip cut off so I could draw little gourd-shaped lines on the donuts.

Optionally, you can also add a piece of green licorice (I used green apple Rips) to make a stem, though the licorice will make the rest of the donuts smell like green apple when you store them in the fridge. Yes, I learned all these the hard way.

I have to admit, despite my obvious bias to all things pumpkin, these were my favorite treats of the Halloween evening. They came out moist--even after being refrigerated overnight--paired well with the cream cheese, had a lovely flavor, and offered a nice contrast to all the chocolate on my table.

What other fall things have I baked lately and not blogged about? I admit, the list is limited to JELLO Jigglers attempted in a pan meant for cakes (miraculously, it worked!). But for me, Halloween is the big event of the season...until Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie comes along....