Peach Bread and Farm Fresh Eggs

I'm in major spring cleaning mode in my house right now. Essentially, the house looks like a tornado went through it, dashing magazines, clothes and books all over, but kindly leaving little clear paths between the rooms for me to walk on. I know this sounds counter-intuitive and not at all like cleaning, but I'm not just moving things around, I'm actually getting rid of a LOT of the clutter. Stuff is being listed on Craigslist (and boy has THAT been a fun little experience), sorted into donation boxes, and packed up to give away to friends and family. The more I dig the more I realize that in just 6 or 7 short years that I've lived in my tiny little home, I've accumulated enough "stuff" to impress Madame Trash Heap.

Among the things being cleaned out is the fridge. All of the mystery jars and random little tid bits have been cleared out and I've moved onto the freezer. That will take some time, I have a LOT of frozen fruit I never got to still left over from last summer/fall. I guess this winter has been busier then I thought. The first to go was the leftover bag of peaches I had brought back from a camping trip to Michigan last fall. I don't like using frozen fruit for pies, but in this lightened version of Peach Bread, they were lovely. The bread itself is not too sweet, quite moist, and very flavorful. The perfect thing to go with a cup of tea in the morning, afternoon, or a late night cleaning marathon. Hard work requires a few rewards, after all.



Peach Bread
Adapted from Honey & Jam (one of my new favorite blogs).
I increased the measurements by 1.5 because my pans are a bit bigger and I wanted taller loaves, but feel free to halve the amounts if you only want 1 loaf or decrease by 1/3 if your pans are smaller. I also left my peaches in bigger chunks and used a bit more then called for because I really love it when fruit forms little sweet pockets in the bread and it felt silly to hang onto just a half a cup of peaches. The batter held the extra fruit like a champ.

5 eggs
1.5 cup dark brown sugar 3/4 cup white sugar
3 teaspoons vanilla extract
3/4 cup vegetable oil
3/4 cup applesauce
3.5 cups roughly diced peaches, drain well if using frozen
4.5 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 teaspoon baking powder
1.5 teaspoon salt
1.5 teaspoon baking soda
2.5 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease and lightly flour two 9 x 4 inch loaf pans.
2. In a large bowl, beat the eggs lightly. Blend in the sugar, oil, applesauce and vanilla. Add flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon; mix just to combine. Stir in the peaches. Pour batter into prepared pans.
3. Bake for about 1 hour, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean.


On a slightly unrelated note, a few weeks back I visited my friend's sister's house and got to meet her 4 adorable red-headed chickens. Her husband had built them an ingenious penthouse coop and I've never seen happier chickens then these. It was already getting dark and I didn't have my camera with me anyways, so sadly I don't have pictures of the girls for you, but I was lucky enough to be given 6 of the beautiful, super fresh eggs to take home with me.



I'm still thinking of what to do with them to really let the eggs shine, but the first two got made into breakfast. I wanted to keep it as simple as possible, so these are sunny side up eggs fried in just a slick of olive oil and with a hearty dash of sea salt and freshly ground pepper.



I may be biased considering I've met the chickens, but I think the whites were fluffier and the yolks were creamier in these eggs. I don't have room to keep chickens of my own, and considering all the baking I do buying local eggs is a bit out of my price range, but I think I'll need to splurge occasionally because these really were amazing.

Scones to Build a Brunch Around

You're probably really sick of me talking about breakfast, so I'll move on. Who wants to talk about brunch? I know, I know, I didn't get far from the breakfast topic, but brunch is my favorite time to have people over. Well, brunch and just because. The day is just starting, the food can be comforting and no one is falling asleep at the table. You can pour out cups and cups of coffee, play games, or just chat, and if you happen to have gone a bit overboard with the menu, that just means your guests will stay longer. It's hard to leave when you can't even stand up.



One more recipe has recently entered my "must make for brunch" repertoire, and that is this one for the best scones ever. If you only know scones from those hard lumps they sell at Starbucks, you will be pleasantly surprised. These are tender, crumbly, and just a little sweet, so they go great with a bit of butter or a slick of your favorite jam.



They're enormously easy to make, and you can probably try them with any kind of fruit or even mini chocolate chips, which gives me an idea for what to try next. But the first time you make these, I'd recommend using the original recipe. It's wonderful and will make a great addition to your breakfast, brunch or any time table.



Dreamy Cream Scones
America’s Test Kitchen Cookbook via Smitten Kitchen

2 cups (10 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 tablespoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons chilled, unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch cubes
1/2 cup currants (I used dried cranberries, and chopped them into smaller bits)
1 cup heavy cream

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 425°F.

2. Place flour, baking powder, sugar and salt in large bowl or work bowl of food processor fitted with steel blade. Whisk together or pulse six times.

3. If making by hand, use two knives, a pastry blender or your fingertips and quickly cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse meal, with a few slightly larger butter lumps. Stir in currants. If using food processor, remove cover and distribute butter evenly over dry ingredients. Cover and pulse 12 times, each pulse lasting 1 second. Add currants and pulse one more time. Transfer dough to large bowl.

4. Stir in heavy cream with a rubber spatula or fork until dough begins to form, about 30 seconds.

5. Transfer dough and all dry, floury bits to countertop and knead dough by hand just until it comes together into a rough, sticky ball, 5 to 10 seconds. Form scones by either a) pressing the dough into an 8-inch cake pan, then turning the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface, cutting the dough into 8 wedges with either a knife or bench scraper (the book’s suggestion and what I did) or b) patting the dough onto a lightly floured work surface into a 3/4-inch thick circle, cutting pieces with a biscuit cutter, and pressing remaining scraps back into another piece and cutting until dough has been used up. (Be warned if you use this latter method, the scones that are made from the remaining scraps will be much lumpier and less pretty, but taste fine.)

6. Place rounds or wedges on ungreased baking sheet and bake until scone tops are light brown, 12 to 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack for at least 10 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Yummy Afternoon

There's nothing quite as warming on a cold day as golden bread baking in the oven and this weekend I've had the pleasure to experience this twice. Who needs radiators in this sub-zero weather when the oven never sleeps?

On my way home on Friday I called my friend D, and while we didn't really have plans to meet, we got to talking and the next thing I know she's at my house with a cooler and a recipe. She found this great recipe on Allrecipes.com a while back and has been making it ever since with great results. While we were waiting for the bread to rise I separated a few eggs to age some egg whites for macaroon experimentation tomorrow and made these Turkish Coffee Pots de Creme with the egg yolks.



To be honest, I didn't really like them. The recipe worked like a charm and they baked up nicely into a thick, creamy custard, but I think the cardamom flavor was a bit too strong for my taste. But if you love cardamom, you should really give this a try.

Anyways, back to the fabulous bread! D wrapped up and took the 4 loaves she made home with her when she left around 2 am and I went to sleep, but when I woke up I could still smell the bread and since there was no bread to be found all I could think of is making some for myself. Lucky for me, D forgot her recipe on the counter. I promise, I didn't steal it, hide it or anything....I think. Anyways, it just so happens that I had everything needed on hand and I had just enough time to pop the pretty loaves into the oven when my friend K rang the buzzer. A while ago she and I planned a Frenchie inspired foodie day, but as the day drew closer everyone else dropped out and it was up to K and me to keep the plans alive, so while the bread was baking we popped a bottle of bubbly, the cork narrowly missing my eye and the glass cabinet full of fragile tea cups and glassware, and started on the macaroons. The plan was to make hazelnut macaroons filled with a chocolate honey ganache I had made that morning...but when we got started I realized I had almost no powdered sugar. Woops. Oh, well, we decided. We'll just go with it, anything you make with sugar, hazelnuts, and egg whites has got to be good. And once you fill the hazelnut meringues with ganache (see how I changed the cookie name as if that's what we meant to make all along? you didn't see anything...) they came out great!



But in my opinion the best part, aside from having a good friend over to chat and tinker in the kitchen, was the bread.



K brought some fabulous ham and cheese because originally we were going to make savory crepes, but with the beautiful bread cooling on the counter K suggested making grilled cheese sandwiches instead. Genius! I mean look at this:



Wait,look, another angle to get the full affect of this amazing deliciousness:



I don't mean to get obnoxious here, but that sandwich was fabulous, so I'd recommend that you either scroll back up to the link with the recipe and make it right away...oh what am I saying, don't leave. Stay, I'll even give you the recipe right here:

Braided Egg Bread
from Allrecipes.com

2 (.25 ounce) packages active dry yeast
1/2 cup warm water (110F degrees)
2 cups hot milk
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup water
5 eggs
11 cups all-purpose flour
1 egg
2 tablespoons sesame seeds

- Proof yeast and 1/2 cup warm water in a large mixing bowl.
- Combine hot milk, sugar, butter, salt, and 1/2 cup water in a medium bowl. Cool to 110 degrees.
- In small bowl, slightly beat 5 eggs, then add to cooled milk mixture. Add milk mixture to yeast mixture. Add 2 cups flour and beat until smooth. Slowly add remaining flour until it forms a stiff dough. Knead on a floured board for 10 minutes (5 minutes with a bread hook). Place in a large glass or plastic bowl lightly greased. Turn dough over to grease both sides. Cover and let rise in a warm, dark place until doubled in volume, approximately 60 minutes.
- Punch down, cover, and let rise again until double, approximately 30 minutes.
- Punch again, and form into three parts. Form each part into a 20-inch roll. Braid rolls on a large, greased cookie sheet. Cover and let rise until doubled.
- Lightly beat remaining egg and brush loaf. Sprinkle with sesame seeds. Bake in preheated 350 degree F (175 degrees C) oven for about 55 minutes until nicely browned. May be made into two regular sized loaves. Reduce baking time slightly.

Enjoy!

The Best Focaccia Ever

I love Roasted red peppers. I love everything about them. I love how they look under the broiler, all bright red and glossy from the thin coat of olive oil. I love when the thin skin peels right off in one or two large pieces, even if it doesn't often happen that way. I love how it tastes and I love how it looks tossed with a pile of caramelized onions in a jar, or even better on toast. It's the easiest thing in the world to make and it never fails to impress, which leads me to my recipe for the best focaccia bread recipe ever from what is becoming one of my favorite cookbooks, Apples for Jam, topped with soft goat cheese and roasted peppers:

Olive Oil Focaccia with Goat Cheese and Roasted Red Peppers
adapted from Apples for Jam:

1 3/4 cups warm water
1/4 oz active dry yeast
1 tsp honey
2 tbsp olive oil
600 grams flour
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
1 tsp garlic powder
1 1/2 tsp salt

4 red peppers
1 large onion
a bit of olive oil


- Put water, yeast, honey, 1 tbsp oil and about a cup of the flour into a bowl and mix until smooth. Cover with a towel and leave in a warm spot for 20-30 minutes until it all froths up and looks foamy.
- Mix in the rest of the flour, the Italian seasoning, garlic powder and the salt and using a dough hook, mix for 4-5 minutes until it's well incorporated. I have a stand mixer, but if you don't she recommends you just mix it with your hands by slapping it around the bowl for a while. Cover the bowl with a towel again and let it rise in a warm spot for about an hour and a half. It should puff up a great deal.
- Lightly oil a rectangular baking dish (11x16). Punch down the dough lightly and carefully spread it in the dish, gently stretching it to the edges making sure it's mostly even. If it won't stretch, leave it for a few minutes and come back to try again, but don't rip it. Tent it with a towel (put some glasses around the dish and drape the towel over them) and let it rise again for about 45 minutes.
- Wash and dry the red peppers and rub completely with a bit of olive oil. Place on a baking sheet and broil them until their skin is nicely charred, checking and turning them every few minutes to make sure it's even.
- Turn down the oven to 450F when you're done, put the peppers into a bowl and tightly cover with saran wrap to let them steam and cool a bit for about 15 minutes.
- Slice the onion into thin ribbons and cook with a bit of olive oil on medium in a large skillet, stirring frequently until they're soft and a nice caramel color. Set aside.
- Mix the remaining 1 tbsp of oil with about a half cup of hot water and a teaspoon of salt. Stir until the salt dissolves.
- Make some dimples in the dough with your fingers and brush well with the water mixture. Put in the oven and bake for about 20-30 minutes until the bread is golden on top.
- While the bread is baking, uncover the peppers and carefully peel as much of the skin as you can. Take out and discard the stem, the seeds and some of the inner membrane and slice the peppers into ribbons. Add to the onions and toss together.
- Let bread cool a bit and then pop out of the pan and cut into pieces. Spread some goat cheese on each slice and top with the pepper mixture. Enjoy!

Happy Easter!

There are a lot of great things I've learned from my parents. They sometimes say that I study them and their behavior too much, but it seems that I truly embrace and excel at their mind-boggling, oddball traits and habits that I'm sure sometimes they wish we wouldn't take too much notice of, let alone take them on as our own. Growing up Jewish in my family meant that around Easter when everyone was coloring eggs, making bread with whole eggs baked right in, and having egg fights we simply were not allowed to participate. My father always insisted on that. My mother on the other hand was an only child and when she was growing up and the same restrictions presented themselves to her by her parents, she negotiated, refusing to be left out of the fut. So eating the eggs became not just allowed, but necessary. I'm not exactly sure how she got by when she was younger, but every year for as far back as I can recall, right around this time, she'd send my dad on a quest. Despite all his arguments, she was adamant that he had a job to do: find her colored hard boiled eggs. Usually it's not hard as you can be pretty much sure that a multi-colored dozen of them will be waiting at your local Jewel, but there has been a year or two when we had to go without and such an event meant some lighthearted, but distinctly disappointed pouting. I don't think it was because she had a taste for hard boiled eggs or anything, but she simply refused to be excluded from the fun and unfortunately(?) I have inherited a healthy dose of that spirit, with a slight modification. Seeing as how this is considered the age of information overload and the internet, I now have complete access to all holidays and traditions, along with a mind-boggling list of amazing recipes that come with each. My birthday, for example, is the official "Sneak a zucchini onto your neighbor's porch day". Seriously. If you don't believe me, just Google it. My sisters do it all the time, but then I don't remember the last time I could present a "fact" to them without it being questioned and Googled. I think I need to jump on the bandwagon and get some Google stock.


But, back to Easter. A friend of the family called me several weeks ago and asked if I'd be available to make cupcakes for an Easter party she'll be going to. I may have hesitated for...okay, I didn't hesitate. I mean, who says no to cupcakes? And I've never made anything for Easter before and I do live under my very own roof now, so I said yes. Now, while making the cupcakes themselves is a piece of cake (that was on purpose) the decorations would need to be appropriately themed, and that would take a bit of research, so to the internet I went....and there I found way too many options/recipes/designs/etc. Considering that I'd be making them during the week due to a birthday party I had the night before I had to drop the cupcakes off, I decided to go with a slightly simpler design approach, hence the cupcakes you see in the picture above. But in my search I also stumbled on this gorgeous post over at Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy, which is one of the many baking sites I *ahem* stalk, and I just had to try this myself. Doing so would break two rules I remember from childhood: it would involve both Painting at least one egg and it would involve baking a special pastry where that egg is prominently featured. I am, however, counting on my mother theorizing that as long as the painting/baking/assembly is not done in her house or in my father's presence, this yummy bread is just yummy bread and it will be welcomed into the house with open arms, despite the bright blue egg in the middle. Who knows, he might even get out of having to find her some last minute painted eggs.

In the mean time, this bread, which was so simple and yet so amazingly good, will probably mean that the thousands of "crazy" people around the world that insist that making your own bread is both cheaper and better than anything you can ever get from the store now have a new convert. Me.

What do you do on a gloomy Sunday?

This morning I woke up at a fairly reasonable time for a Sunday, got dressed and ready to run errands, took two steps out of my back door and went right back in. A few minutes later I was in my robe with a bowl of cereal and the remote. When it's as gloomy as it was today, I really don't want to leave the house, but I'm absolutely incapable of spending more than an hour on the couch. I get restless. So I looked around and decided that it will be a day for odd chores. I installed the two pull out drawers I bought for my pantry and reorganized everything, I sorted through my stack of magazines and threw out the ones that were already "juiced" of all the recipes/articles that interested me and I finally cleaned everything that has been piling on my dining room table for weeks. Lunch: poached salmon with whole wheat mac n'cheese on the side. Hey, don't judge me, it's what was lying around and it's pretty healthy, right? I spent the rest of the day puttering around. Picking up this, sorting that, throwing extras out and cleaning/unpacking the various things I have lying around in bags waiting patiently for me to get to them. It was only 7pm when I realized that I'm tired of cleaning and I need to make a little mess to balance things out, so I pulled out the recipe I've been meaning to make for a while now: Froot Loop cupcakes:


I first saw the recipe for these on Flickr and the picture led me to The Crepes of Wrath blog, which in turn led me to Gastronomy for the original recipe (really just a half sized version of the one on the first blog). I didn't have any oranges, but I did have about 3 dozen lemons so they're lemon flavored cupcakes, and since they looked a bit on the plain side I added "milk" in the form of a simple glaze, so the cupcakes now look like overfilled cereal bowls.

As for why I have 3 dozen lemons, they were pushed at me by my parents. My father was sent on a routine run to the grocery store and he saw several packages of pretty lemons on the clearance rack. So while they were not on his list, since to him lemons equal lemon cake, he bought all of them. When I came by to visit my parents my dad jumped up and said "I have lemons for you!" and with a sly look on his face followed that up with "You know....for the cake?". To which my mother chimed in from the kitchen, "All I want is a jar of Lemon Curd, please. A big one." So while I have a ton of lemons, it seems that they're all spoken for. Though that will be a task for a different day.

My next thought was that I never did go grocery shopping, which was on the agenda when I stepped out of the house this morning, so I began scouring the cupboards for ideas. I'm trying to keep to a budget and one of the main expenses that were cut was the daily lunch outings, but everything in the fridge looked boring. I went online and found an email from King Arthur Flour, a wonderful source for baking tools, recipes and inspiration. They were advertising their cooking classes, which are unfortunately several states away from me, but they also featured one of the recipes that they were going to teach: Sesame Semolina Lunettas and they looked fairly easy. I happened to have had a bag of semolina on hand, so I decided to bake two loaves. One to make sandwiches for work and the other to bring to my parent's house along with the slew of lemon products they ordered. A few hours later, my house smelled amazing and while I didn't shape the bread into the Lunetta shapes, the loaves I ended up with looked and tasted great. I'm definitely going to be baking more bread in the future. It makes lunch a lot more exciting and it makes the whole house smell amazing!


Just look at that crumb! I've never really been able to make bread, so I'm very happy with how this came out. The recipe is definitely a keeper.


In the evening my little sister, who drove back to school a few hours away, after visiting this afternoon, IM'd me to ask about the snow. It snowed? I spent such a nice day inside that I didn't even notice!

Honey Cake Memories

My mom called me the other day to tell me about her search for the perfect honey cake recipe she remembers from her childhood and yet another failed attempt to recreate it. While I will thoroughly research every new baking/cooking endeavor and find the best recipes by learning from the mistakes of others, my mother is a lot more adventurous in the kitchen. On many occasions she has literally thrown whatever she felt like together with the carefree notion of "well, why not?" and "let's see what happens if I add this" and "well, if it doesn't turn out, your father will still eat it". And most of the time her experiments turn out great and she'll call me the next day and happily describe what she did with a touch of the old world instructions that don't actually have any measurements despite my best efforts to extract them. A snippet of the conversation will usually go like this:

Mom: "....and then you add some flour"
Me: "How much do you add?"
Mom: "Just a few handfuls 'till it starts looking like it's enough. You'll see."
Me: "Well, approximately how much did you add?"
Mom: "A few cups should do it. Oh, and then you need some baking soda and vinegar"
Me: "What? Really?"
Mom: "Of course, how else are you going to get it to fizz?"
Me: "It needs to fizz?"

And this is when I give up. None of the recipes I've ever come across even mention vinegar. I write down the ingredients she mentions on any scrap of paper I find along with my guesstimates of the measurements with a quick note stating that it's my mother's recipe and I file it away for future investigation.

But back to the honey cake. I wrote down the ingredients she was using and the two variations she learned from my grandmother and one of her friends and listened to how disappointed my father was when he had to go to sleep at the end of the night with no cake and the whole house smelling of baked goods and honey, and I decided to give it a try. I found a recipe that sounded the closest to what my mom was trying to do here and I decided to make it and bring it over to my parent's when I visit them tomorrow. Who knows? Maybe I can come close and I can give her the recipe to play with as she pleases. I doubled the recipe and made two small 8" loaves and a short 6" round cake. One loaf will come with me to work and the other I'll bring to my parent's house....as for that round one...aside from being my model it'll also probably be breakfast since it'll go great with the green tea I just bought. And in the mean time, I get to go to bed with my whole house smelling of warm honey with a touch of cinnamon.