German Apple Pancakes

Again, thanks to Bountiful Baskets, I've had had more than enough apples around. This morning Hilary and I woke up to a foot of snow, and I wanted to make something special for breakfast. I found this recipe online. I choose it because I don't have an oven-proof skillet, which most German pancake recipes call for; what I do have is a cake tin. I halved the recipe because I only have one cake tin, and also because there would only be two of us eating anyway.

First: slice the apples and cover them in the lemon juice, brown sugar, and cinnamon mixture. I also added pinches of ground cloves and ground allspice to mine. Set this aside. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees and put the cake tin in the oven to heat.

Now you want to mix up the batter, including the milk, eggs, flour, and salt.

Mix it until frothy (top will be covered in bubbles and will continue to bubble). It may be a minute or two. Set this aside while you get your pan ready.

In your preheated cake tin (the oven should now be preheated to 400), add 1/4 cup butter and place back in oven until it's completely melted.

(Melted butter. Yes, you really will need this much.)

Once the butter is melted, place the sliced, spiced apples in the pan. In halving the recipe, I should have used one apple, but I still used two apples. You can use however many apples you like.

Cover the apples with the batter that's been sitting aside. Place back in the oven and bake for 20-30 minutes. I baked mine for about 25.

It turned out beautifully! Remember that German pancakes are still moist and spongy in the middle when fully baked. If you insert a knife and it comes out clean, it's finished, even if it still looks undone.

I served mine with this caramel sauce, which I love. It tasted wonderful together. If you don't want something too sweet, simply sprinkle the pancake with powdered sugar and serve.

I like this recipe because it didn't have a lot of ingredients, or a lot of them. It was easy to whip up and would also be easy to make in bulk. The most expensive ingredient would probably be the apples, if you had to buy them in bulk, and that's saying something.

Loved it!

Banana Pear Chocolate Muffins and Mexican Wedding Cookies

Thanks to Bountiful Baskets, I've had several Asian pears around that I've had no idea what to do with. I'm not crazy about eating pears just as pears, so I wanted to find a recipe I could use them in. Thankfully, I found this recipe (I also had bananas from the load, which are easier to eat/deal with but there were a lot of them and they were going bad), and got to work.

In addition to bananas and pears, I added--yes--Dove dark chocolate. I'm all about being healthy and fresh, but let's not get too crazy. I used one and a half chocolate bars, or about 1/4 cup - 1/2 cup after chopping. When I prepared these ingredients, I was originally going to use two pears instead of the suggested one, but when I got one chopped up I realized how much it was.

First step: mix the banana, eggs, sugar, vanilla, olive oil. (I have to say here--I love that this recipe calls for olive oil. It's so unusual for a muffin recipe. The ingredients are listed as "olive oil" and "vanilla (if you have any)," like someone was more likely to put olive oil than vanilla in muffins. Made me laugh).

Adding the dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt. DO NOT OVERMIX your muffin mix! They will come out like rocks. Mix only until the dry ingredients are just incorporated.

I roughly chopped my chocolate instead of using chocolate chips, because 1) the chocolate bars are what I had and 2) it give the muffins a more rustic look anyway.

Waiting to be mixed together. (I added the pears and chocolate just before the dry ingredients were fully incorporated, so as not to overmix.)

I can't tell you how impatient I was for these to be done baking. They were SO good, and a great mixture that's somewhat unusual.

Some things you should know about this recipe as written:
-The recipe claims it will only make 10-12 muffins, which worried me. However, my batch made 23 muffins, so the work is worth it. (It might help that my pears and chocolate were roughly chopped and took up more space.)
-These muffins didn't puff up nearly as much as other recipes I've made, so don't be afraid to fill the cups a little fuller.
-The recipe says to bake them for 20-30 minutes, which seemed like waaaay long to me. I baked mine for 15 and it was plenty of time. Plus, my oven cooks fast; know what you're working with and adjust as needed.
-Anything baked with bananas has a distinct flavor; I was afraid that one of the banana, pear, or chocolate flavor would overwhelm the others, but the balance was great (unless you want more of one thing, then I'd recommend upping the amount).


Also this week, I made Mexican Wedding Cookies from this recipe. They are my favorite under appreciated "Christmas" cookie. I won't write up the tutorial, since the process is so similar to the shortbread or tart shell tutorials you already know from the blog. They didn't have many ingredients, were quick to make, and are fun to powder and have around. Highly recommend them.

For Future Reference...

I think it's important to note that I believe halving desserts is deplorable.





Sinners.

Chocolate Ganache Tart

Something magical and surreal just happened in my kitchen. It's called "ganache". Ganache is a delicious mixture of dark chocolate chunks stirred into boiling heavy cream. AKA: "If this dessert was a man you'd have to pull me away before we went too far".

Because of my new found obsession with all things Martha (or M. Diddy as her cell mates knew her by) we used this recipe.

A few things I feel obligated to note:
1. I do not own a food processor. Thus, Megan smashed our almond slivers by hand with a spoon.
2. I do not own a food processor. So the butter was mixed into the flour mixture with my freshly washed hands.
3. I do not own a tart pan. Thus we used a disposable pie pan that will indeed be disposed of as I cut through it while slicing up the tart. (Also, I would recommend using a non disposable pie tin, as they are very flexible and hard to press the crust into).
4. We did not add any kind of citrus zest.
5. Screw the sieve. There was zero point to it and it added to our dish pile.
6. I'm impatient. There was a lot of fridge usage so that I could partake sooner.

I would also recommend drinking a large glass of milk while enjoying, as it is very rich indeed (as are people that own tart pans and food processors).

Here are some pictures (obviously I took them because they're not high enough quality to be Megan's):

Chocolate Caramel Fudge Cupcake

Nothing too unusual for some Saturday baking when I made a dozen Chocolate Fudge cupcakes with Pink Vanilla Frosting (I love that they have this; testament that little girls everywhere are turning five every day) (both store bought).

 (You can imagine what they look like, I'm sure, but here are some pictures because, well.. they're pretty.)

After the first dozen, though, I decided I wanted to use the caramel left over from the crepe post a few posts back and incorporate it somehow. Since there seems to be a bake-it-into-the-middle-of-the-cupcake theme on this blog--cookie dough, Nutella--I decided I'd do the same.

 When they had finished baking, I "frosted" them with what was left of the caramel (which went a long way, I was surprised), and also with dark chocolate shavings.

 When I bit into one I found that the caramel had sunk to the bottom of the cupcake. I'm not sure why this surprised me; it's pretty usual MO for a bake-it-in-the-middle-of-the-cupcake. Obviously, this doesn't make them the easiest things to eat, but the flavors were brilliant together.

 A lovely Saturday bake indeed.

Shortbread Tarts with Cream

This is one of the best tasting desserts I've ever had. And I've eaten a lot of desserts. I used the recipe found here.

Having said that, they were tricky to make. The shortbread tastes incredible but was incredibly crumbly and hard to get out of the muffin tins. As I baked batch by batch, decreasing the amount of batter in each tin and the baking time seemed to help. Still, they were difficult to get out and many of them didn't make it out.

Don't let it scare you. Shortbread is an amazing recipe worth mastering; it just takes some practice. Here are some tips:

Let's be real; creaming butter and sugar together is always an excellent way to start a recipe.

 When you cream, the shortest amount of time I would recommend is 2 minutes; the longest I've seen a recipe call for is 20 minutes. Don't skip this part, it gives shortbread and similar cookies their texture (putting air into the batter, making it "light and fluffy").

Because shortbread dough is light and fluffy, do not handle it too much. Handle it as little as possible to keep the effect you got when you creamed it. Also, I think one of the problems with my shortbread cups was that I made the bottoms too thick; don't push down very far, just make an indentation. 

 This recipe calls for fresh lemon zest and juice. A different recipe Jessica and I made last night called for fresh lemon juice as well, and we talked about how to juice a lemon (sans juicer, not really necessary). Here's how:

1. Obviously, if the recipe calls for zest, you'll want to grate it first.
2. Roll the lemon on a hard surface with the palm of your hand. Don't push too hard, you don't want to squish it, but you should feel it loosening up.
3. Slice the lemon in half.
4. Squeeze the lemon with one hand into your other hand (to catch the seeds and unwanted pulp) over a bowl underneath. This will guarantee you don't have seeds in your juice because they can be hard to pick out, and no one wants to munch on one.
5. Viola! This recipe calls for 1/3 cup lemon juice; I just juiced two lemons, which was about right. 

 Ready to assemble.

 Finished!

Very Muddy Buddies

As Annette requested (I even listened to this while I wrote the post, so perhaps you can enjoy it while you read), here's the fabulous muddy buddy adventure I had tonight.

So. They turned out kind of "dark chocolate" muddy buddies. The reason why is this: I didn't actually have chocolate chips. Instead, I found a cocoa substitute online. Instead of the 1 cup chocolate chips for the recipe I found and used, I substituted 6T cocoa powder + 7T sugar + 1/4 c. butter (can't remember where I found this combo, sorry; there are many online and you can find one that matches the ingredients you have).

I combined that mixture with the other ingredients in my saucepan and melted them together, mixing until the butter and peanut butter were melted and the powders were wet. If I do this again, I will probably bring the mixture to a boil rather than just wetting everything, because it would've melted the sugar better; without this, it was a little grainy. 

Another thing I did was double the chocolate mixture portion. Since I used dry ingredients, it wasn't as fluid as it should have been (though I did add a teaspoon or two of vegetable oil to help).

Also. I didn't have very much powdered sugar, which would have helped the chocolate seem not as dark; you can definitely tell in the pictures.

STILL. They were pretty good. Let this be a lesson in improvisation and what-to-do/what-not-to-do's.

Add a side of your favorite Hollywood hunk and you've got something worth munching. 

A last word to the wise: it wasn't the smartest dinner choice, no matter what time of the month it is. I'm glad I wasn't planning on moving around a lot tonight. 

Cookie Surprise Cupcakes

How we know this recipe was a success:
As Annette Harris was eating this she got so into it that she said “Sorry, that was really not lady like.” Afterward she remarked that “This cupcake tasted better than my boyfriend.” And for those of you who know Evan Moss, you know that this is a HUGE compliment!

Cupcake: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Cupcake
Frosting: Creamy Chocolate Frosting Recipe

These were literally the best cupcakes I have ever eaten. It's seriously a cookie surprise when you bite in and only expect cake. Mmmm... Try this one out when you get a chance. You will not regret it (and neither will the member of the opposite sex that you are trying to woo).

Freeze cookie dough in freezer for about 2 hours, or until firm in tablespoon sized balls (I used an ice cream scoop!):

Place balls on top of cupcake batter:

Bake, cool and frost:

And voila!:

All gone!

Caramel Apple Crepes

Sundays are the days I experiment bake. Today, something beautiful was born.

I have some frozen left-over crepes from a while back and I slowly use them as I have extra ingredients (great for college kids and their random grocery lists). Today I decided I wanted to make some sort of Caramel Apple Crepe. I had two apples, and the crepes obviously. The crepe recipe is top secret, as per boyf's instructions, but you can find many good recipes online. I found this caramel sauce recipe and loosely followed it.

First I diced the apples and put them on medium heat. You can cook them down to the tenderness of your liking. I added a pinch of ground cinnamon, ground allspice, and ground cloves to them, and added a little water (as needed) to keep them from sticking to the pan.

While they cooked I made the caramel sauce. It's pictured below in the process of being made; I didn't get a picture of the final thing, but this sauce was AMAZING. It had great flavor and wasn't too runny.

When the sauce was done, I added maybe half a cup or so to the apples (while they were still on the pan). This helped flavor the apples and the caramel also cooked crispy on the pan. I scraped it all into the reheated crepes, crusties, apples and all, and topped it with sauce.

Seriously... the final product was amazing. It was warm and yummy and perfect for a fall day. Highly recommend the sauce and the combo. Turned out great.

No Bake Cookies

No bake cookies. A staple food, in my opinion. What I love about no bake cookies is that I can trick myself into thinking that they're good for you. Also, because they have oatmeal in them I feel like they are appropriate to eat for breakfast (don't judge me).

We used this No Bake Cookie recipe, and the only thing we did differently ingredient wise was to use creamy peanut butter instead of crunchy.

Megan and I do have a few tips regarding these little drops of Heaven:
1. You're supposed to let them harden on wax paper, but for some reason aluminum foil works really well.
2. You need to start timing the 1.5 minutes from a full, rolling boil. And this is pretty much an exact instruction. These cookies are simple, but can be easy to mess up. Remove from the burner right away and start adding the ingredients.
3. Have the peanut butter measured out before hand, because it takes forever to measure.