Tag Archives: quick breads

Eggnog, Fruitcake And Happy Accidents

Posted on by
4

 

Eggnog and fruitcake; you either love them or hate them. I have never met anyone who says “Oh, fruitcake (or eggnog) is ok. I eat some every year but that’s about it”. From what I’ve seen it’s more like this

Person 1- “I am really loving this eggnog I’m drinking. I look forward to it every year!”

Person 2- “OMG!!! You sick bas****!!! Get away from me if you drink that crap! It’s nasty! It’s made from Llama brains! You are no longer a part of my life!!

Person 3- *tackles person one, steals the eggnog and sucks it all down in 5 seconds flat, then proceeds to hold up an eggnog delivery truck to appease their addiction*

Replace eggnog and drinking with fruitcake and eating and you have the picture of the typical reactions to both eggnog and fruitcake. I stand firmly in the camp of those holding up eggnog/fruitcake trucks. Not….erhmmmmm *whistles innocently* that I’ve ever done that.

I adore both eggnog and the much maligned fruitcake. I make my own fruitcake every year (you can get it how you like it that way, which in my case means a ton of fruit) and tend to buy one or two or eight of the preservative filled Hostess or whatever brand I see… “Joes Fruitcake anyone”? fruitcakes. And I happily slurp down a gallon or twelve of store bought eggnog each holiday season. Don’t get me wrong… home made is good too but somehow it just isn’t the same as the overly thick, overly sweet kind from a carton.

So when I saw a recipe a while back on Mandys Recipe Box  for eggnog coffee cake, I knew I had to try it. I mean… it uses store bought eggnog! But (no offense Mandy) I knew I wanted to change it up a bit. Originally though, it wasn’t going to be a big change, just a matter of more struesel and more spice as well as the chance to use my LorAnn Eggnog Flavoring. But, like I said, that was originally. It ended up being a larger change than I meant to make but it actually all worked out and saved some calories to boot. PLUS, made this egg free for those who like that. How? Simple. I forgot to add the eggs to the batter. Oops. When I saw how thick the batter was, I added about 2 tablespoons more eggnog to thin it out some. It seems to have done the trick in replacing the eggs because this was quite yummy without them. And it was still moist and tender. So, as far as I am concerned, the eggs are optional. Next time I make it, I’ll add the eggs out of curiosity but that’s about it lol.

Sooooo… if you like eggnog and warm from the oven baked goods, try this. It has a nice eggnog flavor and a moist tender crumb (even without the eggs hehe). Good cake for a weekend breakfast or a simple dessert. This comes together quickly. The original recipe called for an 8 hour rest time but I skipped that and it was fine. That would however be handy if you wanted to mix it up the night before and just pour and bake the next morning.

Eggnog Coffee Cake

  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter, room temp
  • 1 cup eggnog (add an extra 2 to 3 tablespoons if omitting eggs)
  • 1 cup sour cream
  • 1 teaspoon rum extract
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon eggnog flavoring (optional)
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 1/2 cups flour
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
  • 3/4 teaspoon nutmeg
  • STRUESEL- (I doubled this)
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 1 tablespoon flour
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, room temp
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • GLAZE-
  • 1/2 cup powdered sugar
  • 1-2 tablespoons eggnog (enough to make a glaze of drizzling consistency)
  1. Grease bottom of a 13×9 inch pan and preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a small bowl, mix together your struesel ingredients and set aside.
  2. In a large bowl, beat together your butter and sugar until creamy.
  3. Add in the eggnog, sour cream , extracts and eggs (if using).
  4. On low speed, beat in the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
  5. Spread the batter in the prepared pan. At this point you can refrigerate for 8 or more hours, but like I said, I didn’t.
  6. Bake at 350 degrees for about 35 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.
  7. Let cake cool in pan on a wire rack.
  8. Mix together your glaze ingredients and eat a spoonful of it and drizzle all over the coffeecake.

Print Friendly and PDF

This is a sample footer. This text can be customized from the options page. Good luck.

Me?? Make something the “Normal” Way?!

Posted on by
19

Bite your tongue! You should know better than that. If there is any way to mess up change a perfectly good recipe, I’m the woman to do it. Hmmm, coming from a food blogger, that doesn’t sound too great now does it? Let me rephrase that to put myself in a much better light shall I? If a recipe has certain inherent flaws or shortcomings, or possibly could be adjusted by adding alternate flavors or adding more layers of flavor, I am the woman who will screw up attempt it and be seen later banging my head off of a table when it fails make a roaring success of it.

So were you impressed there?? Huh huh huh? Did I use big words and sound frighteningly wonderful?! Whadda ya mean I just sounded frightening!? I’m hurt! Nay, wounded to my very core! Nay, devastated. Nay, rambling as usual!

Fine, I’ll stop now.

Living in the south, I kinda love cornbread. If you don’t, they kick you out and make you live somewhere like Siberia (prays I have no readers in Siberia cause I just spent five minutes thinking of places one wouldn’t want to live and then changing them so as to not offend anyone living there :-P ). You also have to love sweet tea (lack of that love is why they made my native Kentuckian daughter in law move) and Paula Deen (don’t tell anyone, but while I love her recipes, but she annoys the poo out of me with her use of “Y’all” fourteen times in each and every sentence). I wrote a post back when I first started the blog about the differences between Yankee cornbread and Southern cornbread. But this post isn’t about either of them. It’s about MANLY CORNBREAD! Please make sure you say that with a sneer on your face and while swaggering across the room adjusting your crotch. And in reality, I didn’t do much changing to the original recipe. My point was just that I seem to be incapable of making things that are “normal”. Nope; have to hunt down and make the unusual ones. And as cornbread goes, this fits that criteria. It’s from Emeril Lagesse. The only thing I changed was to not use cayenne pepper because while I love spicy foods, I thought that that as well as the jalapenos may be too much for my kids. Plus, I added a good amount more cheese and threw some green onions in there too. I mean… cheese, bacon, peppers… it was just crying out for green onions.

So go get out your cast iron pan (please tell me you have one. If not, time to buy one.) and your cornmeal and get to cooking. And Kim go get me a COKE while you’re cooking, wench! :-D And for YOU
Ann there is no cinnamon in my recipe today so you can make it hehehehe :-P

This is wonderful cornbread. Crispy and hot and stuffed full of a creamy corn and bacon mix. It has just the right amount of spice and flavor. Enjoy! As my dad would have said “Eat it! You’ll grow hair on your chest!”

Emerils Manly Man Stuffed Corbread

  • 1 pound bacon, chopped (his called for a half a pound… what can I say? I HAD to have some sitting there for noshing on didn’t I? It’s like…the law!)
  • 1 1/2 cups fresh corn kernels (I used frozen & it worked fine)
  • 1 cup heavy cream
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt, plus 1/2 teaspoon
  • 2 teaspoons unsalted butter
  • 3 tablespoons water
  • 1 1/2 cups yellow cornmeal
  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne (again; I didn’t use this)
  • 2 eggs, lightly beaten
  • 1 1/2 cups buttermilk
  • 3 tablespoons melted unsalted butter
  • 2 jalapeno peppers, seeded and finely chopped
  • 2 cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
  • 1/2 cup chopped green onions
  1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Place a 10-inch cast iron skillet in the oven to get hot.
  3. In a large pan, fry the bacon over medium-high heat until brown, about 6 minutes. Remove and drain on paper towels
  4. Drain all the fat but 2 teaspoons. Return to medium-high heat and add the corn to the pan. Cook, stirring, until golden and tender, about 5 minutes.
  5. Add the cream, butter, 1/4 teaspoon salt and water and cook until thick and creamy, about 10 minutes.  Do NOT do as I did and walk away and come back just in time to prevent it from overflowing all over your stove top. Ummm… oops?
  6. Remove from the heat and mash with a potato masher, spoon, your husbands electric razor… to crush some of the corn. Let cool.
  7. In a large bowl, combine the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, baking soda, remaining salt, and cayenne (if using). Stir to combine.
  8. In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, buttermilk, and 2 tablespoons of the melted butter.
  9. Add the buttermilk mixture to the dry ingredients and mix well.
  10. In a separate bowl, combine the cooled creamed corn, bacon, jalapenos, and 1 1/2 cups of the cheese, and mix well.Remove the skillet from the oven and add the remaining tablespoon of melted butter, tilting the skillet to coat the bottom and sides.
  11. Pour half of the batter into the bottom of the skillet. Top with the corn-cheese mixture, then top with the remaining half of the batter.
  12. Bake until golden brown and set, about 30 minutes.Remove from the oven and sprinkle with the remaining 1/2 cup of cheese.

 

This is a sample footer. This text can be customized from the options page. Good luck.

Reinventing The Wheel…Or Biscuit

Posted on by
62

Can you see all the little layers?? Huh huh huh?

We’ve all done it. Or at least if you’ve cooked for any length of time and are more than a casual “I HAVE to cook so I do” sort of foodie you’ve done it. What the heck am I talking about? Food reinvention. Aka the times you want to make something you’ve made before but just want to do it differently. You want something traditional but you want something new. That train of thought has brought us so very many of the foods we all love. Though I doubt Twinkies and Cheetos were somebody’s brain child as to how to reinvent cheese and cake. Mores the pity. :-P

I have been wanting biscuits. I have also been wanting croissants. But biscuits were boring and croissants are a pain in the proverbial tushie. I can make both with no problem. You can’t live in the south and cook without learning to make good buttermilk biscuits or you may as well hide in a hole. And I taught myself to make croissants years back just cause I wanted to prove I could do it. But neither was exciting me yesterday when I was contemplating today’s post. So I figured I’d make Angel Biscuits- those biscuit/yeast roll hybrids. But I wanted to play with them and see if I could get them to be more akin to croissants with out all the trouble and time that croissants take. I have to say; I’m pretty tickled with how they turned out.

Hours before I started the dough, I cut two sticks of butter in half. Then I rolled out each half in between sheets of waxed paper and froze them. After I got the dough finished later, I did the rolling and turning technique (more or less) that you use when making croissants after inserting the sheets of butter in them. After baking, I tried one (I wanted to eat more but controlled myself lol) with some of my home made Apricot Honey Jam. All I can say is… oh my. These turned out fantastic. Are they the prettiest rolls in the world? Nope. But I couldn’t care less nor will you. I promise. These are tender and buttery and the tops and bottoms get a slight crispy almost fried taste and texture due to the butter. You can see the layers in this and they are reminiscent of the flaky biscuits you can make from a can (the ones where you can peel apart the layers) but without the canned taste, thank God and the Pillsbury Dough Boy. So give these a try. They aren’t time consuming at all and taste so darn good!

Croissant Style Buttermilk Biscuits

  • 2 sticks butter (1/2 pound), room temp, cut in half (preferably salted for this recipe contrary to what I usually advise)
  • 1 package (2 1/4 teaspoons) regular yeast
  • 2 tablespoons warm water (105 to 115 degrees)
  • 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup shortening
  • 1 cup buttermilk (you may need a touch more if the dough is dry)
  1. Put one of your pieces of butter onto a large piece of waxed paper. Fold the paper over it and smoosh the butter down. Then roll the butter out flat into a thin sheet. Do this with each of the four pieces. Put into the freezer for at least an hour.

    See? The butter doesn't have to look pretty. Just nice and thin and flat. :-)

  2. When the butter has been in for about 50 minutes, preheat your oven to 400 and start your dough.
  3. Mix the yeast with the warm water in a small container. Set aside.
  4. Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening with a pastry blender until mixture is the consistency of fine crumbs. Stir in the buttermilk, then the yeast. Mixture should leave sides of bowl and be a cohesive mass. If not, add a little more buttermilk at a time until it does.
  5. Place the dough on a generously floured board. Knead until it comes together smoothly. Gently roll out the dough into a rectangle. It doesn’t need to be perfect.
  6. Place one of the frozen butter sheets on it and fold the dough in half, enclosing the butter. Seal the edges well.  Gently roll back out into a rectangle large enough to insert another sheet of butter.
  7. Do this three more times with each of the other pieces of butter. Make sure your board stays decently floured. Seal the dough well after inserting each sheet of butter using fingers moistened with a bit of buttermilk if necessary. Cover any cracks with a light sprinkling of flour and just continue on as you have been doing. Work quickly so that the butter doesn’t have time to soften up too much. The steam is what helps create the layers and warm butter won’t steam as well. When you have all the butter rolled in, you will end up with a thick fairly heavy piece of dough that looks more or less like this:
  8. Roll out a LITTLE bit. You’re not trying to flatten it out again just make it a touch bigger. Once you have this done, cut the dough into 16 pieces. Bake in a preheated 400 degree oven until golden brown, about 20 minutes. Serve with jam or preserves or chocolate sauce if that makes you happy. But you won’t need butter on these I promise you. :-P

 

This is a sample footer. This text can be customized from the options page. Good luck.

But What Will I Leave The Children?!

Posted on by
7

I’m not a wealthy woman. So far from it it’s giggle worthy. I have the same pipe dreams as everyone else about winning the lottery and living a life of leisure in my 4 bedroom house that has a library with floor to ceiling bookshelves. I’d eat seafood every night except for the nights I was eating steak of course. My kids would never need anything and I would be able to leave them large inheritances…such large ones that I would have around the clock security and metal detectors at the front door for when they came over to fawn over me and ask about my health. What?! I believe in being cautious!

But in real life… the same one where I clean my own toilets, clean up cat poop. have cooked approximately 10,000 meals since I entered adulthood (who am I kidding? I still haven’t entered adulthood. I don’t think you are allowed to say that until you prefer something other than Ho-Hos for dinner), did NOT pay someone else to give birth to six children (wouldn’t that be awesome!? Childbirth by proxy! Yeah baby!. Sorry. Moving on.) and have carpets desperately in need of steam cleaning, I don’t have large inheritances to leave my kids. So what will they be fighting over? Besides my collection of old rock and country albums and cassette tapes (yes, I have cassette tapes. Shush.) 300 gazillion books, more spices than any one household should have, stuffed animals older than dirt and the worlds strangest collection of knick knacks (including Stanley the Pig) that is? I was going to leave them my recipes. I had grand plans of making 6 different hand bound copies, lovingly hand printed, of all the recipes they grew up with and loved. My spaghetti sauce, lasagna, sticky buns, chicken curry, homemade rolls, banana bread, cranberry pumpkin bread, homemade apple butter and so many more. Mind you, in reality, they would have been left with rubbermaid containers and drawers (not to mention the top of my hard drive which is groaning under the weight of miscellaneous paper)  filled with about 3000 printed out recipes and some hand written ones but hey, my intentions were good. They will have to find the correct recipes (that is assuming I even HAVE a recipe for whatever they are looking for. Most of my cooking is just trial and error) and then figure out how I changed them because I never write down my changes. Between you and I, part of that is because I’m a stingy cuss who doesn’t want anyone to have my recipes :-P

But now that I have started this blog, my poor kids are screwed. They get nuthin’. Cause all my recipes are going to end up on here eventually. Such as today as I post my chocolate chocolate chip banana bread recipe. So what will I leave the children? Some Andy Gibb albums, figurines of a pig, old clothes and Bobby Goldsboro cassette tapes.

So kids… don’t fight over it all. And be nice to the piggie.

CHOCOLATE CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA BREAD

  1. 2 cups flour
  2. 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  3. 1 teaspoon salt
  4. 2 teaspoons baking soda
  5. 1 cup butter (2 sticks), softened
  6. 1 cup sugar
  7. 6 to 8 mashed bananas
  8. 1 1/2 teaspoons banana extract
  9. 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
  10. 4 large eggs
  11. 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
  12. 1 cup walnuts (optional; I rarely use them)
  • Preheat oven to 350 degrees
  • Grease and flour two loaf pans or use the cooking spray that has both oil and flour in it. Either nine inch or eight inch will work. I use nine inch and that is what my cooking time is based on.
  • In a small bowl,mix together the flour, cocoa powder, salt and baking soda.
  • In a large bowl, cream the butter and sugar. Add the bananas and mix well. Mix in the eggs, vanilla extract and banana extract. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and mix just until combined. Mix in the chocolate chips and walnuts if you are using them.
  • Pour into the two pans and bake for 60 to 70 minutes or until a toothpick or skewer poked into the center of the loaf comes out almost clean. It’s ok if there are a few moist crumbs on it.. Let it cool for five minutes in the pan then turn it out onto a wire rack to finish cooling.

This is a sample footer. This text can be customized from the options page. Good luck.

Knock Knock!

Posted on by
30

Me: Who’s there?

Child: Banana!

Me: Banana who?

Child: Knock knock!

Me: Who’s there?

Child: Banana!

Me (said with a sob in my voice): Banana who?

Child: Knock knock!

Me: (as I bang my head off of a hard surface)Who’s there for petes sake!?

Child: Orange

Me: Orange who?

Child (giggling with extreme maniacal glee)Orange you glad I didn’t say Banana!?

In 25 years of motherhood, I have heard that knock knock joke approximately 5, 362 times. Add the 10,422 times I have heard Elephant jokes (ok, so I actually like those and routinely annoy people with them myself), fart jokes, pee jokes and jokes that make no sense whatsoever (Mommy, why did the…ummmm…the purple boy run across the street? Me- Why? Child- Because he wanted to eat a cookie! HAHAHAHAHA!!! Did you like that one momma!?) and it is a wonder I have any shred of sanity left.

When my son Jordan, who at sixteen has the childlike heart of an eight year old due to various mental disabilities he deals with, told me that joke for the 5,362nd time today, I laughed and groaned as my job description of mom demands I do, then I went back to thinking about todays post. I knew I wanted to make something sweet; surprise surprise, right? But I wasn’t sure what. Then the orange knock knock joke popped into my head at the same time as a serious chocolate craving hit me upside the head.  So this is what I came up with for today. I hope you enjoy them. We did. :-) These are a moist dessert like muffin (not that that will stop me from eating them for breakfast!) bursting with orange flavor and dark chocolate chips.

 

Orange & Dark Chocolate Muffins

  1. 1 1/2 cups sugar
  2. 3/4 cup butter
  3. 1 6 ounce container orange yogurt
  4. 3/4 cup orange marmalade
  5. 2 teaspoons orange extract
  6. 1/2 cup thawed orange juice concentrate
  7. 3 large eggs
  8. 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour
  9. 2 teaspoons baking powder
  10. 1/2 teaspoon salt
  11. 1 10 to 12 ounce bag dark chocolate chips (Nestle has some out now)
  • Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line 22 muffin cups with paper liners (or grease really well but as we all know, I have a thing for making as little dirty dishes as humanly possible)
  • Beat sugar and butter in a large bowl at medium high speed until light and fluffy. Add in the yogurt, marmalade, orange extract and juice. Beat until thoroughly blended. Beat in eggs, Again, beat until well blended.
  • In a small bowl, mix together your flour, baking powder and salt. Pour it into the bowl of wet ingredients and mix with a large spoon (if you use your beater, you take the chance of 1) wearing a bowl full of flour and 2) over mixing) JUST until everything is combined. Don’t over mix or you’ll end up with tough muffins.
  • Mix in the chocolate chip; again, just until mixed.
  • Bake in the 375 degree oven until golden brown. Mine took 22 minutes.

 

This is a sample footer. This text can be customized from the options page. Good luck.