The Bakers's Dozen: Caramel-Glazed Apple Bread

 

The Baker's Dozen: Caramel-Glazed Apple Bread

OMG this was a winner! Such a winner that I already froze half of it to give to my parents because I'm scared I'll scarf the entire thing this week if I didn't. For such a simple recipe, it was really delicious! Here is the recipe:

Caramel-Glazed Apple Bread (Source Unknown)

Bread:

1 1/2 cups shredded peeled baking apples (2 large)

1 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup vegetable oil

4 eggs, lightly beaten

3 cups flour

1/2 cup chopped pecans

2 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. cinnamon

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. nutmeg

Glaze:

2 Tbsp. butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 Tbsp. milk

1/2 cup powdered sugar, sifted

1.) Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease bottoms only of 2 loaf pans with cooking spray.

2.) In large bowl, stir together apples, 1 cup brown sugar, the buttermilk, oil, and eggs. Stir in remaining bread ingredients just until dry ingredients are moistened. Pour into pans.

3.) Bake 45-55 minutes or until toothpick tests clean. Cool 10 minutes on cooling rack. Loosen sides of loaves from pans; remove from pans and place top-sides-up on cooling rack. Cool completely, about 1 hour.

4.) In 1 qt. saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Stir in 1/4 cup brown sugar. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; reduce heat to low. Boil and stir 2 minutes. Stir in milk. Heat to boiling; remove from heat. Cool to lukewarm, about 30 minutes.

5.) Gradually stir powdered sugar into glaze mixture. Place saucepan of glaze in bowl of cold water. Beat with a spoon until smooth and thin enough to drizzle. If glaze becomes too stiff, stir in additional milk, 1/2 tsp. at a time, or heat over low heat, stirring constantly. Drizzle glaze over loaves. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature up to 4 days, or refrigerate up to 10 days.

Makes 2 loaves, 12 slices each. 200 calories, 8 g. fat, 1 g. fiber per slice

I actually cut this recipe in half. All the ingredients can easily be cut in half, so don't feel you have to make 2 loaves if you don't need that much. And as usual, I made my own buttermilk with vinegar and milk.

This is the wet ingredients mixed. It looks like a lot of liquid, more than a typical quick bread, but don't worry.

It all mixes together perfectly with the dry ingredients, as you can see! This is the final product.

The batter only goes up about half way. Even though it says not to grease the sides of the pan, I had problems getting it out of the pan once it was baked, so you might go ahead and grease the sides as well. It'll help you in the long run. I ended up baking it for about 48 minutes before it was perfectly done. I don't know why I didn't take any pictures of the finished product, but I didn't. Just know that it looks pretty much like any other quick bread.

Here is the beginning of the caramel sauce.

And the finished caramel sauce. I didn't use the cold water bath it calls for, but I definitely had to add more milk. It's slightly drizzly, but not like a glaze. It's more like a frosting, but I liked it that way.

I drizzled it over at first but decided I wanted it even over the entire top and spread it out like frosting.

Because I thought it looked a little drab without anything on top, I sprinkled more chopped pecans over the top, and it just worked perfectly.

Here is a cut slice. OMG this thing is so friggin' delicious! The bread by itself is rather plain. There's not much sugar in the bread, so the real sweetness comes from the frosting. People who know me well, know I'm not a frosting person, but this is stupid good! Make sure each bite has some of the frosting, and of course, all quick breads are best with some butter on it!

This would be a hit at a gathering or a work potluck. It's super easy to make. The frosting is a game changer. It would be good on banana bread, zucchini bread, pumpkin bread...Definitely give this one a try!
 

The Baker's Dozen: Mary Berry's Mincemeat Loaf Cake

 

The Baker's Dozen: Mary Berry's Mincemeat Loaf Cake

So, this was a last minute change up. I had a recipe from my recipe collection but the instructions were essentially the same as last week's single-rise disaster, so I didn't want to do that again, knowing it most likely wouldn't work. I looked around at some of my other recipes but nothing stood out. I also have been wanting to use up some of my Christmas ingredients and have found some possible recipes to use up the jar of mincemeat in the fridge. One of them I selected was a quick bread recipe, which fits into this project, so I went with it. It's a snow weekend so I wasn't going to the store, and I happened to have all the ingredients here ready to go. I was able to use up the jar of mincemeat, as well as the rest of the green glaced cherries and made progress using up the red glaced cherries too, so it turned out to be a great way to use up ingredients! And since it's a snow weekend, it was fun to make a recipe that hearkens back to Christmas and made the apartment smell nice as it baked.

Since it's not my own recipe card, I won't type out the recipe. I'll paste the link to it here. Mary Berry is a famous British baker and was the star of several seasons of The Great British Bake Off, so it was fun to try her recipe and I am happy to say that it turned out really well!

I love it when the ingredients are all on hand! I didn't have the self-rising flour that it calls for, but it's very easy to find the proportions of how to make it yourself. Just google it rather than spend extra money on self-rising flour, especially if you don't use it that often.

Here is the mixed batter. I used the green glaced cherries instead of red because I wanted to use them up and wanted the red ones for the topping because I think they're prettier. They both taste the same.

It says you should put it in two regular loaf pans and I tried that but it was just too thin to even spread out on the bottom, really, so I combined them into one. It definitely adds time to the baking process, but it's worth it in the long run.

Here's my pretty topping design! I cut the cherries in half and set them into the top, then sprinkled the almonds around it all. I think it looks nice.

Post baking. I put foil on it towards the end to make sure it didn't over-brown as it continued to bake.

This bread really needs to cool before you cut into it. It was still warm when I cut into it and you can see how crumbly and almost gummy the texture is. I was worried that this was the final product.

But as you can see, it does cut very nicely once it's fully cooled. The texture firms up and holds up nicely. I highly recommend butter on it! It's very sweet, fruitcake-like, and tastes strongly like the mincemeat. This is a great quickbread! It would be so easy to make this at Christmas and take it to a party. It's basically "quick fruitcake." Mary Berry had a wonderful idea and it turned out perfectly!

If you like the flavor of mincemeat, you will love this. You have to be ok with cooked raisins, and I think leaving the glaced cherries out would be a mistake, though you could probably reduce the amount by half if you wanted. And use an online calculator to convert it from Metric to our measurements and do use a scale to make sure you get it exactly right. Measuring cups will be useless for this recipe.

Once you make sure all this is done, you'll be good to go! If you need a Christmas fix, this is your recipe! Give it a try!

The Baker's Dozen: English Muffins in a Loaf

 

The Baker's Dozen: English Muffins in a Loaf

This week wasn't a fail, in terms of making and baking the bread, I would say, but it was a fail in terms of flavor. I was really excited to try this recipe out, because I love English muffins and thought it sounded like a fun and unique concept to have it in a bread loaf shape instead of their traditional shape. But it was just bland and boring when I tasted it. I won't be sharing the recipe, as I don't think the result was good enough to make again. I will taste it one more time tomorrow after it's had a lot of time to set up flavor-wise, but I might not even finish the loaf. It's just blah and boring. I was really disappointed, sadly. I will share the pictures and explain what I did.

The obligatory ingredient picture. Not much goes into this. The recipe calls for salt in the instructions, but it it not listed in the ingredient list, so I had to guess. Because the recipe also made two loaves and I only wanted to make half, I cut it all in half, which worked out fine. I just guestimated on the salt and added a pinch. Apparently it wasn't enough.

The buttered pan dusted with cornmeal.

Here is the first half of the dry ingredients mixed with the liquid.

And this is what the dough looks like after adding the rest of the flour. It's a nice dough. You don't knead it a lot.

I had to sort of press it and stretch it out a bit to fit it in the pan properly before setting it aside to rise.

Here it is after it's risen. Another unique element to this is that it only calls for one rise. I thought that might make it more like English muffins, but it made it super dense without much texture.

It got nice coloring. Called for 25 minutes, and that's what it needed.

A side shot after removing it from the pan.

And here is what it looks like from the inside. You can see there's just no definition. English muffins have some holes in them, and this has none. Probably because of the single rise. It toasted ok in the toaster, but it just was disappointingly boring, overall.

Oh well, they can't all be winners, I guess! And I learned something: yeast breads definitely need a second rise. And English muffins are probably best in their traditional form. They're shaped like that for a reason, clearly! Hopefully next week will be a success...!
 

The Baker's Dozen: Orange Raisin Muffins

 

The Baker's Dozen: Orange Raisin Muffins

I seem to have chosen good recipes so far, because this was another winner! The recipe had one issue, but I was able to fix it before it caused a disaster. I'll explain when I get there...Meanwhile, here is the recipe:

Orange Raisin Muffins (source unknown)

2 cups sifted flour

3/4 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup raisins

1 egg, well beaten

1/3 cup orange juice

1/2 tsp. orange zest

2/3 cup buttermilk

1/3 cup shortening, or butter, melted

Sift the flour with the baking soda, salt, and sugar. Add raisins. Combine egg, juice, zest, buttermilk, and shortening. Mix wet ingredients into dry ingredients and mix just until dry ingredients are dampened. Fill a muffin tin lined with liners, 2/3 full. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.

Makes 1 dozen

I didn't have shortening, so I used butter instead. This where my previous muffin-baking experience came in handy, because the recipe originally says just shortening. But if you are supposed to mix the wet ingredients together and then pour it into the dry and quickly mix it all, then you can't have solid butter to mix in with it. It has to be melted. So, I did this, and I know it turned correctly, so definitely melt the fat, whether you use shortening or butter.

I also didn't have buttermilk, so I made my own out of white vinegar and regular milk. This is pretty common for me, as I don't really have a need for buttermilk outside of small amounts like this, on occasion. It's more cost effective to just make it this way on the times when I need it, than to buy cartons of buttermilk.

The instructions say sifted flour, and then you sift it with the other ingredients. I decided to do this exactly as it said, which means ultimately double sifting the flour, and I think it turned out perfectly this way. So, definitely sift the flour before measuring the two cups, and then sift it again with all the other dry ingredients. I also recommend using fresh orange juice for this, since you have to use fresh zest anyway. I bought a giant orange and drank the rest of the juice for treat once I'd measured out what I needed. I also used the entire orange's worth of zest, even though it was more than 1/2 tsp. Why waste it, right?

Here is the mixed version. It's very light in color, and the orange smell is so vibrant!

Here they are in the muffin tin. Ready for baking!

And here is the final product! I think they got over-baked, when you see how dark they are. The flavor is amazing though. I would probably do 20 minutes in the oven and then test it for doneness. If I make these again, that's how I'll do it.

This is a still-warm muffin, before the butter went on it. I really love how these turned out. They're not overly sweet, and the raisin and orange flavors both come forward really well. The texture is still good as I ate one for dessert tonight and it was still soft. It's a little harder on the outside, but again, that's cuz it baked too long. Tomorrow I'll reheat them by wrapping them in wet paper towels and microwaving them for a few seconds to steam them. If you ever want to reheat bread products in the microwave, always, always wrap them in wet paper towels first. It's the only way to do it.

Muffins are fun to make because the variety is endless, and they're super fast to make. If yeast breads intimidate you and you don't want an entire quick bread lying around, then muffins are perfect for you! And I know some people really hate raisins baked into things, so this might not be for you. I think if you left them out of this, there wouldn't be much to these muffins. They'd be pretty one note. But, if you do like raisins, definitely try this one out. You won't regret it!

The Baker's Dozen-Coconut Milk Scones

The Baker's Dozen-Coconut Milk Scones

Today's recipe ended up fitting into the Veganuary category, though that was not my intention. I was intrigued by the idea of a scone with coconut milk as the fat, instead of butter, but it never occurred to me till I was prepping the ingredients, that this is in fact, a vegan recipe! So, all you vegans out there, check this one out!

Coconut Milk Scones(Source unknown)

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. orange or lemon zest (optional)

1 1/4 cup canned coconut milk, chilled

1 cup dried fruit

Extra coconut milk and sugar for topping

 

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Pour in coconut milk. Gently mix with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula just until it's combined. Fold in dried fruits. Transfer dough onto a floured surface and shape into a disc about 3/4" in thickness. Using a sharp knife, cut into 8 or 12 wedges. Place onto prepared baking sheet 2" apart. Brush the tops with coconut milk and sprinkle generously with sugar. 

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until golden brown. Serve immediately or store them in an airtight container after they have completely cooled. They can be reheated in a toaster or microwave.

Makes 8-12 scones

My signature gathered-ingredients shot to start off with. This one has delightfully few ingredients, which is really nice! This is a good recipe if you only have a few things on hand.

Here is the dough after you mix in the coconut milk.

The dried fruits I used were blueberries and cranberries, which I reconstituted in water for a bit. I also used some more of my candied lemon peel, orange peel, and citron from my Christmas projects. I didn't have fresh citrus, but I had some dried lemon peel and threw that in as well. 

 

You will also notice that this dough looks really loose. I used light coconut milk, the only kind I had on hand, and I suspect it would have been different if I'd used the full fat kind, which would have had chunks of coconut fat to mix in, like butter. Mine was more like cream, so it was much looser. I added nearly 1.5 more cups of flour to the mix and still should have added more. Just be on the lookout when you make this, to make sure it ends up like a proper scone dough.

You can see this looks much more like a proper scone dough. It was still quite wet when I moved onto the next step, but I was just determined to use it like this and not add more, but I probably should have added more flour. Just do what feels right for you.

You can see how wet it still is when I patted out the dough. It made it quite difficult to cut and move around. I should have added more flour. But I was just lazy.

I was going for 12 wedges, and wasn't paying too much attention, and ended up with 16. It was fine, because they're so sticky, I thought smaller would actually bake better, in the long run.

Use the rest of the coconut milk from the can to brush on the top. I still had some leftover, but one can will be more than enough for this recipe. And I sprinkled sugar on top. If I had coconut sugar, I would have put that on.

I ended up having to do this for about 23-24 minutes to bake all the way through. They got nice and golden on top, as you can see.

And here is a close up of the interior. It has a nice texture, just like any other scone.

This recipe turned out really well. The fruits I used taste amazing, and even though they smelled really coconutty, it didn't taste very coconutty at all. It just tasted nice and sweet. They came together really fast, and it was a really easy recipe. This is something beginners could make.

I obviously cannot eat 16 scones, so I wrapped them up in two packages and froze them with hopes of giving one to my parents to try, and keeping one to enjoy a special treat once in a while. My parents tried the harvest bread I made last week, and enjoyed it, so I hope they'll like these too!

Well, so far I've had a lot of success with my bread recipes! I'm enjoying finally trying some of these recipes that I've collected forever but never have had a chance to try. I might need to make this an annual project!

 

 

 

The Baker's Dozen-Harvest Bread

 

The Bakers's Dozen-Harvest Bread

Welcome to my new winter baking project! Those of you who have been following along with my Christmas project got a taste of it last week. Each week, I will be testing a recipe of mine to see how it turns out, and sharing the experience here. Last week was the bonus week, so this is the start of the true project, which will go for the next 12 weeks. This week, I made a quick bread. Here is the recipe.

Harvest Bread(source unknown)

Cooking Spray

2 cups flour

2 tsp. baking soda

2 tsp. cinnamon

1/2 tsp. salt

2 cups sugar

3/4 cup vegetable oil

3/4 cup buttermilk

3 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

2 cups grated peeled carrots

1(7oz) pkg. flaked sweetened coconut

1 cup chopped walnuts

1(8.25oz) can crushed pineapple in heavy syrup, drained

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Spray 9"x5" loaf pan with cooking spray. Cut 15"x4" strip of parchment paper. Line bottom and narrow sides of loaf pan with parchment paper, leaving overhang. Spray paper with cooking spray.

Whisk flour, baking soda, cinnamon, and salt in large bowl. Whisk sugar, vegetable oil, buttermilk, eggs, and vanilla in medium bowl to blend. Add sugar mixture to flour mixture; stir just to blend. Add carrots, coconut, walnuts, and pineapple; stir to distribute evenly.

Transfer batter to prepared loaf pan. Bake until tester tests clean, about 1.5 hours. Cool 10 minutes. Run sharp knife around edges of pan. Invert bread onto rack; remove parchment paper. Turn bread over and cool completely.

(Can be prepared 2 days ahead. Store in airtight container at room temperature.)

Makes 1 loaf

I always have to start off with the obligatory shot of all the ingredients gathered around because I think it's fun to see how much goes into making something!

Here we have the wet ingredients and the dry ingredients. One of the biggest changes to the recipe that I made was with the sugar. I couldn't in good conscience add two whole cups of sugar to something that only makes one loaf. One of my tricks I've learned over the years is that you can replace some of the sugar in baked goods, with unsweetened applesauce, and it doesn't affect the texture too much. Back in the 90's, people replaced fat in recipes with applesauce and it was disgusting, but that's because they were replacing the wrong ingredient. I cut it down to 1 cup of sugar, and used 1 cup of unsweetened applesauce.

Here is the dry and wet ingredients mixed with the add-ins ready to be mixed in. This is basically a carrot cake in bread form. If I had it to do over again, I would have added raisins as well, because I am one of those people who does like raisins in baked goods.

The fully-mixed batter. You will think it's impossible to fill one pan, but it works.

As you can see, it goes right to the top of the pan, but not over. I actually had to stop at this point and move on to some other stuff without baking the bread, so I just covered it in plastic wrap and threw it in the fridge till I was ready to bake.

It took a lot longer than 1.5 hours for this to bake through. After that time, I turned up the oven to 350 degrees and put foil on the top to keep it from browning too much. I don't know if it's because I changed the sugar amount in the recipe, but it just took a lot longer. I don't see any reason why you couldn't bake this at 350 degrees for the whole time. That might take just the 1.5 hours. Just keep an eye on it, and you'll be fine.

This was actually a little hard to turn over once you take it out of the pan. It's very hot and dense and heavy, so you need to turn it quickly so you don't lose momentum and tear it in the middle.

Here is what the bread looks like once you cut it open. There's a lot going on with this bread! The coconut, carrots, pineapple, and walnuts all add textures and flavors to the bread. There's not a lot of flour in this recipe, compared to all the other stuff you put in it, so it's really important to wait until it's thoroughly cooled to help the shape hold up, and the flavors set. And of course butter on this is a must!

This was not a difficult bread to make, most quick breads are super easy to make, which is why we love to make them! This one is very different from zucchini bread or banana bread. It's fancier and in a way, it feels healthier because of all the carrots and walnuts. I do think it's a bit healthier than the original recipe when you cut out half the sugar, but don't convince yourself that this is health foods cuz there's plenty of unhealthy stuff in it!! You do get a little exercise from this too, with all the grating you have to do. That way you can put extra butter on the bread and not feel too bad about it!