Maple bar doughnuts

Thousands of people have had my grandma's cooking.  She was the baker for the University of Puget Sound for maybe 20 years (my mom can chime in if she wants with the actual number).  As the university baker, Grandma made all the pastries for the campus.  She even talked the president's wife out of her secret oatmeal cookie recipe.  I've got a copy of it somewhere.  It makes something like 5 dozen cookies, so it's not a recipe I've made many times.

My grandma was the best baker of cookies, cakes, doughnuts, and pies of every type.  She usually took  at least two pies to any family gathering.  Her lemon meringue was my favorite.  Her pie crusts were perfect: shatteringly flakey and tender.

Christmas was an especially wonderful time to go see her.  Grandma would pull box after box of homemade cookies and candy from a tall stack in her hallway closet: snickerdoodles, decorated sugar cookies with a crunchy royal icing (I've never been able to replicate it), chocolate crinkles, peanut butter cookies with a Hershey's kiss on top, powder-covered tea cakes, spritz cookies, some kind of crescent cookies with a whole clove sticking out the side, haystacks, stained glass, divinity, fudge. Drop cookies, bar cookies, ice box cookies: you name it, she had made it!  She'd pile an assortment onto a plate for us and serve it with a variety of beverages.  We'd gorge ourselves on the delicious treats, devouring in minutes what had taken her days to make.

Over the past couple of weeks I've found myself strangely drawn to maple-flavored things.  I recently bought some maple-flavored shredded wheat at Trader Joe's.  I'm an incurable chocolaholic, and yet when a coworker brought in a dozen doughnuts and I passed over the chocolate-iced doughnut in lieu of the maple bar.  When I returned to my desk after having picked out said doughnut, I saw that my mom had called.  Grandma passed away quietly on March 7 around 8:45 a.m.  She was 94 years old.

It hit me then why I'd been seeking out maple.  Grandma's favorite sweet, her weakness, was maple bar doughnuts.  She adored them.  Every time I visited I tried to take her one.  As she got into her 90s, both in age and weight, I often took two of them in an effort to prevent her from losing more weight.  I don't know if she ate both of them but I do know that she would eat at least one.

The last time she talked to me, she was referring to Kaelen and said, "Oh, he has blue eyes!  He's so cute".  He'd been to the doctor for his 2-month immunizations that morning and I debated not taking him.  That was her final day awake and it's the last thing she said to me.  She wasn't talking much by that point, and when she did it was a struggle.  Forgive me if I've said it before but I'll forever be grateful that she got to spend time with him.  It was fun to tell her that the doc had said Kaelen will be tall, as is her side of the family, and that he's really healthy.  She was almost as proud of him as I am.

In her memory, I bring you a recipe for maple bars.  Enjoy one with a cup of her typical morning beverage, Folgers instant coffee (or not... gag), and remember a loved one from your own past.  Better yet, share them with friends and loved ones now.

MAPLE BARS

• Dough recipe adapted from Cooking Light (yes, doughnuts can be light...ish)
• See this blog for a step-by-step how-to

Ingredients
6 tablespoons water

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 1/8 teaspoons dry yeast

3 tablespoons sour cream

1 large egg, lightly beaten 

6 3/4 ounces all-purpose flour (about 1 1/2 cups), divided

1/8 teaspoon salt

Cooking spray

6 cups peanut oil

Glaze

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

2 tablespoons maple syrup

2 tablespoons strong coffee

(optional: bacon, chopped)

Preparation

Night before:

1. Combine first 5 ingredients in a large bowl until a moist dough forms.
2. Spray a bowl with cooking oil and transfer dough into it.  Cover tightly with plastic wrap and put into fridge overnight.

Morning of:

1. Allow dough to come to room temp on the counter,  This will take about a half an hour.  The dough will have risen overnight in the fridge and should be - but might not be - roughly doubled in size.  It'll still be small - this is not a huge batch recipe.
2. Place dough on a floured surface and roll out a sheet that's about 9" x 9".  Trim the edges with a pizza cutter and then cut into 8 bars.  You can roll the trimmed bits into balls.  Doughnut "holes"!
3. Allow the bars & balls to rise for about a half an hour.  They won't rise a ton.
4. Clip a candy/fry thermometer onto the side of a Dutch oven; add oil to pan. Heat oil to 375°. Place a couple of pieces of the dough into hot oil; fry 1 minute per side or until golden. Make sure the oil temperature remains at 375°.
5. Remove doughnuts from pan; drain and cool slightly.
6. Mix the glaze, adjusting the liquid until it's as thick as glue.  Dip the "holes" into the glaze and spread the glaze on top of the bars with a spoon.  Be generous!  Please on a rack so that excess glaze can drop off rather than pool around the doughnut.

The doughnuts are slightly chewy and crispy on the outside.  The maple flavor of the glaze doesn't run you over as if it were a logging truck and the coffee balances the sweetness of the sugar.  Grandma would have loved them.

But maybe not all of them...

Strawberry oatmeal bars

A post about strawberries in January has probably got you thinking, "seriously, Jenn?!? That's about as out-of-season as it gets.".

Unless you're me, in which case you freeze a ton of strawberries every summer, then were not able to eat them this year because of gestational diabetes.  Generally we use the strawberries in lieu of ice in smoothies because they add fiber, flavor, and color.  Gene makes such delicious smoothies.  I really missed them this year.

My freezer remains well stocked with frozen strawberries.  Other than smoothies and French toast topping, I've been hard-pressed to find a good use for them.  Frozen strawberries turn to mush when defrosted, making them nearly impossible to use in baked goods.  I'm not a fantastic baker and everything I've ever made with strawberries, frozen or fresh, winds up gooey and unsatisfactory. 

I'm inordinately stubborn, however, so crossed my fingers and hoped for  the best with this substitution.  The original version calls for frozen blueberries, which I unknowingly ran out of a few days ago.  You whir the frozen berries with cornstarch and sugar in a food processor, then layer the fruit with an oatmeal dough.  The blueberry version, which I've made many times, is like a homemade Nutrigrain bar, only way yummier.  The end result is nutritious, packed with filling fiber, and tasty.  The bars freeze well, thaw quickly, and can be eaten one-handed. 

As a new parent I have a fresh appreciation of the importance of this last item.  I can't tell you how many recent meals I've wolfed down without chewing, hoping to get some sustenance before Kaelen starts screwing up his angry, feed-me-Seymour face.  Feeding time has been complicated due to my low milk supply (yes, I'm seeing a lactation consultant) and subsequent requirement to supplement.  I feed Kaelen for 30 minutes, give him a bottle for 10, pump for 10 if I have the energy, and then start the process over again in an hour.  Sometimes less, sometimes more.

Good thing he's so cute.

yaaaaaawn

Since Gene doesn't love blueberries the way I do, I'd been thinking of making a version with strawberries for a while.  The strawberries set up perfectly and the end result is, if I may say so myself, delectable.  I'm betting that this can be made with any type of frozen berry with similar results.  Perhaps even frozen peaches...??

BERRY OAT BARS (from Spring 2010 "Real Food" magazine distributed by Metropolitan Market)

2 cups rolled oats

2 cups whole wheat flour

1/2 tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups brown sugar

6 tbsp very cold butter (frozen is fine)

3/4 cup milk

1 tbsp lemon juice

2 tsp vanilla

1/2 cup white sugar

1 tbsp cornstarch

2 cups frozen berries

1. Preheat oven to 350.  Oil 9x13 baking dish.

2. In a large bowl, combine oats through brown sugar.  Using large holes of a cheese grater, shred butter into mixture and work in until the size of grains of rice. 

(As an aside, this is my new favorite way to incorporate butter into a dough when not using the food processor. Use your hands to make quick work of mixing in the butter.)

3. In another container (I use the measuring cup), combine the milk, lemon juice, and vanilla, then stir into the oat mixture.  Press a little more than half of the dough into the bottom of the prepared dish.

4. In a food processor, combine the sugar and cornstarch, then add the berries and process until the mix looks grainy nad well minced.  (If using blueberries, reserve half of the berries and combine with the processed berries at this point.)  Dollop the remaining batter evenly over the fruit.  Bake for 50-55 minutes (40-45 in convection oven) until the top layer is deep golden and the fruit is bubbling.

5. Remove the bars from the oven and allow to cool in the baking dish on a rack.  When cool, cut into 18 3x6" bars. 

You can wrap them individually in plastic and store in a zip-top bag in the freezer for an easy breakfast or snack that will thaw on the counter in about an hour.  Thirty seconds in the microwave will also do the trick.

Strawberry streusel muffins

After enduring a long, dreary, grey, and exceedingly wet winter, today's high is expected to be in the mid- to high 70s.  It will be the warmest day since last October. 

It's one of those glorious days in the Pacific Northwest that will showcase the quirkiness of the people here.  Out will come the shorts, tank tops, and glaringly white skin, a shade of which can only be cultivated in this climate.  Gene and I will go for a drive in our convertible in typical Washington style: top down, heat on.  Fair weather gardeners will wither by mid-day in the heat, then succumb to dreadful sunburns.  Our facebook feeds will be clogged with posts from jubilant friends about how gorgeous the weather is.

As for me, I started the morning coughing and hacking.  I'm slowly recovering from a cold that's had me in its grips for about a week.  It got so bad yesterday that I actually went to the doctor, where I paid a $30 co-pay to be told that I have a cold but can't take anything for it since I'm pregnant.  Clearly that was money well spent. 

A good friend gave me excellent advice for next time: go to a pharmacy and ask the pharmacist for what I can safely take to soothe what ails me.  In the meantime, it's the neti pot and cough drops for me.  The consulting nurse told me to make a saline solution, snort it up my nose, and spit it out my mouth to help alleviate post-nasal drip.  I tried it and believe me - it's DIY water boarding.

When I let the girls out of the coop this morning I realized that the temp is perfect for a breakfast al fresco, something I haven't enjoyed since last summer.  With a fridge we're trying to empty prior to going to New England next week, I realized that the languishing strawberries needed to be used.  I vaguely remembered a strawberry muffin recipe from a blog - but arg, which one??  I spent the next half-hour tracking it down.

I finally remembered that I'd seen it on http://www.crumblycookie.net/ (a very good cooking blog, by the way).  Her strawberry muffins are made with ricotta, of which I had none, so I replaced it with Greek yogurt and omitted the lemon juice.  I wanted the muffins to be streusel-like - hey, I'm pregnant so bear with me - and decided to adapt the topping from Smitten Kitchen's Big Crumb Coffee Cake, which I made last weekend.

Frankly, I'm disappointed with these muffins.  In fact, I've yet to find a strawberry muffin that really blew my skirt up.  The strawberries sank to the bottom, meaning that the batter was too thin to suspend the berries.  If I ever make them again (not likely), I'd replace some of the flour with whole wheat flour to give them more body. 

The batter also made 16 muffins instead of 12.  I really should have made 18 because they rose and spread across the top of the muffin tin, making them very hard to get out of the tins cleanly.

Criticisms aside, they were tasty.  They're not going to last long with the now gooey berries inside of them, and will have to go into the fridge for storage.  They'll be very good with some of the lime curd I made tucked inside.  I enjoyed mine with some yogurt and a pot of tea in the backyard.  The chickens were out, the dog dozed at my feet in the sun, and even the geriatric cats made an appearance for a while.  It was very peaceful.

Do you have a good strawberry muffin recipe?  This morning's attempt reminded me of why I rarely bake with strawberries.  I think they're far better raw anyway.  We're leaving for New England in a week and I'm hoping that we don't miss the local berry season while we're gone.

Rhubarb coffee cake

I love the Smitten Kitchen.  A girlfriend turned me onto the blog right before I got married when she offered to bring a Blueberry Boy Bait to our wedding.

It was such a hit that I never got to try it.  I've since made - and enjoyed - it.

Ever since I've been a devoted SK follower.  Her recipes are seasonal and flavorful.  Her posts are not as frequent as they used to be because a) she has a toddler and b) she's writing a cookbook.  I'm not sure which takes up more time and energy.

About a week ago I found a baggie of chopped rhubarb in my freezer.  Since my recently transplanted rhubarb isn't mature enough to harvest yet, it was a little godsend to discover.  As I drifted off to sleep last Saturday night, I had visions of coffee cake fairies dancing in my head.

Since I now get up at the buttcrack of down, easily an hour or two before Gene, I was raring to go and dying to make the Smitten Kitchen crumbcake I'd dreamed about the night before.  I had made it once before and undercooked it.  It turned out as a disappointingly gooey mess of unmet promises.

This time, it would be different.  And different it was.

If you have the patience, this cake gets better with age.  Let it sit overnight, if you can, and the next morning you'll have a moist and crumbly cake that's the perfect accompaniment to your caffeinated morning beverage of choice.

Check out Smitten Kitchen's website for the Rhubarb Coffee Cake recipe (which she calls the "Big Crumb Coffee Cake").

Be the way, this is a great recipe to make when you feel like dirtying every dish or bowl in your kitchen.  It's a messy thing to make.  And don't undercook it!

Berry pancakes

Don't you love it when your significant other makes breakfast?

So do I!

G-man wanted pancakes and there was some buttermilk in the fridge that needed to get used. 

Here's the recipe he used.  If you've been reading my blog for a while, you might have seen it before.  It's our favorite pancake recipe. 

While he prepped the batter I defrosted some blueberries.  When I was a kid I didn't even know that pancakes could come without blueberries!  Even now, at 36, I think pancakes are naked without blueberries.

Nothing sexier than a man weilding a spatula.

Sorry the picture is fuzzy.  I had left the camera in the car overnight and it steamed up upon coming into the warm house. 

Or maybe I steamed up the camera watching Hubbie cook?

We topped off the pancakes with the boysenberry syrup I made last fall.

Add a cup of coffee and life is good.  Does Starbucks count as local if their HQ is just 30 miles from my house?  Yeah... I didn't think so.

Ingredient breadk-down
LOCAL: all dairy products, berries, syrup, egg
NOT LOCAL: flour, sugar, baking powder & soda, oil, coffee

Buttermilk pancakes with boysenberry syrup

I can't make boysenberry syrup and then NOT show you what I plan to do with it!

We had blackberry pancakes with boysenberry syrup.  We moaned a lot and talked very little.  I think you'll do the same.

For the pancake better (recipe adapted from Cooking Light), mix together:
1 cup flour
2 T sugar
1 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
pinch salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 T vegetable oil
1 egg, lightly beaten

Use a ladle to measure out your pancakes onto the griddle.  That a trick I learned from my dad.

I'd bought some blackberries and we needed to eat them, so into pancakes they went.

We always - ALWAYS - heat up the syrup for pancakes.  What's the point of steaming hot pancakes if you pour cold syrup onto them?  I thought everyone did this until a friend once expressed surprise at the hot syrup.  But beware: syrup boils over very fast in the microwave.  Do it 30 seconds at a time.

Are these not 100% delectable?

It took everything I had to resist licking the plate.

Boysenberry syrup

Berries are nearly at their end here in Western Washington, so I'm doing everything I can to eat them fresh and preserve them for posterity.  Or January.

These boysenberries called to me from the stand at the downtown market I frequent.  "Jennn... JENN!  Eat us!"  The stand owner was yelling "hey, buy those first!"  Whatever.

Once at my home with my boysen-bounty I was faced with a dilemma of choice: what to do with these lush and juicy berries? 

Jam?  Nah - I have plenty.

Cobbler filling?  No - it would only make one.

Boysenberry syrup?  Ding ding ding we have a winner!

When I was a kid my dad always made breakfast on Saturday mornings.  Sometimes we had bacon and eggs, sometimes muffins, sometimes blueberry pancakes.  On days when pancakes were on the menu, boysenberry syrup was usually offered alongside the maple syrup.  That thick, sweet, purple sauce was invariably the Smuckers brand.

If you're a beginning canner, this recipe is perfect for you.  It's easy, quick, and you really can't mess it up like a jam because you don't have any pectin to manage.  Heck, if you ever make a jam that doesn't set, call it a syrup and nobody will be the wiser.

Boysenberry Syrup recipe from FineCooking.com.

• 3 cups fresh berries (blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, or blackberries will also work), washed and trimmed as needed and halved if large
• 1-2 cups granulated sugar

(If you want to can this syrup for long-term shelf-stable storage, please see the website for the how-to.)

In a medium heavy-duty saucepan, crush the berries with a potato masher. Add 1/4 cup water (if using strawberries, add 1/2 cup water). Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, reduce the heat to medium low, and simmer until the berries are very soft and juicy, about 5 minutes.

Set a fine sieve over a bowl. Pour the berry pulp into the sieve and allow the juice to drip through. Gently press the pulp with a rubber spatula to extract as much juice as possible, but don’t press so hard that you force the pulp through.  (I used a food mill in this step, then passed the pulp through a sieve.)

Clean the saucepan. Measure the juice and then pour it into the saucepan. For every 1/4 cup juice, add 1/4 cup sugar. Bring to a boil over medium heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Reduce the heat to low and simmer until the syrup is viscous but still runny, about 1 minute. Skim the foam with a spoon and pour the syrup into clean jars.

If you're not canning the syrup, put the jars on a wire rack and let cool to room temperature. Syrup that's not hot-water processed (canned) will keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.

That ruby red is so pretty!

Sunday morning in the yard

Quiet mornings in the garden make me happy.  I'm always up around 7 on weekends and like to sit in the backyard before the neighborhood wakes up.  The finches and dragonflies flit about in search of food and the hens coo from their run.  It's so peaceful and calming.

All I need is a pot of tea, my newspaper, a freshly baked scone from the freezer, and a fresh fruit salad with homemade yogurt.

Here's some of that infused vanilla honey I made a while back.  It was so good in the black tea! 

That's my great-grandma's Hall streamline teapot from the late 1940s.  The sugar and creamer that match the teapot are Starbucks, circa 2005; green bowl, Paris, 2001.  While I visited my great-grandma several times in the nursing home as a child I never knew her.  I was just 8 when she died.  My grandma says that I'm a lot like her mother, who shared my love for urban chickens, gardening, and entertaining.  Apparently she also loved dishes.

Oh.  I think Rudy wants something...

Now he's happy.

Making scones healthier

I have no photos for this post.  I was pre-coffee/tea and just didn't get around to it.  Sorry.

The Pioneer Woman makes lots of lovely things, including butter- and cream-ridden scones that probably top out around 600 calories each.  We don't live on a cattle ranch and we don't quite expend the calories a typical day of wrangling does.

So as much as I love Ree's scones - and her cooking in general - I just can't bring myself to make them the same way she does, with butter and cream and cheese, oh my!

What I can do, however, is use her recipes for ideas and starting points for my own cooking.

Today, for example, I decided to make vanilla bean scones.  I happen to have a few vanilla beans lying around.  I also have quite a few cherries because they're in season and I've been buying them up like it's my patriotic duty to consume as many cherries as possible.

I took at look at Ree's recipe and decided that 2 sticks of butter was not gonna happen.  Additionally I didn't have any cream and I wanted some fiber in the scones. 

Her recipe called for -> I used instead:

• 2 sticks of butter -> about 1 1/3 sticks butter
• 3 cups all-purpose flour -> 2 cups AP flour + 1 cup whole wheat
• 3/4 cup cream -> 3/4 cup 1% yogurt
• a glaze using 3 cups powdered sugar and whole milk -> nothing
• nothing -> 1 cup chopped fresh cherries

My Alton Brown-esque rationale is that as I was figuring out the replacements was to determine the purpose of each.  In general fat is what makes baked goods moist.  The addition of the cherries introduced moisture that was removed by the reduction of the butter. 

The cream is there to act as a binder (along with an egg) to pull together the dry ingredients and to make it all moist.  I may try to decrease the butter to 1 stick next time, while increasing the yogurt to 1 cup.

As for the whole wheat flour, it gave the scones a slightly nutty flavor and made them a bit heartier.  Heartier = more satisfying = eat less.

Right as I pulled the scones out of the oven my dad showed up for a visit.  He stayed for a cup of coffee and some fresh, hot scones.  G-man is working from home today and I finally put the scones away after hearing him amble through the kitchen and mutter "these things are too damn good".  This from a man who doesn't generally like cooked fruit.

That seems a good endorsement of the healthy-fied recipe!  We didn't miss the sweet glaze nor any of the fat from the cream and extra butter. 

It's totally possible to make many recipes healthier.  Try your own recipe edits and let us know how they go.