Banana Peanut Butter Smoothie

This is barely a recipe, but it's so good I thought I'd share it. Bananas and PB have always been a comely pair, so the great success of this recipe is in discovering an actual technique to throwing a bunch of tasty components into a blender. Add the peanut butter at the end; this ensures it fully folds into the yogurt, instead of sticking to the blender and hiding in those spots the spoon or spatula just can't quite reach. What I've also done is arrange the ratio of ingredients so it's very simple to remember sans-recipe.

Banana Peanut Butter Smoothie
Ingredients:
1 banana
1 cup yogurt
1 ice cube
1 TBSP peanut butter

Directions
--Put ingredients into a blender, adding peanut butter last. Blend on medium setting. Serves one.

Hot Cross Buns

In the days of single-digit birthdays, my mother would grow a basket of wheatgrass at Eastertime. The pin straight blades slowly sprouted up toward the wicker handle, and if the grass grew too eagerly, we'd trim it with craft scissors. Day-of, she festooned the basket with ribbon and small ornaments—rabbits, eggs, chicks. I recall the basket as the ringleader of the holiday's fanfare, which we celebrated with new dresses, flower-trimmed straw hats, and eggs in jolly suits. As we aged, the decorative accouterments diminished in favor of a focus on food. It helped that I began helping with the meal prep—in recent years, we got as fancy as Eggs Florentine and mimosas. And if any Hot Cross Buns had survived into the weekend, we'd add them to the menu. The family's quite scattered now, so to honor a semblance of the Easter tradition, it's the food that I recreate. There's no green basket on the table, but there is a plateful of buoyant, faintly spicy hot cross buns.

 As it turns out, hot cross buns on Good Friday isn't quite as ubiquitous as I imagined. Of both my foodie and Easter-celebrating friends, few had stories to share about them—about crooked icing crosses, or uneven smatterings of raisins thrown into as-yet-unrisen dough. Eyes pass by the tightly packaged, squishy-sweet rolls in the supermarket bins without recognition. Of course, this recipe comes to you post-Good Friday, which makes any connection or lack there-of a bit moot. My recommendation, should you find the recipe appealing during the off-season, is to make the rolls and ice the entire tops (you'll end up with extra anyway). No one will be any the less for it.

Adapted from King Arthur Flour's Easy Hot Cross Buns

Hot Cross Buns

Ingredients for dough:

1 1/4 cups milk (I used skim)

1 package active dry yeast

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

6 TBSP butter, softened

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg

1 3/4 tsp. salt

1 TBSP baking powder

4 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour

1/2 cup raisins

Ingredients for icing:

1 cup powdered sugar

1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

3 TBSP milk, or a little more 

Directions:

--Heat milk until warm but not too hot to touch. Pour over yeast and 1 tsp. of the brown sugar. Let rest until proofed, about 10 minutes. 

--Mix together remaining sugar, butter, eggs, spices, salt, and baking powder. Add yeast mixture and stir to combine. Add flour all at once and mix until a cohesive dough begins to form. Use hands to form into a ball and knead until dough is smooth and elastic. Add raisins and knead to incorporate. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 1 hour.

--Divide dough into 12-14 golf-ball sized pieces. Shape into balls and set in a greased 8x8x8-inch baking pan (it's fine if they touch). Let rise another hour.*

--Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Bake 20-25 minutes or until buns are deep brown. Let cool before decorating, to avoid having the icing spread and lose its cross shape.

--Make icing. Mix together sugar, vanilla, and milk until a smooth, spreadable icing forms. Once buns have cooled, use a knife to draw plus crosses on the buns. Serve warm if possible.

*Note: At this point, dough can be refrigerated up to 2 days. Let come to room temperature before baking.

Morning Scones with Apple and Oats

Several weekend mornings  (and the occasional weekday evening) this past year, I’ve woken up (or returned home) to the sprightly sizzle of pancake batter puffing up on the skillet. As a kid my family frequently made weekend breakfasts, consisting of blintz, hash browns, or blueberry pancakes. If it were blintz, I’d help mix the cottage cheese filling—if pancakes, I’d get to drop the blueberries into the just-overturned cakes. (Hashbrowns I left alone—they included onions, which in my youth I deemed slimy and too bold of flavor.) Sometimes I sat and watched the breakfast construction. Sometimes I clambered onto a stool precisely as one of my parents slid a laden plate and already-dripping syrup spout toward me.  Either way, to have this lazy weekend morning serenade of breakfast resume, now courtesy of my roommate, is rather a treat. And this past weekend, I thought I’d take up the task of putting together the breakfast. In lieu of something that requires immediate consumption, I decided to make morning scones.I’ve had mixed success with scones in the past, but this apple-oat rendition is one of the better ones I’ve come across. There's just enough butter to form a tender crumb, and the oats give some toothiness, while the apple chunks make for bursts of smooth, sweet flavor. I didn’t have buttermilk around, so I created sour milk with soy milk and a dash of vinegar to give the scones just the lift they needed.

Adapted from Martha Stewart's Apple and Oat Scones

Morning Scones with Apple and Oats

Ingredients:

1 2/3 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour

1 1/3 cups rolled oats

¼ cup plus 2 TBSP brown sugar

½ tsp. ground cinnamon

½ tsp. ground nutmeg

2 tsp. baking powder

¾ tsp. baking soda

½ tsp. salt

½ cup (1 stick) cold butter, diced (use margarine if making vegan)

1 ½ cups chopped apple (I used one large gala)

2/3 cup buttermilk or sour milk

Directions:

--Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Mix together flour, oats, brown sugar, spices, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Cut in butter with two knives or a pastry blender until it’s in pea-sized pieces. Add apples and buttermilk and stir with a spoon until incorporated. Use hands to press dough into a disk.

--Flour a cutting board. Flatten dough into a rectangle, about 6 by 8 inches. Use a sharp knife to cut into 12 triangles. Place on two ungreased cookie sheets, making sure the scones don’t touch.

--Bake scones for 18-20 minutes, or until tops are golden brown. 

Banana Peanut Butter Pancakes

 

 As pancakes go, I am generally a fan of the plate-sized cake. I find it very comforting to nibble away at a corner and know I still have miles to go before I reach the middle. But somehow, the idea of the silver dollar pancake appealed to me this time. Perhaps it was the idea of stacking the cakes into a tower I could topple.  Perhaps it was the name silver dollar. It puts to mind something valuable, that you can hold in your hand. Which I'd say is a pretty accurate description of these pancakes. Although you're welcome to eat with a fork if you want (I did).

The recipe morphed from a vegan peanut butter banana bread recipe, a staple to my repertoire. The peanut butter supplies all the fat in the batter, providing natural decadence and protein in one go. Chunked bananas and sour soymilk create a delectably soft, moist loaf. So in modifying for pancakes, I added a bit more flour to stiffen the batter. And they retained their luscious flavour, now encapsulated by a thin exterior of crunch. I put buttermilk in the pancakes, but you can keep the pancakes vegan by using soymilk and vegan chocolates chips and substituting butter with oil or margarine. Finally, potential pancake toppings range widely and wildly; syrup would be great, as would sliced bananas and Greek yogurt. Also worth considering: chocolate sauce and pecans, which you could also add to the batter.

  
Adapted from Madhuram's Eggless Cooking's Vegan Peanut Butter Banana Bread Recipe
Banana Peanut Butter Pancakes
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 cup roughly mashed bananas (about 2 medium)
1/3 cup peanut butter (I used crunchy)
1/2 cup buttermilk (or 1/2 soymilk mixed with 1 tsp. apple cider vinegar)
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 TBSP water
optional: 3/4 cup chocolate chips 

butter for pan

 Directions:
--In a medium bowl, mix together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In a small bowl, mix together mashed banana, peanut butter, buttermilk, vanilla, and water. Add wet ingredient to dry and stir to combine.
--Heat a medium pan on medium-low heat. When warm, add 1 TBSP butter to pan. The pan is ready when the melted butter forms bubbles and begins to brown.
--Add as many pancakes as will fit without touching each other (3-4). If using chocolate chips, sprinkle on top of pancakes. Cook on one side until you can see air bubbles forming and bursting on top of the pancakes, or about 3 minutes. Flip and cook 2 minutes more.
--Repeat with the rest of the batter, adding more butter as necessary. Makes approximately 14 silver dollar pancakes.

Pumpkin-Raisin Cinnamon Rolls

There are some dishes for which I have one go-to recipe, one fail-safe method of producing something tasty. This bread loaf, for example, Moosewood's six minute chocolate cake, garlic-sauteed kale. Not so, however, with cinnamon rolls, my family's breakfast on Christmas morning. My mom and I make them regularly enough that we ought to have a reliable recipe, written down like so many others on a tattered 3 x 5 notecard and tucked into the tiny wooden chest of handwritten recipes that sits on the kitchen counter.

But we haven't got one. For years, we used a recipe from one of my mother's bread books. The dough filled two pans, one we left without nuts for those of us whose tastebuds hadn't yet matured enough to appreciate the crunch they contribute. This was a whole wheat recipe, yielding dense, yeasty rolls. They were good, but we craved the fluffy, spicy clouds we found at coffee shops and bakeries. Then King Arthur's Baking Book arrived in our kitchen, and we turned to its cinnamon roll and sticky bun recipes. That was a messy year. And as 2012 began to enter holiday baking season (that's October for me), my friend and fellow foodie emailed me a recipe for pumpkin cinnamon rolls. I kept it bookmarked until Christmas weekend and then got out the rolling pin.

Nothing wrong with a bit o' butter!

The pureed pumpkin adds subtle flavour and a lovely golden glow to the buns. We cooked up a pumpkin from scratch, although canned should work fine too. And we added extra spices in addition to cinnamon, which heightened the harvesty flavours I usually associate with pumpkin--ginger and allspice. But we still dumped on the cinnamon. And you should too. We also included raisins, which were particularly plump and dreamy after they soaked up some of the cream cheese glaze.

 Adapted from Smitten Kitchen's Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls

Pumpkin-Raisin Cinnamon Rolls
Ingredients for dough:
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/2 cup milk, (cow or soy is fine)
1 package active dry yeast
3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. allspice
1/4 tsp. ground ginger
2/3 cups pumpkin puree, canned or homemade*

Ingredients for filling:
1/4 cup light brown sugar
2 TBSP granulated sugar
1 1/2 TBSP  ground cinnamon
1/3 cup raisins

Ingredients for cream cheese glaze:
4-oz. cream cheese, softened
2 TBSP milk
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

Directions:
--Brown butter in a small saucepan. Heat butter over medium heat until melted; keep cooking until it turns golden and begins spitting, seven minutes or so. Once a few dark bits begin to gather at the saucepan's bottom, it should be ready. Remove from heat and let cool.
--In another saucepan, warm milk until lukewarm. Remove from heat and combine with yeast and a sprinkle of the sugar in a small bowl. Let sit until yeast is foamy, about ten minutes.
--Mix together flour, rest of sugars, salt and spices in a large bowl. Add 3 TBSP of the butter, the yeast mixture, and pumpkin and stir with a wooden spoon until rough dough begins to form. Use hands to knead dough until smooth, adding more flour if it is too sticky. Once the dough is smooth and feels springy, cover bowl with a towel and let rise until doubled in size, or about one hour.
--Flour a large flat surface or cutting board. Turn dough out onto surface. Using a floured rolling pin, roll dough into a rectangle, approximately 16x11 inches. Brush top of dough with reserved butter.
--Make filling. Mix together sugars and cinnamon. Sprinkle over buttered dough. Sprinkle on raisins, making sure they are distributed evenly. Starting with one long end, roll dough into a tight pinwheel.
--Using a length of dental floss, cut log into 1-inch rolls. Place cut rolls into a greased 9-inch round or square pan. Brush tops of rolls with any remaining butter. Cover and let rise for another 45 minutes or let refrigerate overnight.
--Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Bake buns for 30 minutes. While rolls are in the oven, make the icing. Beat cream cheese with a fork until fluffy. Add milk and stir. Sift powdered sugar into the bowl and stir until glaze is well mixed.
--When tops of cinnamon rolls are golden, remove from oven. Let cool at least ten minutes before eating. We eat them right from the pan, and let each person add the amount of icing they desire.

* To make pumpkin puree from scratch, halve a small pie pumpkin. Using a spoon, scrape seeds and sinew from pumpkin. Place halves, cut sides down, on a baking sheet and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes, or until flesh is soft. Once cooled, remove flesh from skin and mash with a fork. A small pumpkin usually yields about 2 cups of mashed pumpkin.

Chewy Granola Bars

I'm so happy to have discovered this recipe. A local restaurant called Toast (okay, it used to be local until I left Kentucky) makes a granola that's simply to die for. Chock-full of coconut, plump raisins and buttery-tasting oats. Then they sprinkle it with bananas, blueberries and milk. I love the stuff. It's so good, I'm willing to pass up the bread pudding pancakes for it. Okay, sometimes I get both. But I always get the granola.

But these granola bars are the answer for my time away from Kentucky. They capture the crisp-crunchy gumption of the granola I so sweetly love. And they are terribly easy to make. Once you've melted the butter, it's a one-bowl operation (use a big bowl). The only can't-cut-corner is lining the pan with parchment paper. These bars are very sticky when warm; the paper was instrumental in getting them from the pan and onto a cooling rack. And it's helpful for catching any crumbs that're dislodged in the cutting process. These crumbs provide instant granola, of course, but also could be ice cream or fruit crisp topping.

I cut the bars after about 15 minutes of cooling time. A little longer wouldn't hurt either. They're very pliable—and will remain so for over a week when left in an airtight container. I've found them an excellent mid-morning snack.

Chewy Granola Bars
Adapted from Smitten Kitchen's Thick, chewy granola bars
Ingredients:
4 tablespoons melted butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup maple syrup
2 tablespoons agave nectar (can substitute more syrup or corn syrup)
1 tablespoon water
1 2/3 cups quick rolled oats
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup oats, ground in a blender or food processor
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup golden raisins
1 cup flaked, sweetened coconut
1/3 cup peanut butter

Directions:
--Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line one 8x8 pan or two loaf pans with parchment.
--Melt butter in a small saucepan. Mix with vanilla, syrup, agave and water in the saucepan.
--Mix together oats, sugar, ground oats, salt and cinnamon until combined. Add raisins and coconut and stir.
--Add wet ingredients to dry and mix. Add peanut butter.
--Scoop mixture into pan (or divide evenly between two pans). Press with fingers or the back of a wooden spoon, making sure mixture is tightly squished together in the pan.
--Bake for 30-40 minutes if using 8x8 pan, 20-30 minutes for loaf pans, until top is brown. Don't worry if it looks very brown; the mixture will still be quite chewy and soft.
--Using parchment as handles, remove bars from pan and let cool, 20 minutes. Using a serrated knife, cut into bars (I got 9 rectangles from each loaf pan).

Bundt Cake French Toast

This entry is a sort of post script to my last one. I left you all with the tale of the rather significantly-sized peach bundt cake I'd made for my birthday. We downed about half of it right away, leaving the rest to be nibbled upon at the leisure of the household. Unfortunately, time got away from me and got into the cake, and before anyone could finish the leftovers, the cake dried out. What was once a lovely, peachy birthday cake turned into a large mass of dry, peachy bundt. But I really despise throwing food away, so I thought I might mask the cake's shortcomings somehow. And it being a lazy Sunday, brunch food sounded about right. So I made French toast, with the cake.

Initially, I worried that the cake would fall apart in the milk-and-egg batter, the dessert being less gluten-y than the average piece of bread. I cut thick slices of cake, gingerly turning the pieces over in the liquid, but they kept their shape as they soaked up the batter. And I successfully transferred them to, and flipped them in, the pan without losing any important corners. The result was a very, very tender French toast. The time in the pan yielded a soft and rich crumb, surrounded by a buttery glaze. The warm peaches in the cake added a sweet bite. Leftover cake lives to crowd the counter another day.



Bundt Cake French Toast
Ingredients:
1 cup milk (I used soy)
3 eggs
3 TBSP brown sugar
2 1/4 tsp pure vanilla extract
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt
6 slices pound or bundt cake
butter for the pan
berries, maple syrup, whipped cream, etc for topping.

Directions:
--Whisk together milk, eggs, sugar, vanilla, nutmeg and salt until combined. Pour batter into a shallow bowl. Dip slices of cake in batter, soaking for one minute on each side.
--Heat 1/2 TBSP butter in a nonstick pan on medium heat. When butter begins to brown, add slices to pan, one or two at a time. Cook until browned, about two minutes on each side, flipping half way through. Repeat with remaining slices, adding more butter as necessary to coat the pan.