Peanut butter coffee cake

Ingredients:

Topping:
1/2 cup brown sugar,
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
2 Tablespoons butter, melted

Cake:
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup butter, or margarine
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat pastry flour)
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1 cup milk

Preheat oven to 375.
In a small bowl mix topping ingredients until crumbly.  Set aside.
In a mixing bowl, cream peanut butter and margarine/butter.  Slowly beat in brown sugar.  Add eggs one at a time, beating until fluffy.  Mix together flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda, and chocolate chips.  Add alternately with milk to the creamed mixture, beating after each addition.  Spread batter in a greased 13 x 9 pan, top with crumb topping.  Bake for 30 - 35 minutes or until a toothpick come out clean.

Stromboli

So for all of you out there who've never had stromboli its sorta like a pizza...except its rolled up.  Pizza is
always great!  But sometimes its fun to do a variation of pizza too.  It seems as though stromboli wasn't even invented until the 1950's, so a lot of people missed out on this yummy meal!

As a side note...did you know there also is a volcano in Italy named, stromboli?

Crust ingredients:
1-1/3 cups warm water (110 - 115 F)
1 T active dry yeast
1 T sugar
3 T olive oil
1-1/4 tsp salt
3-3/4 cup plus 2 T all-purpose flour

Filling ingredients:
1 can pizza sauce
about 3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
pizza toppings of your choice (olives, pepperoni, peppers, onions, sausage, etc)

Step 1:
In a stand mixer (I used our Bosch mixer, which eliminated the first rising time) mix water, yeast, and sugar.  Cover and let rest 5 minutes.  After 5 minutes, mixture should be bubbly and smell very yeasty.  (If its not bubbly and maybe stretchy then your yeast didn't proof, your water was probably too hot or too cold, you'll need to try again).


Step 2:
After, proofing your yeast (Step 1), add oil and salt, mix.  Add most of the remaining flour, and mix.  Dough should not be sticky to the touch, you may need to add slightly more or less flour, depending on your dough.
Mix for 5 minutes.

Step 3:
Cover dough and let raise until doubled.

Step 4:
Punch down dough, and divide into two pieces.  On a lightly floured counter top, roll dough into a rectangle, about 12 inches by 18 inches.  Spread sauce in a line lengthwise on the dough. (About 2 inches in from one edge, and about an inch in from the ends)  Top sauce with cheese, and toppings.  Fold smaller side over sauce line.  On top of that fold spread more sauce and more toppings.  Fold the other side over, and under the bottom of the roll, and tuck the ends in well.  Place on a greased cookie sheet. Stab a knife into the top of the roll 3 or 4 times, to make several slits.

Alternate step 4: If this all sounds too confusing, roll your dough into a rectangle, spread with sauce, sprinkle with toppings, and roll it up! Just keep the toppings about an inch in from the edges, and still tuck all the ends under well, so the cheese mostly stays inside!

Step 5:
Bake at 400 for 25 minutes, until top is golden brown.  Let cool for a few minutes, slice, and serve with heated pizza sauce.  Enjoy!!!

Here is my messy kitchen with a few raw strombolis...I made four, and they were all devoured for supper tonight. :)  I made a large batch of dough (about 11 or 12 cups of flour) and made 4 strombolis, and a small, medium, and a large pizza crust.  =D  Twas a lot of dough!

Flourless Chocolate Nut cake

Gluten free, dairy free chocolate cake?  Gotta try it then! It was a fantastic recipe to bake.  All those egg whites make the cake rise, even though it doesn't have any flour or leavening!  I got this recipe from King Arthur Flour 


Ingredients: 
10 large eggs, separated
3 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate
1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
heaping 1/4 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup granulated sugar (to mix with the egg yolks)
2 cups finely chopped pecans, or pecan meal (I used some finely ground walnuts too)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup granulated sugar (to mix with the egg whites)


Directions:

1) Lightly grease a 10" tube pan or angel food pan. For best results, cut a piece of parchment or waxed paper to fit the bottom of the pan, and grease the paper. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

2) Separate the room-temperature eggs, putting the whites and yolks in separate large bowls.

3) Melt the two chocolates together, stirring till smooth, and set aside.

4) Beat the egg yolks till smooth and lemon-yellow. Add the salt and 2/3 cup sugar, and beat again till thickened and lightened in color.

5) Stir in the melted chocolate.

6) Stir in the nuts. They should be processed as fine as possible; they'll probably be a bit pasty.

7) Beat the egg whites and vanilla till foamy.

8) With the beater going, sprinkle in the 1/4 cup sugar, beating till soft peaks form.

9) With the mixer at low speed, gradually fold the whites into the yolk mixture, mixing gently till no streaks show.

10) Spoon the mixture into the prepared pan.

11) Bake the cake for 35 to 40 minutes, till a cake tester inserted into the center comes out clean. Remove it from the oven, and set it on a rack. Loosen the edges, and let it cool in the pan for 1 hour. Loosen the edges again.

12) Invert the cake onto the rack. 13) Make your favorite ganache recipe*, and pour over cake.  Serve chilled. *I tried to make ganache by using equal parts hot milk and chocolate.  It didn't work so well.  I guess for every part milk you'd need at least two parts chocolate?  I just heated my (very soupy) ganache back up and kept adding chocolate till it was thicker.  The original recipe Flourless Chocolate Nut cake gives instructions for a glaze, which I think would work out well! So maybe give that a try!

Lemon Curd

Lemon Curd

I had never made lemon curd before today.  Its not really something we eat often. My parents brought some home from Door County.  It was good.

And then a few weeks ago, I saw a recipe for microwave lemon curd, on a site I follow, mybakingaddiction.com
I didn't want to use the microwave though, so I used a recipe from finecooking.com.
And well, you can eat lemon curd on lots of things: toast, biscuits, crepes, pancakes...but those are all full of carbs, so I made sort of a lemon parfait with my lemon curd.  Vanilla greek yogurt, lemon curd, strawberries, and whipped cream (Raw cream sweetened with a little Truvia..)   Delicious!



Ingredients:

6 T butter, room temperature
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
2/3 cup fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 tsp lemon zest

In a large bowl cream butter and sugar for about 2 minutes.  Add eggs and egg yolks, beat for 1 more minute.  Stir in lemon juice.  (Mixture will look curdled but it will cook away, and end up smooth.)
In a medium, heavy based saucepan heat mixture over low heat until smooth.  Increase heat to medium, and cook, stirring constantly until mixture thickens.  Temperature should reach 170F  The mixture should not boil (Well now things didn't go so well, and lo and behold, my curd started bubbling away while I was deciding if it was done or not.  I decided it was done, and quickly took it off the stove.  Didn't seem to hurt it. :)
Its yummy!

Flourless peanut butter cookies

Flourless Peanut butter cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup peanut butter
1 egg
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

(plus granulated sugar for rolling dough)

Mix first 6 ingredients with a mixer, on medium/high.  The dough should be sorta fluffy.  Roll into tablespoon sized balls (yes, it will be sticky, just try your best :)  Roll each ball in sugar.  Bake at 350 for about 12 minutes, until bottoms are lightly brown.

So I've made these before, but I couldn't remember what the recipe was exactly..I looked it up online, and found a bunch of recipes calling for baking soda, and bunch calling for baking powder, and a bunch more not asking for any leavening at all...hmm

So Emily and I did an experiment.  One batch with baking powder, one without.  On the pan, the cookies on the right have baking powder; in the other picture, the cookie on the bottom had baking powder.  Definitely go WITH baking powder, the cookies looked better, were softer, and just overall better.

Peanut Butter Scones

So I really wanted to make peanut butter scones.  There aren't very many recipes online for them, but I found one, and decided to give it a shot.  I kept the ingredients exactly the same, except I did not put a piece of chocolate bar on each scone, but changed a few of the steps.  =D



Ingredients:
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
2-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup unsalted butter, chilled
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
1/4 cup milk
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Step 1: Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.
Step 2: In a large bowl, whisk together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, and salt. (I really did use a whisk, and it worked well.)
Step 3: With pastry blender or two knives, cut butter into flour mixture.
Step 4: In a small bowl, stir together the peanut butter, milk, eggs, and vanilla extract. (I used a whisk again for this step, it took some stirring but mixed together eventually)
Step 5: Add the peanut butter mixture to the flour mixture and stir to combine. (The dough took awhile to mix all together but eventually it came together, just keep mixing)
Step 6: Grease a cookie sheet with non-stick cooking spray
Step 7: Dump dough onto cookie sheet and pat into an aprox. 10 inch circle.
Step 8: Spray non-stick cooking spray onto a pizza cutter.  Cut dough into 8 wedges.
Step 9: Sprinkle with sugar. (I used granulated and large-sprinkle sized clear sugar)
Step 10: Decrease oven temperature 350 degrees F. Bake for 17-19 minutes, or until lightly browned. Transfer to cooling surface.

Makes 8 scones.

Pumpkin spice muffins

• So we needed muffins for supper.  I decided to make pumpkin muffins.  (We have lots of pumpkin, and it doesn't have to be Thanksgiving for pumpkin!)
• Lillian helped me out with this recipe.  =D  The other kiddos were watching Little House on the Prairie.  
• I changed a few things from the original recipe....lol
• It really called for 1/2 water, but why add water to a recipe? And I happened to have a very ripe banana..why waste it? Ok so it made the muffins taste a little like banana. And they I think they would have been good with a little more oil.  But you can do whatever you want ;)
• 
  
• Pumpkin Spice Muffins
• 
  
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 4 eggs
• 1-15 oz can pumpkin
• 1 ripe banana 
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (If you don't have it, just use a little extra of the other spices)
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 cup shredded, unsweetened coconut
• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Grease  muffin pan or use paper liners.
• Mix sugar, oil, eggs, banana and pumpkin. In separate bowl mix together the baking flour, baking soda, baking powder, spices and salt. Add wet mixture and stir in coconut.  (Walnuts, pecans, and chocolate chips are also good in these muffins. I added walnuts to just a few of mine)
• Fill muffin cups 2/3 full with batter. Bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes.

Mocha Cheesecake with raspberry sauce and ganache

Its been a long, long time since I posted.  Which is sad, and hopefully not happening again soon.  I plan to post more, but of course, that will also require me to cook or bake more, and take pictures of my cooking and baking.
Today I am posting a recipe I actually made back in October.  (No delicious cheesecake for me today; my sister and I were on a 'no sugar' week and the next few weeks are still supposed to be 'low sugar' Gotta cut back after Christmas junk food!)
But cheesecake is really good...and for this cheesecake I decided to have some fun and make some raspberry jam-ish topping, and some chocolate with cream (ganache) topping; it was yummy.
My original inspiration for this recipe was a cheesecake my friend entered in the fair.  Cranberry Mocha Cheesecake  Now here's a problem.  I made this so long ago, I cannot remember exactly how I did it...but I shall do my best!

Mocha Cheesecake

• CRUST:
• 18 oreo cookies, crushed finely
• 1/2 cup butter, melted
• FILLING:
• 4 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
• 1 1/3 cups sugar
• 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
• 4 eggs
• 2 tablespoons instant coffee granules
• 1 tablespoon hot water
• 1/4 cup whipping cream
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• RASPBERRY TOPPING:
• 1 cup frozen red raspberries
• cornstarch
• cold water
• 
  

Directions

Combine cookie crumbs and butter; press onto the bottom and about 2 in. up the sides of a greased 9-in. springform pan; set aside. In a mixing bowl, beat cream cheese until smooth. Combine sugar and flour; add to cream cheese and mix well. Add eggs; beat on low speed just until combined.

In a small bowl, dissolve coffee in water; add cream and vanilla. Stir into the cream cheese mixture just until blended. Pour over crust. Place pan on a baking sheet. Bake at 350 degrees F for 50-55 minutes or until center is almost set. Cool on a wire rack for 10 minutes. Carefully run a knife around edge of pan to loosen; cool 1 hour longer.

In a small saucepan heat raspberries until bubbly.  Combine a spoonful of cornstarch with a little cold water. Add to raspberries and simmer to thicken.  (Just like gravy except with raspberries.  I meant for mine to sort of be sauce but it turned into a jam; it was still good!)

Ganache.  Ok I really can't replicate the way I made mine.  Because I think what happened was sort of like this...I had some chocolate in a pan already so I melted it.  Added some cream, and some more chocolate and some more cream until it tasted good and had the consistency I wanted. I don't think I used butter, and I know I didn't use any alcohol, but I thats not helping me.  So here's a recipe for ganache without either of those ingredients and looks pretty good.  Ganache  Now I skipped all the refrigerating stuff and just added cream till it was just the right thickness....but whatever works works.  :D

I put the jam and the chocolate on each piece after slicing it.  Looks pretty that way, and saved some of my poor siblings from having 'oh no!' jam on their cheesecake!  

Yummmm I think I'll make cheesecake for Valentines day because I got a heart-shaped spring-form pan a little while ago...but I'm gonna make chocolate cheesecake cuz thats still my fav!  But for now...less is more.  So not a lot of sugar for me!

Ciao my friends!