For the past two weeks or so, I’ve been having exactly this for breakfast – a bowl of plain yogurt with blood orange segments on top. I’ve been using homemade yogurt, which is super thick like I like it. After I segment the oranges, I like to squeeze the leftover membranes over top of the bowl, to get all the extra juice into my yogurt. It’s like a customized blood-orange-flavored yogurt, minus the horrible sugary taste you get with commercial yogurts. So, so tasty.
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And then there was the day that I ran out of blood oranges… so I used some frozen berries left over from last summer. I microwaved them for 30 seconds on half-power, and let all the juices mix in with the yogurt. Definitely the best way to start the day.
So even though I’m very happy with my jams this year, and I’m sure all of the jam you canned was like, superfreakingdelicious and all that, but sometimes, you just get TIRED of eating jam on toast, or a bagel, or a piece of cardboard (if you’re dieting). I will be the first one to admit, I ate my weight in jam on toast for May through July. But eventually the monotonous texture started to get to me… and after a while I wanted something different.
Thus the inspiration for a series on the blog, entitled Uncanny (extra points to my sister-in-law Amy for suggesting that title!)
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I wanted to do things for this series that could be easily adapted to whatever preserves you have in your canned goods pantry. I used a jar of my blueberry-cinnamon-vanilla jam, but you should use whatever you have around. Hey, you could even make this with store-bought jam, although I’m not sure it will bring the mouth-gasms like the home-canned preserves do. Adapt this recipe to whatever jam/jelly/conserve you want, whether it be blueberry, raspberry, peach, apple… I could go on. Feel free to spice up your jam before you spread it on the crust… I stirred in a 1/2 tablespoon of lemon juice, just to punch up the fresh flavor of my blueberry-cinnamon-vanilla jam.
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The recipe itself is very adaptable, too. If you want, add some pecans and throw them on top with the streusel. Add a thin layer of shredded unsweetened coconut onto the crumb topping before spreading your jam. If the amount of butter offends your health sensibilities (clearly I have no sense, so this isn’t a problem for me) then compensate by adding some wheat germ into the crumb layer. You could even switch out the flours, maybe substitute a cup of almond flour for one of the cups of all-purpose flour. My point is, it’s a very adaptable recipe! Have fun with it!
Gather:
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, very cold and cut into cubes
1 large egg
1 (8 ounce) jar of jam, jelly, or preserves
1/2 cup rolled oats
Prepare:
Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C). Prepare a 9 inch x 13 inch baking pan by lining it with parchment paper. Add sugar, flour, baking powder, and salt to a food processor bowl and pulse a few times to combine; alternatively, whisk together in a medium bowl.
Add the butter and pulse about 10 times until the crumbs are the size of peas; add the egg and pulse until combined. (No food processor? How do you live? Use a pastry blender, a fork, or two knives to cut the butter into the flour mixture.) Press 2/3 of the crumb mixture into the bottom of the pan, pressing firmly. Pour the jam onto the crumb base, and spread using an offset spatula or the back of a spoon.
Add the 1/2 cup rolled oats to the remaining crumb mixture, and stir to combine. Sprinkle the oatmeal mixture over the jam layer. Bake for approximately 30 minutes, or until the edges begin to turn brown. Cool completely in pan before cutting into squares.
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Cory Chisel / Home in the Woods (Live)lovely guitar-pickin’ and gravelly male voice pairs wonderfully with these jam bars
After the “strata fail” (as Kate coined it in the comments, best. description. ever) I was bound and determined to make something that I would be willing to eat for breakfast for the rest of the week.
Enter the Foster’s Market Cookbook, which was a gift from my dear sister-in-law Amy. (Amy and I have basically come to the conclusion that we’re going to tell each other what kitchen stuff we want, and then buy them for each other under the guise of birthday/anniversary/Christmas presents. Sister-in-laws are super useful like that.) It’s pretty much food porn, bound into hardcover. And it’s got a foreword written by the Great and All Powerful Martha Stewart, High Priestess of Successful Cookbooks, so you know the recipes are clutch. I think I marked every recipe in the ENTIRE FREAKING BOOK to try. Including, but not limited to, the first recipe for streusel muffins.
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I really don’t understand why we don’t just sprinkle streusel on everything. It’s the ultimate combination of butter, sugar, and nuts! Panera has the right idea – they have that damn cinnamon streusel bagel. I misinterpreted it this entire time, though. I thought it was The Devil’s Bagel because I wanted to eat 5 at a time. I think really, we should be eating streusel-covered breakfast pastries. IT’S WHAT GOD INTENDED.
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Modifications made: I didn’t have a full 1 1/2 cups sour cream, so I used a cup of sour cream, and a 1/2 cup of ricotta cheese instead. Oops! I put the ricotta, sour cream, eggs, butter, and vanilla through my blender before I folded in the peaches… just to make sure there where no lumps from the ricotta or butter. The next time I’ll make them with all sour cream to see what the “original” texture should be like, but I doubt it really made a difference.
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Suggestions for next time: I didn’t peel the peaches before chopping them; next time I will make sure they’re peeled beforehand. The peel turned almost green around the edges in the baked muffins. It was an immediate reaction, so probably a result of the peach peel reacting to something in the batter. But definitely unsightly.
Prepare: Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners and spray the entire tin with nonstick cooking spray.
For the streusel topping, combine the pecans, flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and softened butter in a medium-sized bowl, and mix until well-blended. Set aside.
Sift together the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, and allspice in a medium bowl. In a separate (large) bowl, whisk together the eggs, butter, sour cream, and vanilla. Fold in the chopped peaches.
Fold the flour mixture into the egg mixture, just until the flour is moistened. Do not overmix the batter. (Small pockets of flour are okay here.)
Spoon the battter into the prepared muffin pan. The batter should come to the top of the paper liner or pan. Spoon the streusel topping over the batter, and press lightly with the back of a spoon so that the topping adheres to the batter.
Bake for 30-35 minutes, until a knife inserted into the center of a muffin comes out clean. Remove from oven and cool for 5 minutes. Serve immediately for best crunchy topping. Otherwise, store in an airtight container.
Apparently, I’m quite picky about my scones. Until this recipe, I had yet to find one scone I really liked. Who knew?
The Starbucks scones are too sweet. And who wants a pumpkin-flavored scone in July? There’s another local coffee shop here in Denver called Dazbog, but their scones are too dry for my tastes. Plus, there’s always the cost factor – I’m somewhat hard-pressed to pay $2.50 for a dry, overly sweet scone.
I think my problem was that I had only tried flavored scones up until now. And let me tell you, this “plain” scone is anything but unflavored. Made with the simplest of ingredients, it’s the perfect canvas for whatever jam, jelly, or honey you might have lying around the house (I had mine with strawberry jam), but they’re awesome by themselves as well. These are tender thanks to very little handling in the mixing process, so they don’t get hard as a rock in storage (as long as you keep them in a sealed container, of course).
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These are best when right out of the oven, but they still taste pretty freaking amazing 5 days later… I speak from experience.
Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that these are brushed with melted butter and dusted with sugar right before baking. How could this be wrong?
Gather:
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/4 cups whipping cream
2 tablespoons butter, melted
sugar to sprinkle over top
Prepare:
Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Combine flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar in a large mixing bowl, and whisk to combine. Add the cream, stirring until just combined. (Do not worry if there is a small bit of flour at the bottom of the bowl. Best to sacrifice one tablespoon of flour than to ruin the tenderness of the biscuits by trying to pick it up into the dough.) Dump the dough onto the parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Gently mold the dough into a 9-inch circle. Dust a pastry cutter or knife with flour, and cut the circle into 8 equal pieces. Use a spatula or pastry cutter to gently separate the scones so that they can bake without touching each other. Brush each scone with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 13 minutes, or until golden around the edges. Serve immediately, or cool and store in a sealed container.
I know some of you might be reading this, being all “WTF is monkey bread? Has she gone off her rocker?” Or perhaps, for the food bloggers who are reading this, you’re all, “WAY TO JUMP ON THE BANDWAGON, woman!” because monkey bread is the latest recipe darling of the food blog world, or so it seems.
I’m getting the impression that most people haven’t heard of monkey bread before… at least if they didn’t grow up in the South. I grew up in Virginia, but my mother is from North Carolina, and even better, a pretty small town in North Carolina. She’s been making monkey bread for my brother and I since we were wee little kids, using refridgerated biscuit dough. Once I was old enough to pop open the cans of Pillsbury biscuits myself, I was making monkey bread as often as she would let me. My group of friends and me even made it at 5 am the Sunday morning after prom… it was that popular of a dish among my friends (mostly because my mom would make it when they came over, she spoiled them like that).
If you ever wondered how many teenagers it takes to make monkey bread after they haven’t slept for 24 hours… it’s about six. And it still takes them two hours to do it.
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Now that I’ve gotten over my fear of making doughs from scratch, I decided it was time to attempt monkey bread from scratch instead of falling back on the refrigerated dough. I haven’t had the Pillsbury biscuit dough in… 3 years? So I can’t say that I can really taste the difference between a scratch dough and the refrigerated biscuit dough. But you know, I made it from scratch… therefore it HAS TO BE BETTER. It’s like, a law or something.
Plus… this recipe contains 1.5 sticks of butter. Not as much as you’d see in a Paula Deen recipe… but still pretty good.
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Monkey Bread(s)
Adapted from a Kitchenette Family Recipe
Makes 15 muffins or 1 bundt pan (Serves 12)
x Gather:
For the dough 2 3/4 cups bread flour (plus more for kneading)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast (active dry or instant)
3/4 cup warm water
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature
1 egg, room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons cinnamon
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup pecans, chopped
x Prepare:
About an hour before preparing the dough, set out 3 tablespoons of butter and 1 egg to come to room temperature.
Alternatively, if you need to heat them up in a hurry because you didn’t read the directions beforehand (this has never happened to me… never ever ever) you can warm the butter by filling a drinking glass with very hot tap water, let sit for 15 seconds, then empty the glass and cover the butter with the overturned glass for 5 minutes. Warm the egg to room temp by setting the egg in a jar/bowl filled with warm water (not hot water, it will cook the egg) for 3 minutes (it helps to submerge the egg beneath the surface). Repeat with gradually hotter water for 3 minutes at a time until the egg no longer feels cold to the touch.
Combine 1 1/2 cups of the bread flour, sugar, and salt in a large bowl or the bowl of your stand mixture; whisk to combine. In a separate small bowl, whisk the yeast into the warm water. Let sit for 5 minutes or until foamy (see what foamy yeast looks like here and remember if yours doesn’t foam, your yeast may be expired). Whisk in the room temperature butter and the egg into the yeast mixture. Add the butter-egg-yeast mixture into the stand mixture bowl (or large bowl) containing the flour mixture. Combine by either mixing on high for 1 minute with the mixer’s paddle attachment, or using a wooden spoon and your own arm muscles until the dough comes together, approximately 1-2 minutes. The dough will be very sticky.
Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Knead the dough by hand until it is smooth, springy, and no longer sticky, about 5 minutes. Butter the inside of a large bowl. Add the dough to the buttered bowl and cover with plastic wrap or a clean cloth; let rise in a warm place for 1 hour or until doubled in size.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Add muffin liners to two muffin pans.
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Combine 1 cup sugar and 3 tablespoons cinnamon in a medium bowl and mix well. Punch down the dough once or twice and use scissors to cut off pieces of dough, about the size of your thumb. Drop the pieces of dough into the cinnamon sugar and toss until well-coated. Add 5 to 6 pieces of dough to each muffin liner (dough pieces should reach the top of the muffin tin). Once all muffin tins are filled, add approximately 1 tablespoon of pecans on top of each monkey bread.
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Combine the butter and brown sugar in a small saucepan and heat over medium heat until the brown sugar has dissolved into the melted butter. Drizzle approximately 1 tablespoon of butter/sugar mixture onto each monkey bread. Bake breads at 350 degrees for approximately 20 minutes, or until the top of the muffins are caramelized and crispy.
Let cool 5 minutes before serving. Store in an airtight container if not consumed immediately.
NOTE: This recipe makes enough for a bundt pan of monkey bread as well, which is the original incarnation of monkey bread. If using a bundt pan, add the pecans to the pan first, then the pieces of dough, then drizzle the butter/sugar mixture on top. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes and invert onto a platter to serve.
