Greatest Coffee Cake Ever!

Do I have your attention??

I have been so busy with classes that I haven't really been able to post anything that I made over the past semester. I have to catch up now that I'm on break!

Hands down the BEST recipe I made was Ashley's Banana Coffee Cake - it turned out to be so good, I actually submitted it to my newspaper's weekly culinary contest and it won! I was so excited! I really recommend you try this one.. it's a winner :)

Banana Chocolate Chip Coffee Cake

Modified from Bon Appetit

FOR THE STREUSEL:
1 cup semisweet mini morsels
2⁄3 cup brown sugar, packed
½ cup chopped walnuts
1 tablespoon cinnamon
FOR THE CAKE:
1½ cups all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup sugar
1 stick unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg
4-5 small overripe bananas, mashed (about 1 to 1½ cups)
3 tablespoons buttermilk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, and coat 8- by 8-inch pan with nonstick spray.
Combine streusel ingredients in small bowl until evenly mixed. Set aside.
Mix flour, baking soda, baking powder and salt in medium bowl.
Using a mixer, beat sugar, butter and egg in large bowl until fluffy. Next, beat in mashed bananas and buttermilk. Finally, add the dry ingredients until evenly mixed and dry ingredients become wet.
Spread half of batter in prepared baking pan. Sprinkle with half the streusel. Repeat with remaining batter and streusel. Bake about 45 minutes, or until tester comes out clean. Cool cake in pan on a cooling rack.

Starfruit Upside Down Cake

My boyfriend's favorite fruit is starfruit. I had never really had one until we started dating. They are actually pretty mild-tasting, like a combination of a pear, a grape, and an apple with the consistency of an orange. Hard to explain.. but good! His birthday was yesterday and I surprised him with this upside cake I found after a long google session.

The ingredients called for passionfruits, and being in New Hampshire it's pretty obvious that this is something I don't see every day. I found them at Hannaford luckily. I had no idea what I was doing when I juiced these bad boys but I did the best I could. What a WEIRD texture!

I scooped out the insides of the passionfruits with a spoon and juiced them by hand. I used the edge of the peeler to get the seeds out of the star shapes (I did miss a few though!)

Star Fruit Upside Down Cake (from http://www.nikibone.com/recipe/fruit/starfruit.html)

3 to 4 star fruit, sliced

1/4 cup butter, melted
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
juice of 2 passion fruit

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups cake flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
pinch of salt
1/2 cup milk
1 teaspoon each of vanilla and almond extract

Preheat oven to 350F. Arrange sliced star fruit in bottom of a greased 9 inch cake pan as close together as possible. Mix together 1/4 cup butter, brown sugar and passion fruit juice and pour into pan, turning so mixture covers bottom. Set aside.

Cream together 1/2 cup of butter and sugar. Add eggs, one at a time, beat well. Mix together dry ingredients. Add flour mixture, alternately with milk, to butter mixture. Stir in vanilla and almond extracts. Pour into prepared cake pan. Bake for approximately 30 minutes or until cake pulls away form sides of pan. Let cool for five minutes before inverting onto serving plate.

8 servings

It was not what I expected.. it turned out to be a really dense cake, but it was so, so good! We had it with scoops of rainbow sherbet :) Mmmm

Zucchini Bread

I picked up a monster of a zucchini from a farmer's cart the other day outside of my work. It sat in my fridge for days, during which it was constantly coming up in my thoughts. It's been sort of like this.

Zucchini: "Why haven't you eaten me yet??"

Me: "I'm too busy!!"

Zucchini: "I'm going to go bad soon, and you're going to be wasteful!"

Me: "Aaaaaagh!!"

I hate wasting food, and I think I hate eating bad-for-you foods even more. But I had to get this Zucchini out of my fridge so I pulled up an old recipe card of my grandmother's. This is not the same grandmother who loved to cook, this one is still alive and kicking in a nursing home out in MI. I don't have too many of her recipes, and this was a new one for me. It was actually really good. Probably because of the two cups of sugar that went into it :) I didn't do the two loaves, I did three of the mini loaves and a bunch of mini muffins. I'm not sure that the batter really is enough for two loaves, but I'll update next time I try it.

Anyways.. I'll post now!



Grandma Dz's Zucchini Bread

Ingredients:

3 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 cup oil
2 cups grated zucchini
½ tsp vanilla
3 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp cinnamon
½ cup nuts
½ cup raisins (I subbed for chocolate chips)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

Combine sugar, zucchini, flour, baking soda, salt, baking powder and cinnamon in large mixing bowl. Add eggs, oil and vanilla, blending all ingredients together. Stir in nuts and raisins/choc chips. Pour batter into two 9x5x2 loaf pans and bake for about an hour.

Yields: 2 loaves

Almond Joy Cookies

This one's an absolute treasure. I mean it - I cannot believe something so easy can taste so good. I found this recipe on an index card written out by my grandmother (the one who just passed away in May) and I thought I'd try it out. There wasn't much description on it; there was no ingredient list, just a few scribbles of instruction. So here goes..

Almond Joy Cookies

1 can Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk
2 oz bittersweet chocolate (I used Ghiradelli chocolate chips)
3 cups sweetened shredded coconut
1 tsp vanilla
Handful of almonds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Heat milk and chocolate on top of double boiler. Cook and let bubble for several minutes.

In a mixing bowl, measure out the three cups of coconut. Add vanilla. Once chocolate-milk mixture has heated through, pour on top of coconut-vanilla mixture and stir to combine thoroughly.

Use a small cookie scoop to drop on a well-greased cookie sheet. Press an almond into each cookie. Bake for about 8 minutes.

Allow these cookies to cool before removing. They are extremelyyyy sticky so I actually had to peel them off of the parchment paper. If the cookie got misshapen, it was easily fixed by just re-molding it back into shape. Keep these in the refrigerator -- if they are not cold, they will fall apart when they are picked up!

YUM!

First Crack at Shortbread

My grandmother passed away exactly two months ago to the day. She left behind an enormous collection of cookbooks, kitchen stuff, and really interesting food. I take after her culinary ways so I stepped up to the challenge of using up all of the food she left behind. This includes about 10 jars of jam. Using jam on toast can only get one person so far, so I have been digging through my cookbook collection (and hers!) to find new ways to use some of this stuff up.

When I went to school at Plymouth State, I would sometimes go in and look through the clearance books. I found a few interesting cookbooks for next to nothing. One of them is Shortbread by Jann Johnson. I had never even tried shortbread before but it looked interesting, so I paid the two bucks and put it on my shelf for about 6 months while I finished school. It's actually a really cute book - I wish I had looked through it sooner!




I was scanning through it last night before bed (my pre-bedtime relaxation ritual is to browse through cookbooks) and I discovered a few interesting shortbread recipes. ONE of which used jam. YES!




This recipe called for black raspberry jam, interestingly enough, one of the few jams my grandma did not have. Or maybe she had already used it. Anyways, I made a substitution of strawberry, and I also didn't measure it out. Just smeared it on. Here's how I modified the recipe:


White-Chocolate & Strawberry Shortbread

Ingredients:
1/2 cup (1 stick) + 2 tbsp butter, softened
1/4 cup confectioner's sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
About 1/3 cup jam
A handful of white chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line an 8-inch round cake pan with plastic wrap, leaving some to hang over the edges. With a mixer, beat the butter on low speed about one minute. Mix in the sugar, salt, and vanilla, scraping down the sides of the bowl as necessary. Mix in the flour gradually until just combined.

Press half the dough into the lined cake pan creating a round of dough. Press into the dough with the back of a spoon to spread and smooth. Lift the dough out using the plastic wrap, and flip onto parchment paper on a cookie sheet. Lay more plastic wrap down and repeat the process of spreading the dough out in the cake pan.

Spread the jam on the first dough round until covered, leaving about a half inch on the edge of the circle. Sprinkle with white chocolate chips, as many as desired. Lift the second dough round out of the cake pan and carefully layer it on top of the first dough round, jam, and white chocolate. Let it sit for a few minutes, then combine the edges of the rounds. A fork can be used at this stage to put designs around the edge.

Bake for about 45 minutes until shortbread has set but has not browned. Let sit out of oven for a few minutes, then carefully lift the parchment paper onto a cooling rack. Cool shortbread completely before slicing. Cut into 16 wedges with a sharp, thin knife.










Voila! My first attempt at shortbread! It turned out really tasty. I will have to try a new shortbread recipe from this book again soon!

Morning Glory Muffins

My mom is a grab-and-go type breakfast eater and I am the complete opposite. I like to sit down and create satisfying meals immediately upon awakening. I do it before anything else. I decided that no way would I be waking up before 7 am to make her breakfast, so instead I would experiment with healthy muffin recipes allowing her to take them on the run. I have this amazing King Arthur Flour book called Whole Grain Baking and I dug this recipe out of it. It is one of the best muffin recipes I have ever tried. No lie.




Morning Glory Muffins


1/2 cup (2 1/2 ounces) raisins
2 cups (8 1/2 ounces) King Arthur whole wheat flour, traditional or white whole wheat
1 cup (7 1/2 ounces) brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups (7 ounces) carrots, peeled and grated
1 large tart apple, peeled, cored, and grated
1/2 cup (1 1/2 ounces) sweetened shredded coconut
1/2 cup (2 ounces) chopped walnuts
1/3 cup (1 1/2 ounces) sunflower seeds or wheat germ, optional
3 large eggs
2/3 cup (4 5/8 ounces) vegetable oil
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/4 cup (2 ounces) orange juice

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Lightly grease a 12-cup muffin tin, or line it with papers and spray the insides of the papers.

To make the muffins: In a small bowl, cover the raisins with hot water, and set them aside to soak while you assemble the rest of the recipe. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, sugar, baking soda, spices, and salt. Stir in the carrots, apple, coconut, nuts, and sunflower seeds or wheat germ, if using. In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, oil, vanilla, and orange juice. Add to the flour mixture, and stir until evenly moistened. Drain the raisins and stir them in. Divide the batter among the wells of the prepared pan (they'll be full almost to the top; that's OK).

To bake the muffins: Bake for 25 to 28 minutes, until nicely domed and a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Remove from the oven, let cool for 5 minutes in their pan on a rack, then turn out of pans to finish cooling.

Nutrition information per serving (1 muffin, 106g): 20g whole grains, 342 cal, 18g fat, 6g protein, 26g complex carbohydrates, 19g sugar, 4g dietary fiber, 53mg Cholesterol, 347mg sodium, 322mg potassium, 541RE vitamin A, 3mg vitamin C, 2mg iron, 47mg calcium, 131mg phosphorous.