"Mint to be" bars

Though I honestly think I am one of the luckiest people in the world in terms of the wonderful opportunities and people in the world around me, I have to admit that this winter has been a series of unfortunate health mishaps- from a season-ending injury last fall to a nasty flu to my most recent diagnosis of mono, nothing has really gone to plan. After my poor mono-infected body lay on the couch eating nothing but soup, barely having the energy to walk across the room to get my computer charger for an entire week, I finally started feeling better this past friday.

To celebrate my regained energy and desire to eat food (I do find this a reason to celebrate) I decided I had to bake sometime.  During my sloth-week, I also spent an inordinate amount of time on Pinterest.  bot only did I rename and reorganize my boards but also I pinned a whole plethora of new desserts to make when I finally felt up to it.  One of such desserts were Loaded M&M Oreo bars.  The pictures looked amazzzzzing and I had most of the ingredients.  These two things made me to decide to go for it on Friday afternoon, aka the first day I had been outside in over a week.

 I decided to put a little spin on it and go with a mint theme: T-1 month before St.Patty's day, right? Also I would like to commemorate my current favorite TV show "Grey's Anatomy" (which returns this week yahoo!!) by calling these "Mint to be" bars- thank you April Kepner (I'm totally team Jackson for those that care/understand).  Though having mono is definitely NOT how I envisioned the winter of my senior year, I am hoping that something good will come out of being able to relax a bit- meaning, everything that has happened was "mint to be".  I know that is cheesy but despite hours on the pinterest humor board I cannot think of anything better and I am just SO excited for Grey's this week.  On to the recipe:


1/2 cup unsalted melter butter
1 large egg
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup cake flour
18 Mint Cream Oreos
1/2 cup green and brown M&M's (yes, I picked them out)
8 mini-york patties

1. preheat oven to 350F
2. melt butter and add to large bowl
3. add egg, sugar and vanilla
4. add flour until combined
5. put Oreos and plastic bag and crush up
6. add Oreos to batter (I found that this mixture pretty much looked like some gross pesto mixture- though I agree "gross" and "pesto" should never go in the same sentence)
7. spread batter in 8 by 8 pan (I used by new brownie pan that had individual brownie squares and filled 9 of them)
8. cut up york patties and sprinkle on top
9.  sprinkle M&Ms on top
10.  bake for 15-22 minutes depending on type of pan (I did only 15)


Taking these out of the oven, I was a bit skeptical at the first glance.  I have some impatience issues sometimes, especially when I suspect something I've made has turned out a bit questionable,  so decided to scrap a little crumb off one of the top bars.  Examining the little crumb, I realized that York patties look like a gross, snotty white mess when melted.  This didn't stop me from putting it in my mouth however, since york patties in any form are delicious .  As I ate it, the gooey,white melted York cream mess crystalized suddenly and turned into pure sugar, sort of like some chemistry experiment I did in high school when we learned about supersaturation.  So basically my bars transcended some weird law of matter and taught me that the cream in York patties is supersaturated with sugar..... neither of which is a bad thing.  Though to anyone making this recipe I would probably recommend sprinkling the york patties on AFTER baking. Not that chemistry isn't exciting.

On a side note, all of my doubts I had about my brownie pan making overly hard and underly chewy/gooey brownies were alleviated when I realized these were cooked PERFECTLY.  Slightly crisp around the edges but just so so soft, chocolatey and minty in the middle. soooooo good.  My housemate and I did some serious work of these in an embarrassingly short amount of time.  We decided to leave the last two for our other two housemates, which ended up being a struggle of will. Our thought process- we could just finish them off now and they would never know about them....Unless they read my blog...... then it would be awkward.  So we resisted and let everyone in the Alice Palace taste the magic.  

The Hy(bread)

When reflecting on the different bread products I have made and written about, I realized that I have pretty much run the gamut on pretty much every type- bagels, muffins, bread, rolls, pretzels, corn bread, english muffins, calzones, scones and so on.  So when I finally finished my midterms this past week and was determined to bake something, I needed to come up with someone new to avoid sounding too repetitive.  Basically my baking falls into two categories: 1) over-the-top desserts (aka cookie dough, cheese cake, oreo, reese's peanut cup stuffed goodness) 2) or things I make with flour, yeast and water.  Since I am in the middle of my running season, I try to avoid numero uno unless I have a really good excuse or a really large group of people to distribute them to.  I sadly did not have that type of excuse this weekend so I had to settle with making some yeast product.  

A side note on yeast; I realized that the expiration date on a jar of yeast is only for an UNOPENED jar of yeast.  That would have been nice to know about a year an a half ago as I continued to use my two year old jar of yeast! I have had some failed yeast bread attempts and now I probably know why:  unhappy yeast that was probably over the hill. Apparently yeast jars should not be used longer than 6 months.  I thought I was being thrifty by getting the big jar of yeast but apparently not since I could not have possibly used it in 6 months unless I baked every day.  Anyone who can do that either 1) owns a bakery 2) has a lot more free time on their hands than I do. 

Anyways, in my attempt to come up with a unique product, I settled on English Muffin Bread.  My very strong ambitions to bake emerged fairly late last night so I did not have time to do a long-rise product.  I did find a fairly quick recipe for english muffin bread.  I like english muffins.... and bread... so why not give it a try to combine the two? I used the following recipes with no modification, except that I used my mini-loaf pan instead of the 8by4 pan (only have a 9 by 5 and didn't want to get flatbread!). http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/english-muffin-bread-2

My fresh, young and energetic yeast was also very happy and decided to actually make my bread double (usually I am overly optimistic about my bread's progress.... it's risen a little bit... right???? This time I had no doubt). I also actually measured the temperature of the milk/water mixture to make certain that I don't scald the yeast to death at such a young age :)  I did adjust the baking time a bit to only 30 minutes since I was using my mini-loaf pan.   The result was pretty much as expected, english muffin and loaf form.  Add some butter and honey to a nice toasted slice to complete a wonderful side to a nutritious breakfast (or dinner like I did!). 

Crockin' and almost rollin' with Gertrude

This year for christmas I got another kitchen appliance to add to my and my housemates' growing collection- you would think that with a food processor, waffle iron, sandwich maker, panini press, 2 blenders, fondue pot, george foreman grill and a ricecooker that I would not need anything else.... however, the aspiring adventurous chef inside of me said otherwise, so I asked for a CrockPot.  The idea of a CrockPot is very romantic- you can just whip up something in the morning before running out of the house and then come home to a warm,savory meal .  There are a few caveats however- first off, many of the recipes involve lots of processed food items that you simply throw together. Entire bottles of ranch dressing, cans of "cream of XXXX soup" or packets of taco seasoning are not exactly what I want to be putting into my body.  Therefore, I am on a mission to find healthy and delicious crock pot recipes with which I can fulfill this fantasy of coming home to a nice meal.  And when I mean delicious, I really mean it- my CrockPot is giant so anything I make I will be having for days!  Second, many of the recipes involve more work than you would expect- namely chopping lots of vegetables. So, I would like to find some recipes that minimize the amount of work (without sacrificing taste or nutritional value that is).

Last week on Saturday there was a 30% chance of rain.  That may seem like a normal winter day to anyone in any other year or in any other place (well actually it probably would be raining, not just a 30% chance) but this was a very significant day here in California since there was actually a CHANCE of rain- we have not had one drop of rain this entire year. Because of this it was actually somewhat wintery looking outside and I decided I needed to make a nice warm meal in the crock pot- I settled on a hearty beef stew.  I have never made stew before, so decided to strictly follow a recipe to ensure that this stew that I was going to be able to make at least 5 meals out of would be good. I followed the http://allrecipes.com/recipe/slow-cooker-beef-stew-i/ minus the celery since I simply do not like celery.  I also realized as I was putting in everything that I did not have Worcestershire sauce..... so I just added a splash of soysauce and ketchup (thank you yahoo! answers).  All in all, the stew was a tad bland. However, a sprinkle of salt fixed that!

Also for christmas I got some more pans! I got a brownie pan with individual brownie squares (which I am a little bit skeptical about since brownie edges are the worst) and a mini-loaf pan.  I decided to make use of the mini-loaf pans a make some whole-wheat cornbread with the following recipe http://www.food.com/recipe/whole-wheat-cornbread-80963.  My only faux pas came when I accidentally used the spoon I had been stirring the stew with (which had a strong flavor of onions) to scoop the batter into the loaf pans. Most of the time my worst nightmare is to have my baked good "contaminated" with onion-ness (I am not the biggest onion fan in general, let alone on things it just not be on!), but the cornbread with a tint of onion was actually pretty good.  Would I chop up onions and put them into cornbread.....??? probably not.  But this cornbread went wonderfully with my stew and was in the form of nice little freezable loafs. Now I'm off to go eat some of this stew....a week later. (don't worry I froze it too!)

Zebra Brownies

I will start by apologizing that I am writing this post almost two weeks after the creation of this product.  Lets just call this my belated holiday post.

If you go back to my december 2012 posts (wow 2012!- that was a long time ago.  Still can't believe it is 2014), you will see my entry called "gifty granola" which explains my yearly holiday tradition of giving a jar with some sort of delicious food item to my relatives.  I have done cookies many times, did granola last year and decided that this year I needed to continue to expand my horizons and do some other IAJ recipe.... IAJ obviously is an abbreviation for IAJ (a bet somewhere, in the world, that is a valid abbreviation).  The two requirements for IAJ recipes that I arbitrarily decided :  1) the receiver should not be required to put in more than 3 of their own ingredients into the mix to prevent them getting ripped off... some gift it is if they have to add 10 ingredients! 2) the mix has to look pretty.  That is really all there is to a successful something IAJ .

After browsing a bit online for some inspiration, I came across a recipe called "tuxedo brownies"  which fit all of my VERY strict requirements an IAJ recipe.  So, I decided to go for it. Basically, it entails layering walnuts, white chocolate chips, chocolate chips, brown sugar, flour, cocoa, salt and sugar.  I especially liked this recipe because it has no baking soda or baking powder to add to each one- that is annoying.

 If you haven't picked up on it, they are called "tuxedo brownies" because they have white chocolate chips and chocolate chips (black/white).  I was going to go with this exact same concept, but then I started to get the feeling that these are the types you give out at a wedding...... not christmas.  Maybe one day I will give my wedding guests tuxedo brownies IAJ but christmas was not that day! So, I racked my brain for other black on white things besides a tuxedo.  I came up with cow brownies (Davis resident obviously), Dalmatian brownies, piano brownies, skunk brownies (ew) and zebra brownies.  None of these are particular merry or festive as a christmas gift should be, so I just went with the most exotic- Zebra brownies.  I also found cool scrapbook paper that I could decorate with.  I ended up following the recipe exactly and then dolled up the jars to fit my zebra theme. I also obviously had to make a sample of these chewy, chocolatey and delicious brownies to bring to the party.  I suppose you could always make the brownies without even including the whole jar part if you are just making them on your own, but if you want a wonderful gift to give someone to give them the impression they are a masterful baker, you know what to do :) Happy 2014!!

Gran(d)ola bars

I just finished finals, so what do I do the first day of freedom? Obviously rekindle my relationship with Gertrude that has been a bit frayed these last few weeks.  Since the holiday season is inevitably filled with cookies, fudge and candy, I decided to hold off on the peppermint bark, gingerbread men or peanut butter balls.  Instead I made homemade oatmeal date granola bars  Before you walk these off as rabbit food or cardboard, realize that  I do actually value taste, so I may have sprinkled a generous amount of dark chocolate chips to the granola bars. But dark chocolate is healthy, right??

Whenever I am on pinterest, specifically the "health and fitness" area, I always see these pins for not-so-appealing sounding recipes that say have captions of "OMG these were so good, I am never buying XXX store- bought again!!". What I think- "really? really? you are never going to buy store bought ice cream ever again since you discovered mashed up frozen banana 'ice cream'......... I don't think so".   Anyways, that is what I think MOST of the time.  But these granola bars were literally so good that I may not buy store bought granola bars ever again (ok, that is a lie- I may not WANT to thought!).

• 1 cup packed dates, pitted
• 1/4 cup honey 
• 1/4 cup natural peanut butter 
• 1 cup slivered almonds
• 1 1/2 cups rolled oats
• 1/2 cup dark chocolate 
• 1/2 cup dried bing cherries 
• 1/4 cup dark chocolate chips

1) This was the one step that Gertrude was actually involved in....lightly toasting the oats.  I was a bit doubtful that Gertrude has the ability to "toast", let alone lightly "toast" anything.  But, I decided to give it a try using parchment paper.... which ended up working like a charm. No charred oats in these bars! I toasted the oats for about 300 degrees for 15 minutes. 

2) Next, it was time to puree the dates.  This was probably (ok, definitely) the first time in my entire life that have ever bought dates.,,, so lets just say I was a bit ignorant about the anatomy of a date.  I put the dates in the food processor.... and nothing happened to the dates.  A bit annoyed that my trusty food processor was not processing, I took the dates out and started to cut them..... andddd then I realized that dates have pits.  Genius moment of the day.... I am on winter break after all.  After pitting, the dates processed beautifully. 

3) Next, warm honey and peanut butter in small pan.  I couldn't really mess this up.  

4) Mix the oats, dates, honey/Pb mix, almonds, 1/2 cup chocolate and cherries in a large bowl.  You will probably need to use some force to mix everything together. 

5) Transfer mixture into 8 by 8 pan (with parchment paper on the bottom) and pat down hard

6) Melt remaining dark chocolate (add a little bit of butter if needed) and spread on top 

7) Put in fridge to set 

8) enjoy!

The best part of these are that they taste as good as a dessert, but I still consider it a healthy snack. This means it is socially acceptable to eat "dessert" for breakfast before my workout.... which is awesome. 

P(y)ummmmmkin Muffins

I want to first apologize for my lame excuse of a creative title.  I was trying to think of some punpkin..... oh wait I mean PUMPKIN puns, but I could not find anything all that smashing :P Yesterday signaled T-7 days before thanksgiving and at this time, I came to the horrific realization that I have made it 89% of the way through pumpkin season (october 1-thanksgiving in my book) without baking a pumpkin dessert.  In this time, I have consumed probably 10 cans of pumpkin on my oatmeal or just by the spoonful (I am not quite sure how socially acceptable that is, but it is good!) but Gertrude has not turned out a warm, spicy, moist pumpkin-y baked good...... yet. My excuse to bake this time was to bring something for my Biochemistry project group to celebrate our successful analysis of the protein, Uracil phosphoribosyltransferase.  For those that are wondering (because I know so many are), Uracil phosphoribosyltransferase  is a protein that catalzyes the reaction that makes Uracil Monophoshate, UMP, the ugly stepsister of ATP/AMP.  So perhaps I should retitle this blog P(UMP)kin muffins........... or not. Anyways, here is what I did:


FILLING:
1 package (8 ounces) Cream Cheese
1 egg
1 tablespoon sugar

MUFFIN:
2-1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 tsp allspice
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup pecans

STREUSEL
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup flour
4 tbs cold butter, diced into pieces
1 tsp cinnamon


1. Blend together ingredients for filling in small bowl and set aside
2. Blend flour, spices, baking soda and salt in medium bowl
3. Beat together eggs, sugar, pumpkin and oil
4.  Slowly combine dry ingredients into pumpkin mixture and beat until combined
5.  Mix in pecans, if desired
6.  Fill prepared muffin tins halfway with batter
7.  spoon as filling on top of batter (as much as desired)
8.  Fill muffin tins with remaining batter- I as able to make 12 very full muffins and about 6 smaller ones
9. Bake for 20 minutes at 350 degrees
10.  Prepare streusel by using a food processor to make small crumbs
11.  Sprinkle with streusel immediately after they come out of oven
12.  Let cool and enjoy!

 

Butterscotch Caramel Blondies

 Once upon a time, I did not actually bake ridiculous desserts.  Instead, I stuck with the generic chocolate chip cookies or vanilla cupcakes that I would find in my mom's cookbooks.  I mean this in no disrespect to chocolate chip cookies or vanilla cupcakes, but honestly, the chocolate chip cookies or cupcakes you can buy at the grocery store bakery are probably better than the ones you could make by yourself.... just sayin' (though if anyone wants to prove me wrong with tangible baked  I would be happy to consider). As I have matured as a baker, I have decided that making those recipes that you can't find at the counter of every grocery store is what makes baking more exciting and rewarding. The first recipe of this sorts that I ever embarked upon were caramel brownies, at the following link  http://allrecipes.com/recipe/caramel-brownies/.  I distinctly remember the day after a long run in high school that my good friend  and I decided to make this recipe..... we were so excited how good they were that we made them again, and again, and again.  While I only see her once or twice a year now, we still carry on the tradition.  While I think we have both betrayed the other a few times and made the brownies in our own separate lives, I try to keep my caramel brownies making to when I have my partner-in-crime.

             
The one thing about caramel brownies, is that there is some room for variation. While the original recipe calls for german chocolate cake mix, my friend and I definitely did an experiment where we tried three different types of chocolate cake mix at the same time and did a taste test.  The result: milk chocolate cake mix gives the best caramel brownies (it also has about .5 g less fat than the german chocolate cake mix.... so these caramel brownies are basically healthy).  But they were all delicious nonetheless.  As I was thinking about about what type of recipe I wanted to do for my last day of work (I have the best job ever :), I needed some foolproof recipe that could leave me a little room for experimentation.  The result of my brain storm sesh- butterscotch caramel brownies.  SO GOOD.   

Butterscotch Caramel Blondies

1 box french vanilla cake mix

1/3 cup evaporated milk

3/4 cup softened butter

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 tbs maple syrup 

1 package butterscotch chips 

1/4 and 1 tbs evaporated milk 

11 ounces wrapped caramel 

1. Combine cake mix, 1/3 cup evaporated milk, brown sugar, syrup and butter in large bowl 

2.  Spread 2/3 of mix on greased 9 by 13 cake pan (batter will be thin) 

3. Bake for 8-10 minutes at 350 F

4. While it is baking, melt the 11 ounces of wrapped caramel with 1/4 cup and 1 tbs evaporated milk on medium heat. 

5. After 8-10 minutes, take the pan out and pour the melted caramel onto the brownies. 

6.  Spoon the remaining batter on top and sprinkle the butterscotch chips on. 

7. Bake for another 15-18 minutes

8. Let cool and enjoy!