Category: Food

I still don’t know whether this was a bad idea or not. I fell asleep last night with this idea in my head that I wanted to make oat bars, something that was more cookie than granola bar. So I plagiarized the dough recipe from a cookie recipe I liked, and substituted some flour for oats. I also added peanut butter and concocted my own brown sugar using molasses.

Ingredients:

• 2 Cup Oats
• 2 Cup Flour
• 1.5 Cup Sugar
• 1 Cup Butter
• ¼ Cup Peanut Butter
• 2 Tbsp Molasses*
• 1 Tsp Baking Soda
• 1 Tsp Salt
• 2 Eggs

*Alternatively, you can substitute the molasses and sugar for: 1 Cup White Sugar + ½ Cup Brown Sugar.

Instructions:

1. Mix the wet ingredients: sugar, butter, peanut butter, molasses, eggs.
2. Mix in the rest of the ingredients (dry stuff).
3. Set the oven to 350F. Shape the dough into bars, and place them on a tray to put in the oven. Bake for 12-15 minutes.
4. Take out the tray and let cool.

Verdict:

There weren’t enough oats. I think next time I’d do 1.5 cup flour, 2.5 cup oats.

This was a day alone for me, and I decided to treat myself with a pulled pork sandwich. I turned on the slow cooker in the morning and threw in tenderloins, chopped up onions, BBQ sauce, tomato soup, basil, garlic powder, a bit of water and some salt. Basically, what I had laying around.

I also made a loaf of whole wheat bread. The pork tasted great; I think next time I’d butter the bread and toast it a bit before serving.

I’m now in my second month of school and past the half-way mark. Things are going much better than a month ago. For one, I no longer feel like I’m drowning. School work is more or less under control. A big cause of stress at the job is nearly resolved. I’ve also started to participate in university events, tapping into communities I ignored during my first foray. Life is looking up, if only for a bit.

I’ve also kept baking. My interest in other hobbies are hibernating by circumstance. Programming because of work, reading because of school, same with writing, etc. I appreciate that baking is unlike anything else I do.

Among my recent adventures I made ice cream (without a machine), baked tons of doughnuts, produced snickerdoodle scones, whipped up some home-made Reese’s Pieces, improvised peanut butter chocolate chip cookies, accompanied those with maple cookies, and made sweet buns. That’s about half of what I made, and that’s just in the last few weeks.

It’s gotten to the point where I’m telling myself to tone it down. I have this rule now to only bake weekends. I’ve been very bad at following it. I keep stumbling on recipes, they look so good, and I always invariably have the ingredients on hand. Oh and a side note about the ice cream: it turned out surprisingly well. That recipe is a gem.

I’ve continued testing out baked doughnut recipes. Now there was this one recipe I came across a while ago, but at the time I lacked the doughnut pan required to try it out. I stumbled on it again the other day, and decided to give it a shot. The results were quite good.

I made my own brown sugar for this one, and substituted the expensive cream cheese frosting for a simple icing sugar and milk glaze. The end product is definitively reminiscent of the taste it aims to emulate. Texture-wise I’d say it’s somewhere in between a cupcake, a doughnut, and a cinnamon roll.

Cinnamon Roll Baked Doughnuts

Overview

Credit for the recipe goes to the blog Top with Cinnamon. I used a simple glaze instead of the cream cheese frosting that was on the original, and made my own brown sugar. The whole thing takes about 35 minutes to do, start-to-finish. You’ll need a doughnut pan, though Top with Cinnamon also has an entry on how to make your own.

Ingredients

You’ll need sugar, icing sugar, molasses, butter, cinnamon, milk, cornstarch, all-purpose flour, an egg, nutmeg and vanilla extract.

Base

• 6 Tbsp Butter
• 5 Tbsp Sugar
• 2 Tsp Molasses
• 2 Tsp Cinnamon
• 1 Tsp Milk
• 1 Tsp Cornstarch
• 1 Tsp Vanilla Extract

Doughnut

• 1 Egg
• ½ Cup Milk
• 1½ Cup All Purpose Flour
• ½ Cup Sugar
• 2 Tsp Baking Powder
• ¼ Tsp Salt
• ¼ Tsp Nutmeg

Glaze

• ¾ Cup Icing Sugar
• 2 Tsp Milk

Instructions

Put six tablespoons of butter in a sauce pan, and put on low heat to melt.

While the butter does its thing, mix the five tablespoons of sugar with the two teaspoons of molasses, to make brown sugar.

Pour the quarter cup of melted butter from the sauce pan into another bowl and set aside. Add the home-made brown sugar to the sauce pan and mix.

Add the cinnamon, milk, vanilla, and cornstarch. Combine them.

When the mixture starts to bubble, take it off the heat and pour a spoonful in the bottom of each mold of the doughnut pan.

Set the oven to 350° F. In a clean bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt and nutmeg.

In the bowl you poured that quarter cup of butter, whisk in an egg and add the half cup of milk. Mix well, then add to the flour concoction. Fold whatever’s wet into the dry. Don’t overdo the mixing here; stop as soon as the dry powder is pretty much gone.

Add a few tablespoons of the mixture to the mold. I then push down around with my fingers so that the prod that creates the hole in the middle is visible. I don’t bother trying to get the batter to the edge, it’ll expand into it as it bakes.

Put the doughnut pan in the oven for 8 minutes. As that bakes, prepare the glaze. Combine the icing sugar with milk. I also added some vanilla here.

Pull the doughnuts from the oven. I immediately take them out with a small spatula.

Once cool I use a spoon to place the glaze on them.

Then drop your cellphone into the doughnuts while taking photos, cracking the pretty glaze you made. You’re done!

Critiques: The glaze I made is sub-par. The original cream cheese frosting called for by Top with Cinnamon would definitively be better; but its main ingredient is too expensive to have on hand (special occasions aside.)

I had a delicious waffle a few weeks ago. That seeded in me this urge to be able to make this batter-based mass of deliciousness myself, but I lacked the gear. I looked around at what was out there and I saw lots of electric waffle makers.

That wouldn’t do. In my odd little mind, that was a frivolous piece of kitchen electronics.  What I was really after was something that I could just put on the stove. When I stumbled on the waffle pancake pan at Domus yesterday, I promptly purchased it.

Then this morning, I made some waffles.

This produces smaller single-sided waffles. I’d have to get a cast iron waffle iron if I wanted those big thick double-sided Belgian waffles. But I do appreciate the moderate portion sizes this produces.