In the Kitchen: Amazing Pear Bread

In an attempt to get all my recipes and cooking talk in one place, I’ll be periodically re-posting recipes from my time writing on the Kitchen Mirror here. In some cases I may update pictures & proof-read, but for the most part it will just be a re-posting of what I had there. The posts are not in chronological order – I’m trying to post holiday appropriate recipes near the holidays they go with & fill in others around them.

Originally posted Febraury 23, 2010.

I’ve come to the realization that after a particularly bad day at work, I like to bake a little comfort food. Okay, a lot of comfort food.

This is both good and bad. It’s good because said bad day usually happens on Tuesday, so I have baked deliciousness to take to knit group on Wednesdays. It’s bad because I DON’T NEED TO KEEP BAKING. *sigh* What’s a girl to do? Bake, bake, and bake some more.

This recipe was made a full month ago, after seeing a version my friend Shannon made. I NEEDED to make this bread. It looked too good to pass up.

I started with this recipe from Smitten Kitchen and modified it a bit to TRY to make a healthier version. I’ve posted the recipe with my changes below.

3 cups all-purpose wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
3/4 cup egg beaters (or egg replacer of your choice)
1 cup dark brown sugar
2 large firm, ripe pears, depending on size (you’ll need 2 grated cups total, but I don’t recommend you grate them until you are about to use them, so they don’t brown)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Heat your oven to 350°F (175°C) and lightly grease and flour a 10-inch tube pan or two 9-by-5-inch loaf pans.

Combine the flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a large mixing bowl, and stir with a fork to mix everything well.

Peel and core pears, then grate them. You’ll want two grated cups total; set them briefly aside. In a medium bowl, combine the applesauce, egg beaters, sugar, grated pear, and vanilla, and stir to mix everything well. Scrape the pear mixture into the flour mixture and stir just until the flour disappears and the batter is evenly moistened.

Quickly scrape the batter into the prepared pans and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 60 to 70 minutes, or until the bread is handsomely browned and firm on top and a wooden skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool the bread in the pan on a wire rack or folded kitchen towel for about 10 minutes. Then turn it out onto a plate or a wire rack to cool completely, top side up. Serve it as is, sprinkle it with confectioners sugar or drizzle it with a simple glaze made from whisking 3 tablespoons buttermilk, a dash of vanilla and 2 cups of confectioners’ sugar together.

I’m fairly sure I baked mine for less time, although I can’t remember now. Maybe 55 minutes? My oven tends to run a little bit hot, though, so I often wind up baking things less than the recipe calls for.

Cupcakes Galore

As the semester is winding down (one last class meeting on Tuesday that I’m supposed to be preparing my presentation for & then the final paper due the week after), I’m starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, or the 3 weeks I have before the summer semester starts. The break in the action is what’s keeping me (mostly) sane.

This weekend was our Relay For Life event & I baked a TON of cupcakes to sell again. Unfortunately, this year was much colder than last year, so the crowd was smaller. We didn’t sell out, but we did make some more money for our event team before calling it a night.

I made tiny funfetti “birthday” cupcakes to give away to the cancer survivors who happened by our table, but I think most of them headed home after the opening ceremony &/or dinner. Like I said, it was COLD outside on Saturday night. But how cute are these cupcakes?!

These Salted Caramel Cupcakes are my new favorite to make. Here’s the secret ingredient I used: Fleur De Sel caramels & caramel sauce from Trader Joe’s. Instead of making the caramel filling, I baked one of the caramels into the center of the cupcake. Then I used about 1/3 cup of the sauce in the frosting & drizzled a little more on top, followed by a little sprinkle of sea salt. DIVINE.

These Yellow Cake cupcakes with chocolate frosting are also surprisingly delicious & do not invoke my “Vanilla Cake Syndrome”. I’ll have to do a proper post on them sometime soon, as I can’t remember where I actually found the recipe now.

We also had Fredbird stop by the table to help us sell some cupcakes. :)

In other news, my computer came home on Tuesday & it took me until Friday to get everything back on it – there was drama because I had two Time Machine backups on the same disk & it chose the wrong one to use to restore everything. So I had to erase the disk & reinstall my OS. Then I tried to restore from the correct backup, but couldn’t access or even FIND any of the files, even though I could see they were taking up space on my hard drive. In the end, I did a copy & paste to get the docs back, reinstalled the software, & even managed to get my iTunes playlists back. WOO.

And now I must get back to work on my presentation. I’ll be back soon to talk about knitting.

Getting dotty with it.

I started to write something last week about the sinus infection’s reign of terror, but then never finished it. There was a discussion of how prednisone is pretty much the WORST THING EVER and I will never ever ever get back together* with it. BUT, I’m feeling nearly normal now, haven’t taken a dramamine for the head wibblys in several days now, and all in all improving. Yay. My brain works again!

*If you click that link, I can not be held responsible for the earworm. Also, I’M SORRY.

In other news:

• The speedometer on my car has stopped working. The gas gauge quit about a year and a half ago. The car is only 8 years old and has around 70,000 miles on it. This should not be happening. A quick call to the dealer suggested that I needed a few hundred dollars to get it fixed. *sigh* As luck would have it, my tax refund will be enough to fix this plus let me do something else. Yay for being a responsible adult?
• I’m taking a class this summer that requires I have Windows 7. I wish I would have just pulled the trigger on switching back to a Windows laptop when I was shopping for a computer in the summer, but I thought I would be able to hold out for a little longer.
• As if the new(ish) mac knows of my plan to buy a new computer, it has been acting up the past few days. I don’t know what’s up with it and it’s hard to explain other than general slowness, so there may be a trip to the genius bar in my future. This is just what one needs at the end of the semester, right? *sigh*
• I am crazy cupcake prep mode – our Relay for Life event is next weekend & I’ll be baking cupcakes to sell there again this year. This year I have an assistant in coworker Jennifer, whose house we’ll be doing most of the baking at.
• I survived the first storm of the Spring of 2013 – there was apparently an EF0 tornado only a few blocks away from me, but my little corner of the city was unharmed (save for a power outage that lasted just long enough for me to find & light a candle).
• And, finally, only a few more weeks of class this semester & then I get about 4 weeks off before I start the summer semester. My class in the summer is only 6 weeks, so after it’s over I get July & most of August without classes. Whee!
• Apparently today is officially “National Grilled Cheese Day”, so go out and enjoy a tasty cheesy sammy today.

In the Kitchen: Delicious Tomato-y Grilled Cheese

In an attempt to get all my recipes and cooking talk in one place, I’ll be periodically re-posting recipes from my time writing on the Kitchen Mirror here. In some cases I may update pictures & proof-read, but for the most part it will just be a re-posting of what I had there. The posts are not in chronological order – I’m trying to post holiday appropriate recipes near the holidays they go with & fill in others around them.

Originally posted April 23, 2009.

Did you know that April is National Grilled Cheese month?

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know until one of the StL locals twittered about it, then posted a link that inspired this sandwich.

Looks like a delicious mess of gooey cheese, right? It is, and I’m going to tell you how I did it.

I started with this recipe from Pithy & Cleaver for the Tomato Soup Grilled Cheese and made a few modifications based on preference and my inability to find Sun Dried Tomato Paste at my local grocery. Really, I was trying to make this a tiny bit healthier without losing the flavors that drew me to the recipe in the first place.

Ingredients:

For the creamy tomato soup spread
1 1/2 tablespoons lowfat cream cheese
2 tsp regular tomato paste
scant 1/2 teaspoon sugar
freshly ground pepper (or just regular black pepper if you happen to think you have a pepper grinder when, in fact, all you have is plain ol’ black pepper)
diced/minced garlic, or maybe a little garlic paste. Something garlicky.

For sandwiches
1 slice Asiago cheese
1 slice cheddar (medium, sharp, whatever – I used Sargento medium reduced fat)
2 slices light wheat bread (I use Healthy Life’s Flax Seed Bread – low in carbs, calories, and HFCS free!)
butter or margarine (I used Brummel & Brown)

Take all your ingredients for the tomato soup spread and mix them together. The original recipe said this was enough for 2 sandwiches, but I used most of it on my one sandwich. So I guess it depends on how tomatoey you want your sandwich.

Next, butter each piece of bread lightly on one side. On the other side, spread the tomato mixture. Heat up your griddle or skillet, but keep the heat around medium or low – I actually burned the first side of my sandwich. Put one piece of bread on the griddle butter side down, place 1 slice each cheese on the bread, then top with the other piece of bread. Let it cook for a few minutes – until the bottom is appropriately golden brown – then flip and cook another couple minutes.

Serve with…something. I didn’t get that far as my sandwich finished cooking before I could get a can of soup in the microwave. And then I inhaled the sandwich and followed it up with some pot roast & veggie leftovers from the fridge. WHATEVER. IT WAS DELICIOUS.

This is a recipe that it would be clearly easy to make several at a time, especially since the cheese slices come in packs of 10 around these parts. I probably could have eaten 3 more of them myself, but I didn’t.

Oh, and as for that “healthy” thing I was trying to do, it wasn’t too terrible – if you use the same bread I did (which runs 80 calories for 2 slices), you get a sandwich with 262 calories, 21g carbs, 14g fat, & 19g protein.

In the Kitchen: Flourless Chocolate Cupcake Bites

I spent some time watching my favorite puppies (nearly 12- and 10- year old puppies, that is) last week, during Passover. As Mindy had already cleaned the house for the holiday, I didn’t do a lot of cooking while I was there. However, before she headed out, we made plans for me to bake Passover-friendly cupcakes for Sarah’s 2nd birthday.

Stef at Cupcake Project has a great selection of Passover-friendly cupcake recipes and I jumped over to try to decide which ones to make this year. Mindy & I agreed on the Flourless Chocolate cupcakes. These were a stretch of my abilities because of the no flour, water bath, melt ALL THE CHOCOLATE required. I also needed (or so I thought) a double batch of them to serve at a work potluck that was on Tuesday.

I changed nothing about Stef’s recipe, other than I did try to bake a tray without the water bath & that did not work. So don’t do that. These cupcakes are basically chocolate, butter, and eggs.

I was lucky and got to break in Mindy’s brand new KitchenAid mixer and OH MY GOSH I NEED ONE NOW. It was the BEST. I was tempted to go buy one as soon as I got paid this month, but I’m going to try to be responsible and save up for it over a few months. But OH MY GOSH I WANT ONE RIGHT NOW. With the baking for Relay for Life coming up this month it would be great to have, but must be responsible and adult and not distracted by the shiny (Target has one in Flamingo Pink and that is the one I want. SO HARD.)

After the cupcakes came out of the oven & cooled, I tried one. These are decadent. Rich. And, I thought, too much to have a full sized cupcake of. So I decided to turn them into “cupcake bites” by cutting each cupcake into fourths, then adding the frosting. I put them in mini cupcake liners after they were cut up, then stored them in the refrigerator – they soften up quite a bit when out of the fridge, turning them to the consistency of a truffle filling.

When I decided to turn these into “bites”, the cutting of the cupcakes got a little messy, so I had to lock the puppies out of the kitchen. Bittersweet chocolate + dogs who hoover up anything on the floor = not a good combination.

I had a coworker tell me that these were the best thing she’s ever eaten. Rachel and Jamie both said these are in their top 5 favorites of my cupcakes. I thought I was going to get away with not having to make these again, but they might have to go in the rotation for very special occassions.