baking

You are currently browsing articles tagged baking.

Baking with Whole Grains

September 20, 2010 in Uncategorized by traveleatlove | 18 comments

Whole grains are becoming more and more widely used in home baking, and since I love whole grains and most of my (failed) baking attempts have involved whole what flour, I was excited that our King Arthur Flour experience included a class on baking with whole grains. Before I get down to the baking part of the post, and since it is Whole Grains Month, I am pleased to announce that the winner of The Oldways Table is Megan from the blog Stetted! Megan please email me with your contact info so I can send your prize.

Our second baking adventure at King Arthur was making multi-seed crackerbread. You can get the recipe here, and it is beyond easy. I am looking forward to homemade crackers and cheese!

Just as with the pizza dough, we watched Susan do a demo of making the cracker dough, then set out in pairs to make our own.

The recipe for multi-seed crackerbread is incredibly simple and versatile as it allows each baker to add her own seeds and herbs for completely personalized crackers

Alicia and Megan were partners for the day. Here they are hard at work making cracker dough.

Michelle flours the work table while Bridget makes the dough.

Daisy and I were partners for the crackerbread. We made a good team!

And here we have Katie and Jen. How happy does everyone look?!

Elina and Kerstin scraping their cracker dough out of the bowl

Once we had made our cracker dough, we went back up to the demo space so Susan could show us how to roll it out and add the toppings. We had so many fun options available to us, including fresh herbs from the King Arthur garden.

It is so funny to be with a group of bloggers. Someone is always taking a photo!

I loved making the crackers because, in addition to being so simple, they allow you to get creative with the variety of seeds, herbs, and flavorings. I want to make curry crackers and cinnamon crackers, and I think I actually have all of the ingredients at home!

After we watched the demo on how to finish our crackers, we chose our toppings and returned to our work spaces to cut and roll out the dough.

In a few short minutes, we had ready-to-bake crackers! And we got to see the big King Arthur oven. It is very deep and has multiple levels. The doors are small and open inward so that the heat of the oven is preserved. A long stretcher-like conveyor belt is used to quickly push in pans. It was so neat to see how they can bake so many things at once.

Once our crackers were in the oven, we had a little snack (fresh made bread and butter, yum!) and then moved on to our next whole grain baking task. . . brownies! You will want to see these photos and to use this recipe, just trust me on this one, and I will be posting it tomorrow.

I am playing around with photo layouts for big events like our day at King Arthur. I have lots of work to do on them still, but do you prefer big single photos to the table with photos and captions? Does a mix of both look weird? I am hoping to make some blog improvements over the next couple of months, and feedback is welcome!

Tags: baking, crackers, Food, King Arthur Flour, whole grains

I baked!

August 31, 2010 in Uncategorized by traveleatlove | 22 comments

When it comes to the kitchen, I am definitely a throw caution to the wind kind of girl. A little of this, a bit of that, give me a curry, sauce, or soup to make, and I delight in the creative possibilities.

Enter baking. For someone who grew up baking all sorts of cookies with my mother at home and who has fond memories of grating potatoes for potato rolls with my nana, I have somehow become terrified of baking. Maybe the fear comes from the few times I decided to forego an important ingredient like baking powder. Maybe it’s the time that I dreamt up my own recipe for almond butter shortbread, the results something only I would eat. I am not sure exactly where my growing fear of flour came from, but this past weekend I decided to face it.

With almost 3/4 of a container of buttermilk left from my chilled avocado soup, it came to me that I should bake buttermilk biscuits. I perused the internet for recipes, knowing that successful biscuits would depend on following a recipe all the way through, and I finally settled on a recipe from Tyler Florence. Of course, I had to change it up a little, and I used whole wheat flour instead of all purpose and butter instead of shortening.

While I was definitely nervous and careful to read every step of the recipe, I had fun mixing everything together with my hands, dropping little blobs of dough on to a cookie sheet, and smelling the delicious, buttery aromas as they emanated from the oven.

The final result? A little drier and less flaky than any biscuits I have ever had, which I think might be the result of the whole wheat flour. They certainly looked and tasted more like scones, but they tasted good.

Especially topped with Trader Joe’s lemon curd or honey and Kerrygold.

I look forward to baking again and hopefully to getting to a point where I am confident enough to bake for friends and family. This September I am attending a baking class at King Arthur Flour, and I am really excited to see what a professional has to share with us!

Are you a baker? If so, what is your favorite thing to make?

Tags: baking, biscuits, Food

Baking with Blue Diamond

October 20, 2009 in Uncategorized by traveleatlove | No comments

Can I first just say that my post on the Galway Spirit One Spa somehow made it to the Galway City Guide page?! Even if no one ever reads it, just having my post on a Galway page is enough to make me smile for the rest of the day! Its almost like ME being there 🙂 🙂 Soon enough! Now back to my regularly scheduled post. . . Sunday was a good reminder of why I do not bake. My “plan” was to spend part of this unseasonably cold, SNOWY, Sunday baking almond butter pumpkin cookies. Of course I completely forgot to pick up necessary ingredients such as baking powder and more eggs, so my cookies quickly turned into shortbread, and a very healthy shortbread at that. I started with a jar of Blue Diamond almond butter, this time the ready spread honey almond butter. If you like Barney Butter, you will definitely like this. Best eaten out of the jar 😉 it is also very good for baking.

I could not get a good picture without flash or with flash. 🙁 I started with an amazing chocolate chip shortbread recipe that I always make for parties and holidays, and I made quite a few changes.

My recipe: 1 cup whole wheat flour 1/2 cup canned pumpkin mixed with a dash of cinnamon and some freshly ground nutmeg 1/2 cup Blue Diamond honey ready spread almond butter 2 TSP organic maple syrup Preheat oven to 375 Mix all of the ingredients together until a ball of dough is formed. If you need to, sprinkle a tiny bit of water into the bowl, then using your hands shape into a ball, making sure to get all of the flour blended in. Place ball of dough on a cookie sheet or in a baking dish and roll or press out with your hands. Once the dough is on the cookie sheet/baking dish, place in the oven for 12-15 minutes. You want to make sure that the shortbread is cooked through so that it is dry and crunchy/crumbly. Once out of the oven, score the shortbread with a knife so that it is in the pieces that you want it to be in after it cools. This makes it MUCH easier to get apart once it is cool.

My shortbread was a little too crumbly. I would bake it for another 3-4 minutes next time. Other than that, I really liked it. There was no sugar or butter added, so this is not a sweet, buttery shortbread like I usually make. However, the tastes of the pumpkin, almond butter, and maple syrup give this a complex, nutty flavor that is perfect for breakfast, with tea or for a not to sweet dessert. I would definitely make this recipe again. It is a versatile, feel-good snack, the kind of baking that I can definitely get behind!