I told myself I wasn’t going to give you yet another recipe for zucchini bread. Until I made this one. Filled with dried apricots and flavored with orange, it reminds me of my mother’s long lost banana bread recipe that I have been unable to replicate. When my daughter Abby came home and raved about this bread I knew I had to share it. It starts with my basic Olive Oil Zucchini Bread Recipe . Olive oil, maple syrup and brown sugar are beaten together in a bowl until they are mixed. Add eggs, vanilla and orange extract and beat it together until it is emulsified (it ...
Breads and Pastries
BLUEBERRIES! BLUEBERRY BUCKLE
Get ready for it. I am doing blueberries this month. While I am not a huge fan of raw blueberries there is something about a blueberry cooked into a pie, buckle, cobbler, crisp, muffin, Danish pastry, jam, sauce, or whatever I can cook it into, that I just love. I went to the market yesterday and they had baskets of blueberries. Not the overlarge, relatively tasteless blueberries that have regrettably become common lately. But real blueberries: small, sweet, delicious. And now I have two quarts of blueberries to use up! I am starting simple and classic: ...
LEMON RASPBERRY QUICK BREAD
Once I have successfully tried a new method I like to see if it works well in other dishes. In this case I am using the "reverse creaming method" to make a moist, and densely crumbed quickbread flavored with lemon and filled with raspberries! "Pop it in the oven!" "Toss it in the oven!" "Throw that in the oven and give it a quick bake!" Why are TV chefs so violent with their cooking? After I have spent good time carefully putting together a dish the last thing I am going to do is carelessly pop, toss, or throw it anywhere! What am I going to do is to think about how the ...
OLD BAY AND CHEDDAR BISCUITS: STAND BACK RED LOBSTER!
According to my daughter, these light and flyffy biscuits overloaded with cheese and richly flavored with Old Bay Spice Seasoning give the Biscuits from Red Lobster some serious competition! What do you think? When we moved to Singapore in 1999, my oldest daughter was 13. Over the course of the next 11 years I watched all three of my girls transistion from childhood through high school to young adults. There were many milestones and many traditions, one of the most memorable of which revolved around suitcases. Sometime in May, every year, we would board a plane home to the United States ...
PUMPKIN BISCUITS
It’s Fall! All hail pumpkin and pumpkin spice! It seems like every year the stores try to push us into the next season long before the present one is finished. Pumpkin products have been on the shelves of my local markets since August. In my quest to enjoy the products of each season when they are in season, I have studiously ignored this. Yesterday, however, was the first day of Autumn. With everything else that’s been going on it seems like the weather gods are giving Western North Carolina a bit of a break. This September has moved from the heat of summer to the cooler days and ...
BACK TO BASICS WITH QUICK BREAD: NECTARINE AND MANDARIN ORANGE BREAD
A Basic Quick Bread Recipe is used to make a sweet, moist bread featuring fresh nectarine puree and dried Mandarin oranges. People often comment on how unusual my life has been: the many places I have lived and how different that is from their lives. It is true I have lived and traveled all over the world. But what I noticed is, that while the setting was different, the things we were doing, wherever we were, were the same things our families were doing back home. Thus it was that I sat on a beachside terrace in Bali and listened to my brother-in-law explain chemical equations ...
JUMBLED UP FRUIT BREAD: PEACH, BLACKBERRY AND WATERMELON
I’ll admit it. I am a sucker for the fruits of summer. Don’t ever leave me alone in a Farmer’s Market or I will return with half bushels of peaches, tomatoes and plums, a dozen (or more) ears of corn and at least one large watermelon. Not to mention berries of all sorts. As if I don’t have enough in my own garden! There comes a time when it is necessary to use these wonderful products or watch them go bad. Sometimes it calls for a touch of ingenuity, sometimes it just needs luck. A go-to of mine has always been quick bread. Quick breads are made with baking powder or baking soda ...
WITH THE BEST OF INTENTIONS: OLIVE OIL, LEMON AND GINGER ZUCCHINI BREAD
I started this week with the best of intentions. I thought that everyone must certainly be tired of Quarantine Baking so I planned to write a blog about something meaty, maybe something on the grill, something far removed from bowls and ovens and flour. Then I went out the garden and found the zucchini had decided this was the time to begin. Even then, my intention was not to start with zucchini bread just yet. I thought I would collect a number of recipes and then do baker’s choice for you all. But that was before I tasted this zucchini bread. This zucchini bread is moist, super ...
AN ENGLISH CREAM TEA
When you think of tea and the English do you think of a large Manor House with immaculately groomed lawns, ladies in long dresses and hats and gentlemen standing behind them? The High Tea of Downton Abbey! I think of a roadside sign on a back road leading to a charming cottage with a few tables set out on a rose flanked patio. The sign simply reads “Cream Tea”. Cream Tea is a summer institution in the United Kingdom. Cream Teas can be found at the best restaurants and in small tea shops. They are available in cities and in the countryside. They are most common in Devonshire and ...
HIGH TEA: VICTORIA SANDWICH CAKE
It’s time for the finale of my Great British Baking Show Competition and I am knee deep in flour, butter, sugar and eggs. I have one day to prepare three different elements of a classic British High Tea: Victorian Sandwich Cake, French Tarte Au Citron and Scones. Up to now I have not worried about the time requirement of each challenge but since I know how to make each of these items already I thought it would be interesting to try making them in the same time allotted to the contestants: five hours. Pastry dough for the tarts is made and resting in the fridge and I turn next to ...
