Lily's Scones

Last weekend I took a mini trip to North Carolina. I think I may have mentioned that I have been accepted into a few schools, Appalachian State University being one. And because of the four –day weekend (we also got Tuesday because of a teacher in-service day – gotta love those in-service days) I decided it would be best to utilize my time wisely and visit an out of state college. It was nice, but I’m not ready to commit just yet.

Anywho. I feel like I haven’t baked in forever, so as soon as I got back from my trip, I did a little look through some of the blogs I follow to see what I could quickly whip together. That’s where these scones come into play.

I like scones. They are like biscuits, but somehow more… sophisticated shall I say? I saw these on Paris Pastry (an amazing blog filled with delicate-looking sweets and pastries) and I thought, aww, those are super cute. Yes, that’s how I base my decisions sometimes: their cuteness factor, haha.

These were real simply to whip together. Seriously, it probably took me less than 10 minutes from sifting the flour to kneading the dough, to punching out portions.

My scones aren’t as dainty as Danielle’s, but that’s because I decided to mix it up with some whole wheat flour (I can’t seem to finish off that bag no matter what!). Adding the whole wheat flour made it taste more like a biscuit, but that’s ok because they were pretty good. I polished off three in one sitting. I think next time though, I’m going to stick with the plain all-purpose flour, and maybe add some sugar on top to make it a little sweeter, a little daintier.

Lily’s Scones

Slightly adapted from Paris Pastry
Makes 6 (2 ½ inch) scones

Ingredients
1 cup + 2 tbsp unbleached all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
½ tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 ¼ tsp cream of tartar
3 tbsp cold, unsalted butter, cubed
½ cup + 2 tbsp cold milk
1 beaten egg (for egg wash)

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.
2. Sift the flours, salt, baking powder, and cream of tartar into a medium-sized bowl. Rub in the chilled butter until it resembles coarse crumbs. All the milk all at once, and mix gently, just until the dough becomes moist. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead the dough a few times until it becomes a ball.
3. Roll or pat the dough so that it becomes one inch thick. Using a 2 ½ inch biscuit cutter, stamp out 4 scones. Re-knead the dough and repeat until you get a total of 6 scones. When stamping out the scones, make sure you do not twist the biscuit cutter, just stamp it straight down. If you twist, the edges will seal and you will not the amazing rise you want.
4. Place scones very close to each other on the baking tray. Brush a little bit of the beaten egg on the tops. Place the scones in the oven for about 8-10 minutes or until the tops are slightly golden. These scones are best eaten right out of the oven. Also they taste great with a bit of butter, jam, and/or honey.  

Whole Wheat Baked Doughnuts

I am oh so very excited about today’s post!

You see, I got this new thing that has been sneaking into blogs slowly, but surely. I personally think it will take over cake pops, maybe even cupcakes.

Wanna know what this marvelous thing is? It’s the baked donut. No, it’s not a yeasted dough which you cut out and bake (which would be cool to do sometime), but these baked doughnuts are made in a donut pan. I’m in love with this pan. 

I haven’t had a traditional, deep-fried, glazed doughnut in about a year and a half. I don’t eat much (if any) fried foods. The last time I ate at a fast food restraint was last summer when my family and I were going to see a play in New York and we needed to get some grub, fast. I don’t remember it being particularly great. But before last summer, I hadn’t had fast food since the first semester of my sophomore year in high school; it’s now the second semester of my senior year. I just don’t like the weird bloaty feeling that it gives and because I haven’t had the stuff in so long, the smell kind of repulses me.

Boy, did I get off on a tangent. Here I am writing about gross fast food when I should be talking about these delicious donuts. By the way, have you noticed I’ve been switching the spelling from donut to doughnut? Yeah, that’s because I have no clue how to spell it and Good doesn’t help because pictures of doughnuts pop up for each spelling. Sigh. Oh well.

So these donuts are healthy, but just because they are healthy, don’t turn your nose up at them. Like I said before, these babies are baked in a special pan. (Don’t have that pan? Click here. Izy didn’t have a donut pan either and she made an awesome one out of tin foil.) Also, instead of using all-purpose flour, I used whole wheat flour because 1. I have about half a bag full of the stuff and I need to use it, and 2. I thought it would give a nice flavor and color to the doughnuts, and I was right!

The batter is so easy to whip together, seriously. The batter came together in about 5 minutes, tops! And it’s really not a messy recipe either. Don’t you hate it when you dirty up like all the bowls in your house? Yeah, this one dirties up like two and that’s counting the measuring cup.

The doughnuts have a sweet, yet hearty flavor, due to the whole wheat, and probably taste best within a few hours after they have been baked. After about 12-16 hours, they get a little sticky (the powdered sugar that I put on could have something to do with that), but they still tasted wonderful. I can’t wait to keep trying out different donut recipes because to me, these doughnuts rival their fried counterpart.

Whole Wheat Baked Doughnuts

Adapted from For the Love of Cooking
Makes 6 donuts

Ingredients
1 cup whole wheat flour
¼ cup + 2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
¼ cup buttermilk
2 tbsp milk
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tbsp unsalted butter, melted and cooled

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F. Coat the donut pan in nonstick spray and set aside.
2. In a medium bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder and salt. In another bowl (or a measuring cup) stir the buttermilk and milk (I used a combination because I was using buttermilk powder and I was too lazy to convert the powder to make two tbsp of buttermilk. You can use all buttermilk if you wish.), egg, vanilla and butter. Pour the liquid ingredients into the dry and mix until well combined.
3. Fill a piping bag (I just used a zip lock bag and cut a hole in the corner) with the batter. Fill each donut compartment about half full with the batter. Bake for 7-9 minutes or until the donut feels soft when poked. (My doughnuts did not spring back when they were poked, but they were nevertheless done.) Cool in the pan for about 2 minutes. Invert the doughnuts onto a cooling rack to cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar and serve.

Light Wheat Rolls

Happy Black Friday everyone! I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with tons of food, friends and everything else that is special about Turkey Day. Also, I hope you didn’t go Black Friday shopping. That is a scary sight and people get trampled and they fight over clothes and appliances. I don‘t think I ever will participate in the event, I‘m too young to die. But If you did go, I hope you got the flat screen TV you’ve been eyeing or whatever it was you wanted to get a good deal on.

So, on to bread. Every year I’m on roll duty for Thanksgiving. Something about making bread rolls is just fun. Last year I made these Honey Muffins as the carb component of the Thanksgiving meal, and they went so fast. This year I went with wheat rolls. On Thanksgiving Eve, I baked them, and then froze them so they would stay fresh for dinner. 

These rolls were very light (as their name describes) and fluffy. Everyone thought they were delicious and my mom even said there was a hint of sweetness to them. I kinda felt the same way, but it wasn't overpowering. I'm starting to think that whole wheat flour adds a touch of sweetness to breads, but maybe that's just me. I do love the color that whole wheat flour gives though, so I might be baking with more whole wheat, you never know.

Light Wheat Rolls
adapted from Katrina on AllRecipes

Ingredients
1 package active dry yeast
¾ cup + 2 tbsp warm water (110° F)
¼ cup sugar
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup + 2 tbsp whole wheat flour
1 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour
egg wash

Directions

1. In a bowl of an electric mixer, dissolve the year in the warm water. Let stand for about 10 minutes until it becomes creamy.
2. With the hook attachment, mix sugar, salt, melted butter, egg and whole wheat flour into the yeast mixture. Once that has come together, slowly pour in the all purpose flour, ½ cup at a time, until the dough starts to pull away from the bowl.
3. Pour dough out onto a well floured surface and knead until the dough becomes smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes. I had some trouble here and had to keep adding more flour, so if the 1 ½ cups is not enough, don’t be afraid to add more flour.
4. Lightly oil a large bowl and place the kneaded dough in the bowl, turn to coat. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and set the bowl in a warm place to let the dough rise until it’s doubled, about an hour. Punch the dough down and cover with the damp cloth. Let rise for another 30 minutes or until doubled in volume.
5. Grease 12 muffin cups. Punch down the dough one last time and divide the dough evenly into 12 portions. I found that weighting the dough was best and then divide it’s weight by 12 to get equal amounts of dough. Roll the dough pieces into 7x1 inch strips. Roll the dough up on the short length creating a spiral. Place the spiral dough into the muffin cups and let rise uncovered for about 40 minutes. Once risen, brush a little bit of egg wash (1 beaten egg + 1 tbsp water) on the top.
6. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bake for about 10-12 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve warm. 

Two-Tone Yeast Bread

Yeast smells so good they should make a candle sent out of it. I would buy it, wouldn’t you? Over the weekend I was reminded just how intoxicating that smell was. I haven’t made bread since… well this cinnamon swirl bread I made last year.

Last week (or was it longer? I haven’t added anything new to the blog in a while and I apologize.) I mentioned that my cookbooks and magazines were feeling neglected because all of the recipes I have been using come from the Internet. Let’s face it though, the Internet is a handy gadget. So, I made a promise to my hardback recipes that I would use them, and it’s amazing how many recipes I have tagged and never thought of again. I really should keep better track records of what I flag.

This little gem of a recipe comes from the Taste of Home Fall Baking 2011 edition magazine. I had forgotten how long it takes to make bread, at least when you’re still a novice, and thankfully I had the time change to help me for once. (I got up at 5am because of that stupid time change.)

This is a two-tone bread and I was kind of nervous and excited for this recipe. Nervous because this is only my second time working with yeast, but excited because I was baking bread, and homemade bread is one of the tastiest things ever! The only tricky part about making this was getting the second dough to catch up to the first dough. It calls for an hour rising time and by the time I was done with the second dough, the first one had almost doubled in size.

The end product was so tasty. It was soft and moist and kinda sweet with a hint of whole grain. Not to mention, there is molasses in this, and with various holidays coming up, I think it would make a great bread for Thanksgiving. You could probably bake it in a pretty loaf pan and tie it with a bow to give to someone as a holiday gift. Or, you know, you could keep it all to yourself and slather it with some butter or jam to have for breakfast or afternoon snack, your choice.

Two-Tone Yeast Bread
slightly adapted from Taste of Home Fall Baking
makes 2 loaves

Ingredients
1 package (¼ oz) active dry yeast
1 ½ cups warm milk (110-115° F)
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp sugar
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp butter, very soft
1 ½ tsp salt
3 ¼ - 4 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 package (¼ oz) active dry yeast
1 ½ cups warm milk (110-115° F)
3 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp sugar
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp butter, very soft
1 ½ tsp salt
2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2 ¼ cups whole wheat flour

Directions

1. In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm milk, then transfer into the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the soft butter, sugar, salt, and 2 cups of flour. Beat with the paddle attachment for 3 minutes. Add in more flour until the dough has become soft and just a tad sticky (I used about 3 ½-3 ¾ cups flour).
2. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 6 minutes or until dough has become smooth and elastic. Place dough in a large glass bowl greased with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm place to double in size, about an hour.
3. For the molasses dough, dissolve the yeast in the warm milk in another bowl. Once the yeast has dissolved, place in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the molasses, sugar, soft butter, salt and all purpose flour. Beat until smooth. Gently beat in enough of the whole wheat flour to form a soft and slightly sticky dough (I used about 1 ¾ cups of whole wheat flour).
4. Turn dough onto a slightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 3 minutes (for some reason, this one came together faster). Place in a large glass bowl greased with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside to double in size, about an hour and a half.
5. Punch each dough down and divide in half (so you have four balls of dough total). Roll one of the white portions out into a 12 in x 8 inch rectangle. Roll one of the molasses portions out into the same sized rectangle. Place one dough on top of the other, it doesn’t matter which. Roll up jelly-roll style and pinch seams and ends together so the inside dough doesn’t peak through.  
6. Place seam side down in an 8 in x 4 in loaf pan (Do this is you want a giant mound. I used an 8 in x 4 in and a 9 in x 5 in loaf pan and I think the second one fit better.). Repeat with the two remaining doughs. Loosely cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for another 30-45 minutes. 
7. Bake at 375°F for 30-40 minutes or until the tops are a golden brown and the bottom of the pan makes a hollow sound when tapped. Cool in the loaf pan for about 10 minutes before removing. Place on a wire rack to cool completely.