Garlic Toast

One of the best parts of any Italian dish is the deliciously buttery, garlicky, toasty bread that usually comes with it. Actually, it might be THE best part. Excuse me, waiter? Just wrap my dinner to go...I’m still nomming on the bread! But who wants to wait to go to a restaurant just to enjoy some garlic bread? Granted, if it’s the super fancy kind with fresh cloves of garlic and house-made bread… However, you can easily make simple garlic toast at home, and given that this recipe only calls for 4 ingredients (3 if you don’t care much for parsley), you might already have everything you need!

Ingredients:

1 loaf French bread (or other bread of choice)

Butter (or margarine, or olive oil)

Garlic powder

Parsley flakes (I used dried parsley flakes, but freshly chopped parsley would be even better)

Heat oven to 350°F.

Slice the bread into 1 inch thick slices. Generously spread butter or margarine (or brush with oil, as pictured) on one side of the slices. Liberally season with garlic powder, and then dust with parsley flakes. Place non-seasoned side down on a baking pan (no need to grease the pan, but you can line with foil or parchment paper if you wish).

Bake 10-15 minutes, depending on your preferred level of crispiness. When cool enough to handle, serve with your main dish (if you can restrain yourself from sampling!).

If you happen to have leftovers, refrigerate them in an airtight container. You can reheat them in a microwave (~5-10 seconds), but reheating in an oven will result in crispier toast. Enjoy!

~Karla

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Rice Thepla (Flatbread) with Spinach

I’m not much of a rice eater, but I do cook it once in a while, especially when I have guests over for dinner. Not having much practice with cooking rice, I almost always overshoot the required quantity and end up with leftover rice. There are several things that cooked rice can be used in, such as spinach-brown rice gratin, and cheesy broccoli rice; and here’s another. This recipe converts the cooked rice into a bread! Thepla is a type of bread originating in India, in the western state of Gujarat. It is generally made with a mix of flours, often has some greens, and is seasoned with aromatic spices. The dough is rolled out and pan fried to form a thin, soft and crispy flatbread. Generally I use leftover rice and just enough flour to form the dough with the addition of leafy greens or any other vegetables that I might have in the refrigerator. Its a great way to use up cooked veggies too. Anything goes, as long as you can make a soft and firm dough out of it.

Ingredients (Makes 5 small theplas)

1 cup cooked rice

½-1 cup packed spinach leaves, chopped

1 clove of garlic, minced

1 tsp grated ginger

⅛ tsp turmeric powder

2 tsp coriander powder

¼ tsp garam masala (optional)

Salt to taste

Red chili powder to taste (optional)

2 Tbsp chickpea flour (chickpea flour helps crispiness, but can substitute with wheat, oat or rice flour)

~2 Tbsp wheat/oat flour

Oil

Mix in all the ingredients except for the flours, and knead to form a soft dough using a food processor or by hand. Add the chickpea flour and just enough wheat/oat flour to make a soft dough. Check and adjust seasoning before making the theplas.

Divide the dough and make 5 dough balls. Roll out each one using flour for dusting. The dough can be delicate, so don’t roll it out too thin. Mine were 2-3 mm thick.

Heat a couple drops of oil in a pan over medium heat. Transfer one of the rolled theplas to the pan, cover and cook until lightly browned on the bottom. Add another couple drops of oil on top (optional), and flip the thepla. Cook uncovered until the other side is golden brown as well. Crispy brown spots, slightly puffed up in places but soft to touch is the sign for a perfect thepla!

Remove from heat and serve hot with your favorite condiments - ketchup, chutney, raita, or just plain yogurt.

~Gayatri

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Something fun to make with leftover rice - Thepla! This version of the easy Indian bread is made with cooked rice and...

Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Saturday, October 24, 2015

Blueberry Banana Muffins

I often find myself in the position of trying to make use of super ripe bananas in creative ways, such as banana chips, oatmeal, or rolled up and baked in a pie crust with walnuts and brown sugar, kind of like an empanada. Most often, though, I make some sort of banana bread treat - banana split bars, banana bread, banana bread with walnuts, banana muffins (with or without nuts and/or chocolate chips), chocolatey-banana muffins...lots of banana-bread-type stuff, many of which use the same basic recipe. Recently I made blueberry banana muffins, which got some pretty great reviews! Here’s my tried-and-true banana bread recipe with a blueberry twist.

Ingredients: (about 2 dozen muffins, or 2 loaves)

Basic recipe:

2 cups whole wheat flour

⅛ tsp salt

2 tsp baking soda

1 cup butter/margarine (I used ¾ cup canola oil, ¼ cup applesauce)

2 cups sugar (I used half white and half loosely-packed brown sugar)

4 medium bananas, ripe

4 eggs, beaten (I used EggBeaters)

Optional add-ins:

~¾-1 cup blueberries (I used frozen - no need to defrost)

~¾-1 cup chopped walnuts

~¾-1 cup dark chocolate chips

Heat oven to 350F. In a small bowl, coarsely mash the bananas.

Sift flour, salt, and baking soda together in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together butter/margarine and sugar until smooth. Stir in bananas and eggs and mix until well-blended.

Pour wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix just until combined. Stir in your add-ins of choice (this time I only used blueberries for the add-in). 

Spoon the batter into a lined muffin pan, filling each cup about ⅔-¾ full. Bake 18-20 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

If you want to make bread loaves instead of muffins, divide batter into 2 greased 4"x8" loaf pans and bake 50-60 minutes, until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean. 

Let cool before serving.

~Karla


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Simple and versatile banana bread recipe in the form of delicious moist blueberry banana muffins!http://cooksofcakeandkindness.blogspot.com/2015/06/blueberry-banana-muffins.html

Posted by The Cooks of Cake and Kindness on Monday, June 29, 2015

Orange-glazed Cranberry Orange Bread

A Cooks of Cake and Kindness Culinary Experience Part III: To round out our 3-course dinner of Portabella mushroom caps and Spaghetti and No-Meat Balls, we finished off with a deliciously tangy citrus dessert - certainly a departure from our typical chocolate-based choices! Not only did we have our hungry dinner party to feed (who, by this time, had a high expectation for dessert!), but we also promised one of our coworkers some baked goods, so we ended up making 1.5x the original recipe, resulting in some of the odd ingredient quantities seen below.

 

Ingredients

2¼ cups all-purpose flour (we would typically do a partial substitution with whole wheat flour, but this was our first time making this bread so we didn't want to try anything too radical)

¾ tsp salt (more like just a pinch)

1.5 tsp baking powder

1.5 cups brown sugar

zest of 1-2 large oranges (we had clementines on hand, so we used the zest from 5 of them)

1⅛ cup buttermilk (if you don't have buttermilk on hand, you can make your own: 1 cup buttermilk = 1 cup milk + ~1 TBSP vinegar. Let it sit for a few minutes until the milk curdles)

¾ cup canola oil

3 large eggs, slightly beaten (we used egg-beaters)

1.5 TSBP orange juice

¾ tsp vanilla extract

1 cup fresh cranberries (we used dried cranberries, soaked in warm water for about 30 minutes)

4 mini-loaf pans or 2 4x8 loaf pans (we made one larger and 2 mini loaves)

For orange glaze: ½-1 cup powdered sugar + 1-2 TBSP buttermilk + 1 tsp orange zest (or more if you want more orange flavor)

 

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease loaf pans and set them aside.

In a large bowl, mix together flour, salt, and baking powder. In a separate small bowl, combine sugar and orange zest (rub them together with your fingers to better infuse the orange flavor), then add to the flour mixture.

In another bowl, mix buttermilk, oil, eggs, orange juice, and vanilla. Slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir until just combined. Drain the cranberries, then mix them into the batter. Pour batter into the prepared loaf pans, filling each pan until they are about ⅘ full.

Bake 30-40 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. The larger loaves will take about 5-10 minutes longer than the small loaves. Once the bread is done baking, remove from the oven and let cool for 15 minutes.

While the bread is cooling, mix together the glaze. In a small bowl, start with 1 TBSP buttermilk and ½ cup powdered sugar and about 1 tsp orange zest. Whisk together until the glaze is smooth. Adjust the quantity of sugar and buttermilk as needed.

Drizzle the glaze over the bread. We did this in 2 steps: for the first, we drizzled enough to cover the top of the loaf, then waited about 10 minutes for this first layer of glaze to set. For the next application, we drizzled the glaze in a zig-zag or scribble pattern and let it set.

When you're ready for a sweet but tangy citrus dessert, slice and serve!

~Karla

Orange-glazed Sweet Potato Bread (Or: You Can Never Have Too Many Desserts)

This past holiday season, my husband and I hosted a Christmas Day potluck at our house. Everyone brought all sorts of amazing food, from ChristmasTree Pastries to green bean casserole to corn pudding and more! My mom was in charge of candied sweet potatoes, and, since my parents were driving 5ish hours to come stay with us over the holidays, I figured she would make the dish once they got to our place. To my surprise, they showed up with coolers overflowing with pre-made food – including candied sweet potatoes! I then had a serious dilemma on my hands – what should I do with the extra sweet potatoes I had already bought? In true Cooks of Cake and Kindness fashion, I made another dessert!

This recipe was originally for cookies (see recipe here), but I soon got tired of waiting for each batch of cookies to bake (I had a lot of batter!). Solution: mini bread loaves!

Ingredients
2 cups well-mashed or pureed sweet potato (roughly 3 medium-sized sweet potatoes)
2.5 cups flour (I used about half all-purpose, half whole wheat)
2.5 tsp baking soda
2.5 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt (optional - I added only a dash)
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 cup unsalted butter or margarine (or substitute 1/4 cup applesauce + 3/4 cup canola oil)
1.5 cups packed brown sugar
2 large eggs
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp finely grated orange rind (optional - I did not add orange rind)
1 cup chopped pecans (optional - I did not add nuts)

Glaze: 1 cup confectioner's sugar + 2 TBSP orange juice (adjust amount of liquid for desired consistency)

Heat oven to 400°F. Grease a baking sheet.

Sift flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and nutmeg. In a separate bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Beat in the eggs, sweet potato, vanilla, and (optional) orange rind. Gradually mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients. (Optional: stir in pecans.)

To make cookies, drop the batter by heaping teaspoons onto a baking sheet, leaving about 2 inches between – they will spread! Bake 12-15 minutes or until lightly brown and firm. This amount of batter should make about 6 dozen cookies.

If you get tired of too many cookie batches, as I did after 2 rounds of making cookies, grease 6 mini-loaf pans. Divide batter evenly among the pans and bake about 20 minutes (you should be able to bake all the loaves together at the same time) until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out mostly clean. In all, I made 2 dozen cookies and 4 mini-loaves.

For the glaze, mix the confectioner’s sugar and orange juice to desired consistency (you may need to increase the amount of both depending on how many cookies/mini-loaves are made). Glaze is best when applied to cookies or loaves when they are still warm. Note: I didn’t actually have confectioner’s sugar, and I didn’t really want to break out the food processor just for this step, so I used regular granulated sugar in the glaze. It wasn’t as smooth as it would have been, but it turned out okay and still tasted delicious!

~Karla

Strawberry-Rhubarb Bread

This one is a completely experimental recipe, but I got some good feedback from the folks who I tried this experiment on ;-)... so I figured I could post this! It’s a roasted rhubarb and strawberry bread, but any other fruit would also work, as long as it doesn’t release a lot of juice while baking. The reason I roasted the rhubarb with some sugar was to reduce the tartness, but this is optional. If you like the tart flavor of rhubarb, this step can be skipped. I plan to try using mango in this recipe while the stores still have good mangoes, and will update this post with the outcome of that… hopefully it will be just as delicious!

 

Ingredients:

1/2 cup unsalted butter / margarine

1 cup + ½ tbsp brown sugar

2 cups flour (I used 1 cup all purpose flour and 1 cup whole wheat flour)

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup buttermilk

1 tsp pure vanilla extract

1 egg

2 cups chopped fruit (rhubarb and/or strawberries)

¼ tsp ground nutmeg (optional)

¼ tsp ground cinnamon (optional)

Mix ½ tbsp. sugar with the chopped rhubarb, and broil for a ~3-4 min. This can also be done in a pan on the stovetop.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-by-13-inch baking dish or two loaf pans (I used three mini loaf pans and another small baking dish). Whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt.

Beat butter with ¾ cup sugar until light and fluffy. Add egg and beat. Fold in the flour mixture and buttermilk alternately. Add vanilla and mix. Stir in fruit.

Add batter to prepared pan. Mix nutmeg and cinnamon to ¼ cup brown sugar and sprinkle on top of the batter. Bake for ~35 min or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

~Gayatri