Individual Apple Bread Puddings

After the success of the waffle and chocolate-hazelnut ice cream, I decided to have fun and make another plated dessert at home. I had slightly stale sourdough bread and some lovely but somewhat bruised apples so I made bread pudding! I made each mini pudding in a well buttered ramekin so I could turn them out onto plates a bit like a baked Charlotte.

I topped the warm bread puddings with vanilla-yogurt cream, apple caramel sauce, and some crushed oat and walnut "nougatine". I put quotes around nougatine because typically it's made of slivered almonds coated in caramel; this is a granola-y version. This breakfast-y but still very dessert-y plated dessert was delicious and, perhaps, a bit whimsical (beiWng breakfast inspired and all that)!

Croissant Bread Pudding

I got tickets to Richard III with Martin Freeman! The problem is, the normal tickets are expensive. So I waited on line (with a friend, thank goodness) from an absurdly early hour for reduced price advance tickets. Long wait short, we got great seats for about 1/4 of the price! I mention this because it (plus the day trip we'd taken the day before...whoops, bad planning) is the reason that I have terrible photos of my croissant bread pudding.

French Toast with Maple Hazelnut Butter

Who doesn't like breakfast for dinner? Especially brioche french toast with sautéed pink lady apples and maple hazelnut butter. I'm not sure any more needs to be said. (Although I should note that I was lazy and used all natural jarred hazelnut butter and stirred in good quality maple syrup--rather than making the nut butter from scratch.)

Homemade Granola

Alices Tea Cup makes incredible homemade granola and the recipe is in their cookbook. I think there's something funky with the recipe as scaled down to home cook sizes, so I've tweaked it here and there and changed the baking method a bit. Overall though, it captures the spirit of their delicious, honey sweetened, oatty and nutty granola.

French Toast with Caramel Sauce

I forgot to post this last year. When our friends came round (and we baked cookies) the girls had a sleepover while the parents got some alone time. Alaina and Tegan are great kids and I wanted to surprise them by getting up early and making a special breakfast. Unfortunately they are morning people (at least Tegan is) so I couldn't really surprise them. But I still banned them from the kitchen, so at least the type of food was a surprise.

Healthy Breakfast

For something a little different, I thought I'd make something that wasn't sweet. Actually I cook a reasonable amount, I just don't usually think it's blog worthy. This, however, is definitely worthy of my blog.

My mom and I are trying to eat healthier. This means that breakfast has mainly been fat free yogurt with berries and granola or oatmeal made with water (I make a mean oatmeal, but it does get old). Occasionally an egg white omelette breaks the monotony. I decided to mix things up. And about an hour later (my time management isn't great when I'm cooking...) we had oven baked home fries, sautéed mushrooms, and scallion scrambled eggs.

Strawberry Pancakes~with recipe!

I had a pint of strawberries that got really smashed up on the walk home (oops). I salvaged about half the pint and macerated them with balsamic vinegar and sugar and served them on a toasted spelt croissant spread with some vanilla mascarpone. Yum! The other half the pint was good for nothing but purée. I am currently without an ice cream maker, so there was no point in saving it for sorbet. Berry sauce would have been nice, but no fun. So I figured something with the berry purée in the batter (kind of like the way you can use apple sauce instead of oil with boxed cake mixes). What to do? Pancakes!

They were perfect! They were fluffy and light. They tasted very much like normal pancakes with pieces of strawberry added in, but better, because every bite had strawberry in it and there were no pockets of uncooked batter (as there can be under chunks of fruit.) Best of all they are pale pink! Okay, that's probably not the best thing, but they really are pretty.

I'm so happy with how they came out I'm going to share my recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 3/4 cups AP flour
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• Pinch salt
• 2 large eggs
• 1 1/4 cups milk
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• Scant 1/2 pint strawberries, puréed (it will make about 1/2 cup purée)

Directions:

• In a large bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients
• In a second bowl, beat the eggs, milk, vanilla, and strawberry purée together.
• Whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients until it forms a thick batter.
• Let the batter sit for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, heat and butter a frying pan or griddle.
• Ladle out about a 1/4 cup of batter onto the pan, making 1 or 2 pancakes at a time.
• Cook for about 2 minutes, until the underside is golden brown and the bubbles break the surface of the pancakes.
• If you want to add more fruit or chocolate chips (I recommend chocolate chips!) drop them on the surface of the pancakes now, before you flip them.
• Flip and cook the flip side for about a minute, until golden.
• If you aren't serving right away, put the finished pancakes on a foil lined pan in a warm oven.
• Repeat, buttering the pan as needed.
• Serve with real maple syrup.
• Makes about 20 fluffy, pinkish, perfect pancakes!

Valentine's Day Pancakes

I didn't want to go out to a restaurant on Valentine's Day. My pops was out of town so my mom felt the same way. So we decided to do Valentine's Day dinner at home (after a lovely Valentine's Day lunch at my new favorite burger place). For fun we had breakfast dinner! I made sautéed pink lady apples (very much like my stove top baked apples but without the vanilla and a bit less sugar) and homemade chocolate pancakes. Pancakes are actually surprisingly easy to make from scratch and they really a better than when they're made from a mix. I decided to make them heart shaped. It wasn't terribly easy since I don't have a mold (I used to have a heart shaped pancake shaper/mold thing, but it disappeared a year or two ago.) Basically I just used a spoon to carefully drop/drizzle the batter in a heart shape. It was tedious and time consuming, but it wasn't too tough and it was worth it because they looked incredible! The cocoa-y pancakes and the sweet yet tart apples were delicious together with just a drizzle of pure maple syrup.

Pain Perdu

Our menu project is coming up. I'll explain the project in more detail later, but for now suffice it to say that we have to design a restaurant/bakery, write a menu with at least eight desserts, and prepare two dishes from the menu (chosen by the chefs). Since we have to be able to produce any two dishes we need to, at least in theory, be able to make everything on the menu before we hand it to the chef for him to "order" from. Yikes. I thought it would be a good idea to test out some of the desserts that I was putting on the menu. I knew I wanted a pain perdu--the French name for French toast--on the menu, so I figured I'd practice making it. There are a couple of recipes and techniques I like, so I combined a few to make my own and gave it a shot. Luckily I had slightly stale homemade brioche from fry day. For the menu, I plan on serving the pain perdu with summer fruits or berries but all I had at home was apples, so I sauteed them in butter until they just started to get soft, then added some vanilla sugar to the pan so they got nice and caramelized. I topped the pain perdu with the apples and some good quality, real maple syrup. Since this happened to be breakfast, rather than dessert, I served somewhat larger portions than I will do for the menu. It was great! If the chef orders this, I'll have to try it again with the correct fruit, blackberry sorbet, and a maple blackberry sauce. Ah well, the life of a culinary student can be hard but I suffer through it!