Category Archives: food

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Chocolate Chip Brioche Pretzels

 

 This week I made a cake and I didn’t even take a picture of it.  Unheard of, and so unsatisfying.  The cake was for the teachers for their parent-provided dinner during conferences.  So I didn’t get to eat it, and I wasn’t even there when people were eating it, and, I assume, raving about how good it was.  If only I had a picture, I could have at least gotten a like on instagram.  I’m sure there is a Zen Koan in there somewhere.  If a cake is eaten in a teachers lounge, am I a martyr for suffering through the lack of praise?   That reminds me of when I used to not know if the Pope was Catholic or not, because sometimes when I asked a question the answer was, “Is the Pope Catholic?”  And I would think, “Maybe?  I have no idea.”  I wasn’t one for follow up questions.

Because of the cake situation this week, I planned a coffee cake themed Fancy Breakfast Friday.  But when the Smitten Kitchen cookbook fell open to Chocolate Chip Brioche Pretzels I knew it was meant to be.  Luke has been wanting to make soft pretzels all week, but we haven’t had time to squeeze it in.  These pretzels really got me thinking about how people handle their breakfast pastries.  Do people get up at 4:00 am?  Or eat breakfast at noon?  This recipe said you could do the first half the night before and leave the dough to rise in the fridge over night.  In the morning, you just had to let the dough come to room temperature and then you could do the rest of the steps.  But how long does it take dough to come to room temperature?   I was wondering to myself if I was going to set an alarm for 5:00 am, take the dough out, sleep for an hour and then make the pretzels.  I asked Dave for his advice as I tend to over complicate things. He suggested just leaving it on the counter before I went to bed.  I basically can’t even feel my feet right now, due to the temp in our house, so I agreed that was a good idea.  I suppose I could have also taken the dough out of the cold mixing bowl and put in in the oven with the light on to warm up a bit.  But I want to know – how do people do it?  I decided to draw the line at 6:00 am starts for Fancy Breakfast Friday.  I served the pretzels with bacon and made to order eggs.

I have made some delicious things from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook, and the pretzels were a hit as well.  I’m more of a sugar/chocolate person than a butter person when it comes to indulging, so I was glad for the chocolate chips.  These were a hit with everybody though.  The only problem was that the recipe called for 12 minutes at 350 degrees.  I cooked them for 12 minutes and then added three minutes at a time… again and again.  So it took about 24 minutes – double the recipe time.  I assume this is problem with my oven.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Oven Pancake Take Two


After  last week’s Famous Fancy Breakfast Friday Flop, I decided to redo the recipe at home in my own kitchen.  Last week, I blamed the cracker of a pancake on maybe too much flour, or maybe not having the right pan, or maybe not having any measuring spoons or cups. I am sure that the pan had something to do with it, because I dont see how a pancake could have risen like the one above in a 13×9 pan like the one I used last week.

HOWEVER, by redoing the exact recipe, I was able to find my fatal flaw.  When I added the milk to the pancake shown above, I realized that I had no memory of adding milk the first time.  The milk may have made a big difference in the pancake consistency.  The other difference was that I whisked at my parents house, and at home I used the blender for a couple quick seconds to combine everthing.  This ended up being a lot like my recipe for apple pie pancakes, with the only difference being that I usually saute the apples in the cast iron skillet and then pour the pancake batter over the apples and bake the pancake.  It doesn’t rise like in the picture above, but it does puff up, and it is delicious.

I served this with apples chunks that I sauteed in butter, cinnamon and a little brown sugar.  I sliced the pancake into 4 and the boys and I ate it with apples and vanilla yogurt.   I asked Dave how he ate his and he said, “I assumed you ate all the caramel sauce, so I was forced to used maple syrup.”  I said, “Caramel sauce? I guess the apples were a little carmalized, but no, we had it with yogurt.”  He said, “Yogurt. Blech.”

Jack said it was “so good” and “can I have this on my birthday?”  which is basically the highest praise to which a meal can aspire. Birthday Worthy.

Fancy Breakfast Friday

Last week I was visitng my parents and I decided to treat them to a very special FBF.  When I am at my home, I set my alarm extra early to get FBF on the table for my babies.  When I am the baby at my parents house, I sleep in so late that they have already left the house for church and the gym, so I planned to have a fancy second breakfast ready for when they got home.

I set out to make what I call “apple pie pancake” because for some reason my mom had 1,000 apples in the fridge and on the counter.  I didn’t have my recipe book with me, so I used this recipe from Betty Crocker.  Click the link and then compare the picture to mine so you can see how I #nailedit.  I call this new creation “Apples on a Cracker.”

The thing about cooking in someone else’s kitchen when they aren’t home is that sometimes you can’t find what you are looking for.  The things I couldn’t find include measuring cups, measuring spoons, a spatula, and an oven proof skillet.  Minor details.   I think my estimates were off.


But I guess if I was going to have a big Fancy Breakfast Friday Failure, I am lucky that it still tasted good, and my mom will forgive me.

Fancy Breakfast Friday


I clearly need to work on my food photography because this is not pretty.  Part of the problem could be the black counters combined with my total lack of photography skill mixed with the fact that I maybe used a smidge too much cornstarch with the peaches.  But as they say, presentation is everything and I am not selling this one very well.

FANCY BREAKFAST FRIDAY!! This was a peach crisp that I whipped up when I realized it was Thursday and that I had no plan.  I’m on a kick to clean out the freezer, so this are local organic peaches… but from when?  (Christmas request – a label maker.)  Luckliy I had these peaches in the freezer, I assume it was a bag of 6 frozen peaches in a little sugar water, because I always freeze my peaches in groups of 6 as called for in my delcious peach cobbler recipe. Instead of the cobbler topping this time, I went with the recipe from the Homestar cookbook to make it more breakfasty.  I think I could probably share that recipe if I had it in front of me, but I don’t.  It’s very healthy.  So I took the part that called for honey and substituted brown sugar, and where it said olive oil, I used butter.  I served this warm from the oven with a vanilla yogurt topping.  I think it was a hit, but no one ever asked for more the next day.  I’m not sure if this is “out of sight out of mind” like with the beet cake or if this was “thanks but no thanks” like with the beet cake.

Fancy Breakfast Friday

 Wow! This week went by so fast and I am not sure what I have to show for it!  But I did go all out for #FBF last week – at Jack’s request we had breakfast burritos.  I made bacon and fried some potatoes (cheated with the store bought and I’m not sure it was a time saver). I also had red and green peppers, pickled onions, and refried beans, and scrambled eggs.  I got the tortillas at Costco that are uncooked and you cook them as you need them.  They are so so delicious and I have been eating a lot of quesadillas for lunch lately.

Once the boys were up they told me what they wanted in their burrito and I cooked their tortilla and assembled it to order.  So good.

Then Monday we had a little “last breakfast” for Luke because he got a new orthodontia thingy that makes it hard to eat.  I mixed everything (eggs, sausage this time, cheese, red and green peppers, and potatoes) together and pre made the burritos so they were ready when the boys got up – Monday’s are not leasurely.  Consequently Jack didn’t want his, which was fine with Dave and I because we both secretly planned to eat it later.  I tried to make Luke eat two burritos Monday before he had to subsist on smoothies, applesauce and pudding.  He only managed 1.5, but I had him finish the other half on the way into his appointment.

Let The Beet Drop

  I wanted my beet cake story to have a better ending so I have been procrastinating writing about it.  But the truth shall set you free, or so they say.  I bought a bunch of beets at the farmers market a couple weeks ago and I roasted them on the grill until they were soft.  I peeled them and they were ready for salads.  My favorite way to eat beets is to serve them roasted and sliced over spinach with balsamic vinegarette, pine nuts and goat cheese.  But this was a rather hefty bunch of beets there are only so many salads that Dave and i can eat during the shelf life of a bunch of roasted beets.  (Jack famously tossed a beet over the fence once -al fresco – to avoid eating it and I got the messsage.)

I had also been wanting to try a red velvet style cake that was light on the red dye number 7 and heavy on the beet juice, but alas, I ended up with quite a few golden beets in my bunch and it wasn’t meant to be.  So I went with Martha Stewart’s chocolate beet cake.  Now aside from one lemon spatchcocked chicken, Martha has never steered  me wrong.  But I got a tiny bit suspicious when I read the ingredient list and saw “salt”.  Not 1 teas. salt, or a pinch or a dash, just salt.  That looks like a proofreading error to me, and if no one proof read this, and there are no comments, then what in Gods name was I getting myself into?  A chocolate beet cake, that’s what.  I saw that within the recipe, it did mention how much salt to use, but I forgot the salt until a later point in the recipe regardless.  I worried a bit, because the thing about a cake is that it’s hard to taste the end result until it’s too late.  Dinner is over and everyone is staring at you.

So I bucked up, put on my maxi dress and high heels, put the cake in the cake carrier and walked a mile or wahtever to the party.  To my delight this ended up being one of those parties where the host says “bring an appetizer, a side or dessert” and everyone brings dessert.  It calls to mind a certain sesame street skit.  But no one complains too much when everyone brings dessert, especially not the person who brought the beet cake.

Long story short, I brought home only half a beet cake, which wasn’t bad considering it was competing with strawberry short cake, two pies, and other goodies.  The cake was pretty, and moist and sweet and chocolately, and it had a slight beet taste, or maybe a beet aftertaste.  Some of the kids liked it, some of the adults liked it.  At home, the beet cake was more appealing because it wasn’t competing with anything else.  The boys had a slice and liked it.  So when we had chicken tagine for dinner and everyone ate their chicken and no one wanted their chick peas or sweet potatos, Dave held out the beet cake like a delicious carrot.  But the siren song of the beet cake wasn’t quite enough to entice anyone to eat their veggies, so it was like a double insult.  No one wanted dinner and the dessert wasn’t worth the suffering.

Next thing I knew, I was throwing away the remains of a moldy beet cake.  Never before in my life has a cake gotten moldy.  I will admit to having a sliver of cake with my coffee for breakfast occasionally, but I did not do that with the beet cake.  The icing was perfect, and it did help overcome the beet aftertaste, but only once you were already eating it.  The thought of the beet aftertaste before you took a bite was a little harder to overcome apparently.  Or maybe the problem was that the cake was on the counter in my newer cake carrier, as opposed to the see through one I often use.  Out of side, out of mind. No one was beeting down the door for more cake.

Fancy Breakfast Friday

Last weeks FBF was a bit rushed because I had to hurry the kids out the door to school, drop off the dog, and head to the airport for a getaway weekend with the hubby.  We went to a dear friend’s wedding party in NYC.  We’ve never left the kids or been to NYC so I was a little stressed.  I prepared by doing nothing and planning to wing it.  It worked out!

Fancy Breakfast Friday consisted of yogurt parfaits – blueberry/yogurt/homemade granola repeat with bananas then strawberries.  I am working on perfecting my granola recipe so I will share that at a later date.  It’s weird to me that the markup on store bought granola is 700,000% so I should do a cost analysis along with my recipe to see if I am missing something.   Our favorite yogurt is brown cow vanilla cream top.

Fancy Breakfast Friday

Simply Colorado is a cookbook I received at my wedding shower, 18 years ago.  It appears to be available on amazon for $0.01 at this time, which is a steal.  My go-to pancake recipe is from this book, and I love it because it uses 100% whole wheat, but the pancakes are still very light and fluffy.  It calls for blueberries, which  I usually have in the freezer, and buttermilk, which I rarely have on hand.  When I do have buttermilk, I make these pancakes and they are amazing.  When I don’t have buttermilk, I add a splash of white vinegar to regular milk and let it sit for a minute.

Fancy Breakfast Friday 

Fancy Breakfast Friday is going strong 3 weeks in.  Last week’s breakfast was blueberry buckle with vanilla crumb with a side of breakfast sausage and an egg made to order.  I had to go overboard on the protein since I was basically serving cake for breakfast.  The recipe is from this cookbook:  Rustic Fruit Desserts.  I’ve also made the strawberry shortcake from that cookbook and it is amazing.  I had mixed results with the plum cake.

This recipe is actually for a cranberry buckle, and the reason I initially made it was to use up cranberries during the holidays, but the cranberries were just way way too tart.  Blueberries make this perfect.  It also calls fora 9×9 pan, which I don’t have.  So I did a lot of calculations lxwxh, a=piR2 etc to convert 9×9 to either 8×8 or 10″ round or 9″ round.  I think I determined the 10 inch round pan was the way to go last time, but this time, I used the 9″ round because I seem to have short term memory loss. It turned out perfect and delicious, but I had to cook it for a year and a half, checking every 5 minutes to see if it was done.

Fancy Breakfast Friday

We are starting a new little thing around here called “Fancy Breakfast Friday”  There is a little song that I like to sing when I think about Fancy Breakfast Friday and it goes like this:

Fancy Breakfast FRIDAY!
Fancy Breakfast FRIDAY!

Luke said we needed a Fancy Breakfast Friday playlist, so I’m not sure how well the song is working for everyone.

We had waffles and strawberries last week, from a fave cookbook – The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham.  I made the raised waffle – it contains yeast, and you mix most of it the night before and leave on the counter to rise.  Just add eggs and baking sode in the morning. I even subbed in some whole wheat flour and no one noticed.  SO good.

I wanted to see if this new tradition would “take” before I blogged about it.  So we’ll be a week behind here.  But I have big plans for FBF.