Tag Archives: breakfast

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Pan Dulce

Luke had pan dulce in his Spanish class as part of their Día de los Muertos celebration so he put in a Fancy Breakfast Friday request. I have never made pan dulce, nor did I know how to say it, so I went with the King Arthur Flour recipe. In retrospect, I should have considered a couple recipes, maybe one with a prettier topping, because these didn’t turn out like the pan dulce at la pastelería. (Or should I say la panadería? There’s been some debate here this morning.) There’s that point in the recipe where it says, “Just before baking, use a pan dulce cutter to press a pattern into the topping.” That’s when you give up on looks and hope that it tastes good.

I followed the recipe to step 9 the night before and then left them in the fridge over night. In the morning, they had until the oven was warmed up to rise on the counter and then they were cooked.

As I was prepping the dough the night before Luke asked what I was doing and I told him that I was making pan dulce with a “ch” sound and he got the sweetest smile on his face. I thought it meant, “Wow what a great and loving Mom I have.” But when he said, “Uh. It’s pronounced Pan Dulce” I realized it was a smile of “You dummy.” That’s OK, if anyone appreciates Fancy Breakfast Friday, it’s Luke.

Instead of halving the recipe and then making smaller portions, as I have been doing lately, I accidentally made the whole thing, and came up with 8 instead of 10. They were huge. Jack almost missed the bus because it took him so long to eat his.

I took a picture with the book I read last week too, The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan. It’s a little book about a good man. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character. I read about it in the New York Times Book Review where Tana French recommended it, and Tana French had been recommended to me by my Aunt Linda, so I knew I had to read it.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: My Go-To Pancakes

I’ve made these pancakes for Fancy Breakfast Friday before, but I never shared the recipe. The reason I made something as standard and boring as pancakes is that I have had an ongoing buttermilk situation. I know I have complained about King Soopers before but here I go again. They have goat, soy, almond, cow, banana, chocolate, coconut, cashew and probably more types of milk. But last time I looked for buttermilk they didn’t have any. The dairy guy said, “You know, you can just add a splash of lemon or vinegar…” And I said, “I KNOW! I’m the queen of making fake buttermilk. But when I plan ahead and I’m at the store, it’s because I want ACTUAL buttermilk.” But I said it very nicely.

This time I did find some, but all they had was a half gallon. Has anyone ever needed more than a pint of buttermilk? No. So I used buttermilk in the biscuits last week. I had halved that recipe, so that left me with half a gallon minus 1.5 cups. To use a bit more, I tripled this pancake recipe that I usually double. (The next day I made cornbread with some more of the buttermilk and I still need to use the rest assuming it hasn’t gone bad.)

Here is the basic recipe – this is for one small batch of pancakes – I always double it, sometimes triple it. This is adapted from Simply Colorado, which was a wedding shower gift. (It’s old.)

My Go To Pancake

1 cup buttermilk or yogurt. (The yogurt makes it very think. If I use yogurt I double the recipe and do half milk/half yogurt.)
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup whole wheat flour (when I tripe I do 2 cups whole wheat and 1 cup all purpose flour)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
optional blueberries

Add all dry ingredients to a bowl and mix with a fork.

Measure the milk in a measuring cup that is larger than the amount of milk you are using. Crack the egg into the measuring cup and stir well with a fork.

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir with the fork until just mixed. Allow to rest for a second while you heat the griddle.

I make these pancakes in a smiley face skillet. Using a ladle I fill each face with batter and put a spoon full of frozen blueberries on top. When the edges look cooked and bubbles are rising I flip the pancake onto another heated skillet. There is no way I could accurately flip the pancakes onto the faces in the skillet. So my smiley pancakes are one sided. This actually makes it go a lot faster since I have two skillets cooking pancakes at once.

My other pancake secret is that I keep them warm on a plate in the microwave. This is great in the summer when you want warm pancakes, but you don’t want the oven heating up the house. This is a trick I learned from Dave.

These pancakes were loved by all, and eaten all weekend, sometimes as a pancake and peanut butter sandwich. Sometimes toasted. Sometimes just at room temperature like a piece of delicious bread.

If you are looking for a trip down memory lane, please feel free to read this description of Luke’s first day of kindergarten. It came up when I was searching my blog for “pancake”.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Big Buttermilk Biscuits

This recipe is from Oprah magazine and I found the baked egg aspect intriguing. This was supposed to make 12 huge biscuits, so I decided to follow my brilliant plan from the bagels last week and half the recipe and then stretch it to 8. My old theory use to be, “As long as I am baking or cooking I might as well make 1000 of everything.” That explains why I would only make cookies once a year. Once, right after I had given away all my cookies someone asked me to make 2 dozen cookies for the teachers. I begrudgingly did it and I learned a valuable lesson. It’s a lot easier and less time consuming to make a smaller amount of something. Especially something that may not be the healthiest thing in the world to have around the house. Long story short (too late) I halved the recipe.

This recipe calls for a 3″ biscuit cutter, which I do not have because until this point in my life I have exclusively made drop biscuits. I used a large jar. And guess what? I ended up with 12 biscuits. The only thing I can figure out is that I rolled the dough to half the thickness I needed. Otherwise the math doesn’t work out.

I only made 4 biscuits with an egg in them because I thought they would be gross as leftovers. And to be honest, I wasn’t sure how they’d be fresh out of the oven either. The non-egg biscuits came out looking golden and gorgeous. I left the eggs in a little longer because they hadn’t really turned golden and the eggs looked very runny. Finally I tapped one of them to see just how runny they still were and my finger bounced right off. They felt like rubber. The boys found the egg inside the biscuit to be quite fascinating, and fun. They tasted good, the biscuit was very buttery and the egg had a kind of hard boiled quality to it.

Everybody got a biscuit with an egg baked in, some bacon, and half a burnt grapefruit. For the grapefruit, I put some sugar on top and caramelized the sugar with my creme brûlée torch. Fancy, I know. (This idea came from Centro, which used to have my favorite breakfast in town before they changed chefs.)

This was a fun breakfast. I would make it again if it was requested.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Bagels

I’d love to share this recipe, but it’s one of those recipes where I decided to half it and then only halved some of the ingredients and then tried to figure out why it was so dry or wet. I also didn’t have bread flour and so I subbed a combo of all purpose flour and vital wheat gluten. The last problem was that I don’t have a wide pan for boiling the bagels, so I could only do one at a time. Of course I did two at a time, which I think is why they became somewhat misshapen.

HOWEVER, misshapen and flat, they were delicious. Chewy, perfect on the outside and inside. Dave said they were perfect, Luke wanted to know if they were easy enough that I could make them all the time. Jack asked for oatmeal instead. Coincidentally, Jack is grounded.

Not only did I make homemade bagels but I then turned them into bagel supremes – with a fried egg, cheese and a slice of bacon. Stay tuned for round 2 where I figure out a repeatable recipe.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Pumpkin Donut Holes

I read many a pumpkin donut recipe last week before I realized that I have neither a pumpkin shaped baking pan, nor the ability to fry things. I don’t know why, but frying is not in my repertoire. Actually, I do know – its because I grew up during the “fat is bad” years and I have a tendency to burn myself. I leave the frying to Dave. I do have a cake pop maker though, so I started looking for pumpkin cake pops. I used this recipe from the cake pop maker website. They were even better the next day, which is something I love in a breakfast recipe.

The best part was that I made these at the same time as my famous pumpkin cake, which I was taking to the teachers for their conference meal. So I used all the same ingredients and managed to use a whole can of pumpkin since both recipes called for less than a can. Multi-tasking!

I served these with scrambled eggs. Everyone loved them, and I was happy because Luke likes to talk about how he doesn’t like pumpkin.

How do you like my new mug? I bought it as a present to myself after 1 year of Fancy Breakfast Fridays. I am still working on the year in review, but as Dave said, “there were enough duds that you don’t need to do 52 FBFs exactly a year later.”

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Apple Cake

Last Friday Dave was out of town, mountain biking in the snow in Crested Butte, and I was home alone with the boys, one of whom had fractured his ankle. It was right at the beginning of the injury where everything was very complicated and I was feeling guilty. So I figured, why not turn these 3 pounds of apples into a giant cake? Well here’s why:

It wasn’t pretty, but it was delicious. Maybe I layered the cake and the apples in the wrong order, or maybe peeling the apples does make a huge difference. But I wasn’t going to peel 50 apples, or however many apples are in 3 pounds. As I was slicing apples, I imagined my kids growing up and eating a pastry that had peeled apples in it and saying, “How sophisticated! My mom never peeled the apples in her pastries.” And then someone looking at them with a mixture of horror and pity. (I make pie with peeled apples, but Dave does it for me.)

No need to share this recipe, I’m never going to make it again. If I need a breakfast apple cake, it will definitely be this one.

After we ate the tall part of the cake, I was able to flip it over without it breaking (more) and make it look like a fancy half eaten cake, so that was nice!

And now our month of apple breakfasts has come to a close. I had planned to move on to a month of pumpkin breakfasts, but I am not quite ready. Pumpkin spice is in the air…

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Apple Cobbler

We had apple cobbler, bacon, yogurt, juice and coffee last week for Fancy Breakfast Friday. I again tried following ye’ olde daycare recipe for apple cobbler. The boys used to get this for snack on Friday afternoons at daycare and everyone loved it. But I don’t 100% trust the recipe for various reasons. I read a million apple cobbler recipes last week trying to put together a frankenstein version of apple cobbler. Jack said, “I love this, even the dusty stuff on top.” Dave said, “Good thing you got your fancy camera back, because good luck getting this to look good.” Then he later admitted that he ate his by mixing it into his daily oatmeal. We had one breakfast, one dessert and then the rest did get mixed into oatmeal because that was a good idea.

This really seems more like a crumble, even though the recipe I “adapted” for the top called it a “biscuit”.

One day I will perfect my apple cobbler and share the recipe.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Apple Cream Torte

It’s a good year for apples in Colorado, these are from my neighbor’s tree. As I write this, I have 8 apples baking in the oven for an apple cobbler and those are from a friend’s tree. I love to bake with apples from the neighborhood. Of course, I took this picture before I added the powdered sugar, but it got even prettier.

Dave asked if this had 7 eggs in it like last week and I said, “No! It doesn’t even have any fat. Just 3 eggs and oh, 3/4 cup of cream. Never mind.” And a cup of sugar. I might try to scale that back a bit when I make it again. This reminds me of the apple pie pancake, but without the two steps of cooking the apples on the stove and then the batter in the oven. The only problem is that I will have to plan ahead because I don’t normally have cream.

I went to the grocery for the cream and then tried to find the recipe online when I was there to make sure I wasn’t missing any other ingredients. I found that Food and Wine has an index with all the recipes for the month, which is very helpful. Unfortunately, this recipe was from Sunset so the Food and Wine index was actually more annoying than helpful. I was so sure it was from the recent issue! I may get too many magazines, but that will never change.

However I would change one part of this recipe. It says to add the apples at the end, and make sure they get mixed into the batter well. Then pour it into the pan and make sure the apple slices are all laying flat. Next time I would pour in some batter, add some apples, repeat, etc. Having to make sure the apples laid flat involved getting a lot of batter all over my hands.

I made this the night before and served with bacon, a bowl of yogurt and sliced peaches.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Raspberry Butter Cake

As I may have mentioned, my camera is broken so I have to get a job to pay for the repairs, thanks A LOT SONY! So I didn’t even bother with fancy photos for this raspberry butter cake. I went through a huge stack of magazines and tore out recipes and this was one that appealed to me. Raspberries, whole wheat… it sounded healthy. (Note, I did not read that butter was in the name of the recipe at first.) Then I saw almond flour and I recycled the magazine. I have enough going on in my life, I don’t need to buy almond flour. But then the very next day, my friend told me she had started making her own almond milk and had an almond flour by-product if I wanted any. Serendipity! I told her I would be happy to take her almond flour and I grabbed this recipe out of the recycling.

Time passed and it cooled off enough to run our oven. I grabbed a thingy (unit of measure) of raspberries and I planned to make this. Then I read the recipe again and I thought… “2 sticks of butter? That’s a lot.” and then I thought. “7 eggs? Well I guess if I am going to serve cake for breakfast, it should have 7 eggs in it.”

It was very good. (2 sticks of butter.) And moist. I know some people hate the word moist. That actually makes me use the word more, especially to describe cake, and especially when the cake is really moist. Like, 2 sticks of butter and 7 eggs moist. It was a little greasy.

I gave a tiny slice to my friend who gave me the almond flour. I should have given her more, but we were going camping that day, and I thought I needed 75% of a cake to get through the weekend. This was true, people get hungry camping and a moist cake on a desert camping trip will dry a lot of hangry tears.

I served the cake slices with a bowl of yogurt and a slice of bacon.

MetaMegan

kids, bikes, books, food