Tag Archives: breakfast

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Next Level Higbee Muffins

I went snowboarding one day last week with my friend Laura said she recently had to defend a delicious breakfast muffin against an accusation that it fell into the realm of the cupcake. I said, “Tell me more”. She said, “Well it really was just a white muffin. Then you dip it in butter and then cinnamon and sugar.” I was sold, and I knew just the muffin to make.

Many years ago, we decided to make Higbee Muffins for Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve made them on and off for Thanksgiving since then. But I always think, “Isn’t this just a frosting short of a cupcake?” That’s how I knew it would be the perfect muffin for this Fancy Breakfast Friday. I have one memory of making the famous Cleveland muffins in high school from a recipe in the paper, but no memories of that special trip to Higbees, where you got dressed up, went shopping, and ate the historic muffin. I used this recipe from Cleveland Magazine titled “Historic Eats” because it sounded legit. The weird thing to me is that the first time I made these, I swear the top was perfectly smooth. Ever since I have made only lumpy muffins. I did find one recipe that called for the butter to be creamed with the sugar instead of melted and I think that’s the difference. But which recipe is correct? If you had a famous Higbee Muffin, was it a little lumpy? For the purpose of this breakfast, lumpy was the way to go because of the added nooks and crannies.

I mixed the dry ingredients the night before. In the morning I added the eggs and melted butter and baked the muffins. They cooled a little before the boys got up. I had melted butter and cinnamon/sugar in pretty dishes and the boys got to dip their muffins in each. It was fun and different and delicious. I also halved the recipe so they wouldn’t go stale and/or be eaten to excess. I just dipped and coated the leftovers and we ate them the next morning.

Muffins were served with orange juice, a side of fruit and a bowl of yogurt. Thanks for the great idea Laura!!

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Mint Smoothie Fail

I thought I would go with some sort of 40 day Lenten breakfast theme until Easter and then do an amazing Easter Brunch spread, but I couldn’t find a way to make it fun and exciting and pretty and delicious. 40 days of porridge! Eggless breakfasts! Deprive yourself with oatmeal! I finally came to the conclusion that the way to be a breakfast eating blogger during Lent, would be to use items in my fridge that may otherwise go to waste.

We do Cook Smarts at our house, which is wonderful and amazing and something I should really blog about another time, but for the purposes of this post let’s just say I had a ton of leftover mint and a bit of leftover plain greek yogurt. I also had leftover orange marmalade from the Cook Smarts recipes for the week. I’ve been known to let the dregs of the fresh herbs wilt and turn brown before they hit the compost bin ad sometimes greek yogurt has been known to grow mold, despite my best intentions. I’ll probably finish the marmalade in a couple years, or move it to the retirement home with us when we finally get too old to maintain this ranch house ourselves.

Dave said that marmalade is best on toast so I didn’t bother coming up with a recipe for orange marmalade scones, which was my original plan. I thought this would be the week to perfect my bread by getting it to double in height compared to last week. The bread ended up the exact same height despite my best efforts so I officially give up on the recipe I have been using. (It was good though. Luke and I ate it with orange marmalade. Jack doesn’t like orange marmalade and Dave was too traumatized by the smoothie to try anything else, he had oatmeal.)

On to the smoothie. I was actually pretty excited about this recipe that I found on PopSugar. And as you can see, I totally nailed it. It was pretty, healthy, vitamin packed, you could taste the chocolate and the mint. I was excited to be sneaking veggies into the kids breakfast without them knowing, it basically was everything you want in a breakfast recipe. My only concern was that it wasn’t going to be sweet enough. (My other concern was that our 1000 year old blender wasn’t up to the task. It did an OK job. Running our blender before everyone is awake is a sure fire way to wake everyone in the house, and some of the neighbors too.) Luke had one sip and kind of shrugged his shoulders about it. So I took his smoothie back, dumped it back in the blender and added some sugar. He tried it again and said it was OK. I thought it was good. I’m actually really glad I tried it because I have always feared spinach smoothies, but it was delish. And I don’t think you could taste the spinach at all. Jack hated it. Luke tried to tell Jack it was full of kale and then said, “just kidding, it’s green from the mint.” That made me wonder if I should feel guilty about the spinach. Regardless, this recipe supposedly one serving and after Luke and I had our fill there was a lot left over so I tried to get Dave to drink it. He asked if there was anything gross in it like yogurt and I said no. That was a lie. If I ever had any regrets in life, its that I did not video tape Dave trying the smoothie. I could have made the perfect GIF expressing the following emotions seamlessly in a 5 second period: “This is good! This is OK. This is disgusting!” Or “Yum! Um? Yuck!”

I posted on Facebook that I needed someone to come by and drink the rest of the smoothie. I got one response from someone who said he would, but it was too far to drive. And one response from my neighbor, but by then it was too late. Now I know where to deliver unpopular smoothies though, for future reference.

Failures two weeks in a row… Time to do something amazing.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Eggs Rothko Fail

Here is a pretty picture I took during a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park. So much prettier than the Eggs Rothko, aka toad in the hole, aka one eyed Jack. It’s eggs in a piece of bread with melted cheese. The recipe is from Breakfast Recipes to Wake Up For. Or, as I like to call it, Breakfast, recipes for which you should wake up. It’s a little clunkier that way, but what can you do?

The problem was that I took a really simple recipe and tried to improve it or complicate it by making my own bread. And to do that I have to overcome two major obstacles – altitude and the fact that sometimes I don’t let the bread rise enough. Long story short, I had to make a small hole for the egg in my too short bread. It spilled over and was a giant mess. The end.

Ok here’s a picture.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Bread Pudding

I was inspired to make bread pudding for Fancy Breakfast Friday because my friend Laura has been sending me recipes from her beloved bed and breakfast cookbook. Dave was going to be out of town, and since he doesn’t like bread pudding, the timing seemed perfect. But then I started thinking of the homemade pop tarts, chocolate babka, a batch of delicious cookies from a cookbook I received for Christmas, madeleines from the same cookbook, and a batch of brownies, and I thought maybe I had used enough butter to last a lifetime. It was really time to switch to something more savory for breakfast.

Then I ended up at Cured and they had some gorgeous french bread that just screamed to me, “make me into bread pudding please. Oh la la.” It was meant to be.

I wanted to go with a basic recipe and I turned to the wisdom of dear old Betty Crocker. I used this recipe here. Where she calls for 6 slices of soft white bread, I used 8 ounces of french bread, plus two whole wheat hamburger buns that were lurking about in my pantry. I added the buns because the whole mixture seemed a little too wet.

I mixed everything the night before and put in the fridge and then cooked it in the morning.

I served the bread pudding with vanilla yogurt. It was good.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Chocolate Babka

If you read Food and Wine, or look at the cover in line at thegrocery store, this chocolate babka will look familiar. Or maybe it will look a little flatter than it should be. Regardless – find the recipe here. I suggest buying the magazine though because their website is a pain. I veered from the recipe in two places – where it said “let it rise for two hours until doubled in size” I instead let it rise for the amount of time it takes to put kids to bed and watch an episode of The Making of Murderer. That is about 90 minutes, and in that time it rose somewhere between “not at all” and 10%. But it was 10 pm and I wantedto bake it before I went to bed so into the oven it went. Hence the slightly rectangular shape instead of the beautiful squares you see on Food and Wine. I did the glaze in the morning and this is where I made another change. I was out of butter after the almost 3 sticks used in the dough and filling. (I accidentally ate just a salad for lunch a few weeks ago and I have been in a baking frenzy ever since.) So I thought, “ugh! Another stick and a half of butter and 12 ounces of chocolate!” So I used four ounces of cream and four ounces of chocolate (or maybe 6 and 6) for a ganache. I went to bed thinking the loaves were pretty enough without the glaze but in the morning I could see the glaze was necessary.

As I was waiting for kids to get up, I did a little research into the history of chocolate babka, because 100 % of my knowledge was from The Seinfeld episode where the bakery runs out of chocolate babka and Jerry and Elanie are forced to get a lesser babka: cinnamon. So I rewatched the clip and then looked up choclate babka on wikipedia (I didn’t say my research was very thorough or extension) and I learned it is an Eastern European (I kinda got that from the name) holiday celebration cake. So where did I get that it was appropriate for breakfast on a Friday? Fancy Breakfast Friday has officially gone off the rails.

Lucky for me, we had plans to stay with friends at their condo in the mountains, and you make yourself welcome with a chocolate babka. (I threw in quiche for good measure.) The babka was a hit, with Jack requesting it for his birthday, which as we know is the highest praise that can be given.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Bespoke hand glazed oven pastries* aka Homemade Pop Tarts

I was in line at the grocery store the other day and I saw a magazine with homemade pop tarts on the cover, and I knew what my next Fancy Breakfast Friday was going to be. Pop tarts were something my mom never ever ever bought when we were growing up. She did buy toaster strudel once, so I’m not sure what she had against pop tarts. If I had to guess, I would say that she thought pop tarts were gross, or possible too expensive. When I grew up, got a job, and became hungry and bored one time, I got pop tarts out of the vending machine. They were OK. For the calories, I would take a candy bar any day, so that was that. I’m pretty sure my kids have never had pop tarts either, because they are the kind of thing I would eat if they were in the house, and then feel like it wasn’t worth it. However, for some reason the homemaede pop tarts called to me. I decided just to make them, and not use a recipe, just totally wing it. I made a pie crust, and rolled it out thin and chilled it for an hour. (OK fine I used a pie crust recipe – this one here, I chose water, not milk for the liquid.) Then I cut out rectangles of approximately matching sizes, I wanted to make 12 so everyone could have 3… so I had to make them smaller and smaller as I went along. I brushed the bottom with an egg wash and added the filling. Strawberry jelly for the strawberry ones and brown sugar and cinnamon for the others. I put the tops on and used a fork to seal the edges. The tops were brushed with egg wash and then I baked them at 350 for 25-30 minutes. Once they were cool, I made a frosting of powdered sugar, a little milk, vanilla and brown sugar. Once I had frosted all the pop tarts with brown sugar filling, I added strawberry quick to the frosting for the strawberry pop tarts. It took about an hour for the frosting to set, so this was a “make it the night before” recipe. For breakfast I warmed them up in a 350 oven for 5 minutes. Served with bacon and eggs. They were described as “good” and “buttery and sweet.” Not the highest praise I have ever received, but they were fun to make!

* I was going to just go with homemade pop tarts for the title but Dr. Mark had better ideas when he saw the pic on Instagram. Now he wins a hand delivered fancy breakfast Friday pastry from this week. Offer valid for all readers who invite us to stay at their ski condo.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: A New Pancake Recipe

I bought the cookbook, Breakfast: Recipes to Wake Up For with some of my Christmas/Birthday Amazon money and the first thing I made was the pancake recipe. These pancakes rely more on eggs than bking soda/baking power – so they are a little thinner and a little eggier. It also has a ton more vanilla than most recipes I have used. If I had to put these on the spectrum between pancake and crepe, they’d be just 10% off the middle towards the pancake side. They were a hit. I might play around with substitutin some of the flour for whole wheat next time though. We’ll see.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: The Force Awakens Edition

We went to Steamboat Springs for New Years eve, and I knew that the motel continental breakfast wasn’t for everyone. I mean, the boys love a good toaster waffle, and I secretly love taking a break from making breakfast, but a continental breakfast can only take you so far. When you are headed up to snowboard for hours in sub-zero temps you need a little something extra. So I made banana bread to take with us. I mostly follow this Cooking Light recipe – sub full fat vanilla yogurt for lowfat yogurt, and since the yogurt is sweetened, I put in 75% of the sugar. It’s so good.

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Happy New Year!

I’m vacationing for New Years and I decided that I don’t want to leave my fancy camera in various parking lots at 10 or fewer degrees while I shred the mountain on my snowboard. (I use the term shred loosely.) So I don’t have access to the photos I took on Christmas morning of the fabulous breakfast that I made. (Reminder, #FBF is one week delayed.) Earlier in the week though, I did make this gingerbread dutch baby. It was pretty, but nothing to write a blog post about.

For Christmas morning, I made the same scones I make every year. I make the scones ahead of time and freeze them, then they go straight in the oven at 375 and cook until browned and perfect. So yummy. Click here for the recipe.

I also made a fritatta. On Christmas eve I microwaved some spinach (my recipe calls for “all the spinach that is about to go bad in your fridge.) I also sliced some onions and shredded some chedder cheese. In the morning, I sauteed the onions in olive oil, while I whisked about 6-8 eggs. I whisked in the cheese, spinach and some leftover choppped bacon. Once the skillet was heated up and the onions were softening, I poured the egg mixture in. i left the eggs on top of the stove until they no longer wiggled when I shook the pan, and the scones were done. Then I put them in the hot oven with the broiler on low. Presents were on the verge of being opened so I had to keep a close eye on everything. Scones, frittata, sausages, and bacon were served with milk, juice, coffee, and presents.

Happy New Year Everyone! Here’s to some delicious breakfasts in 2016!

Fancy Breakfast Friday: Gingerbread Waffles

Merry Christmas everybody! Fancy Breakfast Friday is always a week behind so while you are reading this I am probably preparing the ultimate Fancy Breakfast Friday Christmas Breakfast. (Spoiler alert: I try to take it easy on Christmas morning.) But as Christmas approached, I had to dig out the Martha Stewart Gingerbread Waffle recipe. Its not to late to eat these this year, but be sure they are on the menu for next year for sure.

MetaMegan

kids, bikes, books, food