Cranberry Orange Coffee Cake

Am I the only person who goes crazy buying fresh cranberries when they're on sale at Christmas, only to have a freezer full of unused cranberries come February?

Please say I'm not.

Anyway, I had to make a coffee cake to bring to a church brunch the other day. I'm not really much of a cake person.

But I am a cranberry-orange person. And a streusel person.

I'm also a butter person; the 9x13 version of this recipe uses an entire pound of butter. Sorry, not sorry.

This is a fairly sweet coffee cake; you could probably cut the sugar in the cake by at least a half cup, since you still have the streusel. It's also very dense and heavy; surprisingly hefty and filling for a cake.

You can easily halve the recipe for an 8x8 cake if you want something a little more suitable for a family, but the 9x13 size works great if you're bringing it to a brunch, as I was.

Cranberry Orange Coffee Cake

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease a 9x13 inch pan and set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together 2 cups flour, 3 tsp. baking powder, 2 tsp. baking soda, and 1 tsp. salt.

In a different, small bowl, combine 2 cups sugar and the zest of 2 large oranges (or 4 tangerines/clementines). Rub the sugar and zest together with your fingers until fragrant; it will clump together a little bit as the sugar moistens from the zest.

Cream 2 sticks (1 cup) butter and the sugar mixture until fluffy, about three minutes.

Add in 4 large eggs, one at a time, beating each one into the mixture before adding the next. Beat until smooth.

Beat in 2 cups plain Greek yogurt and 2 tsp. vanilla extract. Beat until well combined.

Add the dry ingredients a little at a time, mixing until just combined.

Fold in 2 cups fresh cranberries.

For the streusel:

In a separate bowl, combine 1 1/2 cups flour, 1 1/2 cups packed brown sugar, and 1 tsp. cinnamon. Whisk together.

Cut 2 sticks (1 cup) butter into small pieces. Add the butter pieces to the flour/brown sugar mixture. Cut butter into the flour with a pastry cutter or your fingertips. You're looking for an even mixture of large crumbs--you know what streusel looks like.

Pour half of the coffee cake batter into the pan and top with half of the streusel. Spoon the remaining batter over the streusel, using a spatula to spread it gently across the pan. Top with the remaining streusel.

Bake until golden brown and it passes the toothpick test, about 45 minutes to an hour.

Pumpkin Spiced Oatmeal

Fall is finally here and with it, a plethora of pumpkin foods.

Seriously. Everybody has a pumpkin everything. The bakery where I get the office's Saturday morning bagels had pumpkin scones and pumpkin bars; the coffee shops all have pumpkin lattes, and restaurants serve pumpkin soups.

The DDH, who is not a huge pumpkin fan (he doesn't like sweet potatoes either, except as fries), rolls his eyes at this particular trend. But I like pumpkin (and sweet potatoes, for that matter), so it makes me happy.

For three-quarters of the year, I eat oatmeal for breakfast. It's fast, it's easy, it's tasty. I can change it up by adding different dried or frozen fruit. In the summer, it's too hot for oatmeal, and for most of this pregnancy I haven't been able to stomach it or similar warm foods. But my oatmeal appetite has returned with the cooler weather, and I've been happily noshing on strawberry-cherry oatmeal every day.

But then. Then I found a recipe for pumpkin spiced oatmeal.

My favorite fall food fad combined with my everyday, quick-and-easy breakfast?

The end.

This recipe is super easy to whip up, but, let's face it, waaaaay too complicated to make in the morning before work. Because scrambled eggs are too complicated to make in the morning before work. Sometimes coffee is too complicated to make in the morning before work. If it takes more effort than stirring water and ingredients in a bowl and popping it in the microwave, it's too complicated to make in the morning before work (which is why I tend not to eat breakfast in the summer when oatmeal isn't an option, oops).

BUT. This recipe reheats quite well. So I can make a big whopping batch of it on, say, a Thursday afternoon, and have breakfast for almost a week.

It's healthy and filling and fast--everything a breakfast should be. I'm in love.

Pumpkin Spice Oatmeal
Adapted from this recipe at Becky Bakes.

Make sure to read the notes at the end of the recipe regarding oat types and some tasty variations!

Set a medium saucepan on the stove on medium-low heat and gather up your ingredients. You may wish to measure your honey and pumpkin out in advance so you can add them quickly. Not that I speak from an experience wherein I almost burned my honey or anything.

To the hot, dry pan, add: 1/4 tsp. ground cloves, 1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg, 1/2 tsp. cinnamon, and 1/8 tsp. ginger.

Toast the spices for about two minutes, stirring occasionally so they don't burn. It seems silly to say "toast until fragrant" with these spices, because they're already fragrant. But you'll notice a point at which you suddenly say, "oh! that's what they mean by fragrant," because they'll suddenly smell even more like themselves than before.

Turn the heat down to low.

To the spices, add 1/4 cup honey

and 1 cup pumpkin puree.

You could probably do with as little as 1/8 cup of honey if you want less sweet oatmeal. See the Variations note below for some other options.

Stir the honey and pumpkin together until well combined and smooth.

 

Add 4 cups water to the puree mixture. (Note: If you use steel-cut oats, you may need 1/2 cup more water.)

 

Turn the heat up to medium high. Stir until combined and bring to a simmer.

 

Add 2 cups quick oats (1 1/2 cups steel-cut oats). See Oat Note, below.

 

 

Turn heat down to medium and simmer, stirring occasionally, twenty to thirty minutes or until tender.

 

After ten minutes, mine looked like this (remember I'm using quick oats):

Quick oats after ten minutes.

 After another ten minutes, they looked like this:

Quick oats after twenty minutes.

I declared them done at that point because I wanted them to still reheat well, but if you plan to eat it all right away, you may wish to let them go a little longer.

Either serve or remove from heat to a heat-safe container. Allow to cool before covering and refrigerating.

Pumpkin spice oatmeal.

 It reheated well the next morning:

Oatmeal reheated.

 And was delicious with a splash of cold milk:

Oatmeal with milk.

It of course lends itself to toppings: more cinnamon, fruit, nuts. I've been eating it with chopped almonds and it's delicious.

***



Oat Note:

Now. There are about a million and one types of oats out there. I usually buy the giant cardboard tube of "quick oats" because they cook quickly for my morning oatmeal but are a bit larger than "instant oats" for when I use them in recipes like this one. Sometimes I get rolled oats or steel-cut oats.

People will argue until they're blue in the face about what kind is better and how you REALLY ABSOLUTELY MUST use this one kind for one recipe or the other. But honestly? You can use any kind of oats in almost any recipe and you'll be fine. You may want to adjust the water : oats ratio of the recipe. You may need to adjust the cooking time. But don't let not having the Exact Perfect Right Kind of oats stop you from making a recipe that looks delicious. Try it with what you have on hand. Let me know if it's a total abject failure so I can delete this note. ;-)

 

***

Pumpkin spice oatmeal with almonds and milk.

Variations: 

• Sub any winter squash puree for pumpkin: butternut, acorn, etc. Also, sweet potato.
• Sub banana puree for the pumpkin. Add some chopped nuts for Banana Nut Oatmeal.
• Sub any liquid sweetener, such as agave or maple syrup, for the honey.
• Or sub unsweetened applesauce for the honey for a not-sweet but very autumny version.
• Use 1/8 cup honey and 1/8 cup molasses and up the ginger to 1 1/2 tsp. for Pumpkin Gingersnap Oatmeal. Bonus points for adding diced fresh ginger. This is my real new favorite.
• Play around with the spices, increasing or deleting them until you get it juuuuust right.

What variations can you think of?

 

I never bothered with any of the millions of baked oatmeal recipes on the internets, because heating up the oven seemed a lot of work for oatmeal. But I'm thinking a lot of those different flavor combinations could adapt well to this cooking method. Yum!

French Toast

A few weeks back, I made the most amazing, delicious, scrumptious, wonderful batch of impromptu French toast out of stale Panera bagels.

I went to eat a bagel, discovered it was rock-hard, and decided that, instead of throwing it away, I would try to make French toast.

I didn't have a recipe or a plan, just some eggs and milk and stale bagels and cinnamon and it turned out perfectly.

Fast forward to Saturday. I wanted French toast. We had some bread that wasn't quite stale, per say, but you never really know, in Tulsa, if bread will go stale or moldy, and we were unlikely to eat it before it went whichever way it decided to go.

Anyway. I had this stack of bread, which the DDH obligingly dried out a bit in the toaster, and I panicked. "I can't remember what I did for the bagels. Those turned out so well. I don't want to mess up this bread. I wish I had written down the bagel-process. I need a recipe!"

The DDH rolled his eyes. "You don't need a recipe to make French toast. It's just French toast."

"That's what you say now," I said, "but you won't be so certain if I ruin it all and you have nothing to eat."

The DDH decided not to argue and went back to doing...whatever it was he was doing in the other room.

I looked up a recipe for French toast and promptly did almost nothing it said to do. Because that's how I roll.

And it turned out just fine.

This recipe is for all of you who don't really need a recipe for French toast, but want one anyway. Feel free to ignore everything it says. It's hard to go too terribly wrong with eggy bread.

French Toast
Adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.

This recipe makes enough batter for eight slices of commercial sandwich bread, made moderately soggy. If you use more, thicker, or drier bread (or bagels!) you may need more batter; if you prefer less-soaked toast, you may use less.

BUT. Unless you are short on eggs, you should make more batter than you think you'll need, because everyone should at least once have the experience of eating leftover batter cooked into oddly-seasoned scrambled eggs. Your tastebuds won't know what to do with themselves.

Eight slices o' bread.

 Crack four eggs into a large bowl.



Eggs.

Use a whisk or fork to beat up the eggs, as you would for scrambled eggs.

Add two cups of milk:

Moojuice.

Whisk together until well combined.

See the yellow flecks suspended in the milk? That's what
happens if you add the milk before beating up the eggs.

Add approximately 1 tsp. vanilla and spices to taste. Cinnamon is a must-have. My personal Secret Ingredient is ginger. Other popular spices are nutmeg, cloves...any of those warm spices that belong in pumpkin pies. I don't recommend using all of those in one batch, though, unless you want pumpkin pie flavored French toast. Which, now there's an idea....

Add about 1 heaping tsp. of each to taste.

The usual suspects.

Whisk to combine.

Spicy batter.

 Add in a good shake or three of salt.

There are two schools of thought on French toast preparation: the Dipping School and the Soaking School. I belong to the latter. I want toast that's as much egg as bread. I want it crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside and completely its own delicious thing.

Other people like plain toast with a little egg glaze on it. De gustibus non est disputandum, as my dad always says.

Anyway, so if you're a Dipper, you want to heat your skillet, then dip your bread to your liking into the batter and toss it on the skillet right away.

If you're a Soaker (congratulations on your good taste), pile some bread in there and leave it to soak while you heat the skillet.

Soaking toast.

The only problem with this method is that the first few slices you soak might soak up all your batter, leaving the last couple slices dry and sad. Sometimes this is acceptable or even desirable, if, say, you have some weirdos in your house who like less eggy French toast. But for best results, only soak two to three pieces at a time, and don't leave them in too long. Admonish them to leave some batter for the other toastlets. Alternatively, split the batter between two bowls so you can soak all the bread at once.

Meanwhile, heat a scant tablespoon butter or oil (a neutral flavored oil like coconut or canola, not olive oil, unless you want some really weird-tasting toast) in a large skillet.

Oiled pan.

Put the battered bread in the hot skillet.

Cook for about two minutes on each side or until browned. You'll have to keep adjusting this time as your pan gets warmer, the same way you do when making pancakes. Luckily, you can keep flipping toast back and forth until it's nicely browned on both sides without making a bit mess.

Remember that this is egg soaked bread, so you do want the egg to cook all the way through.

Nicely browned.

This is what happens if you're not firm with your bread and you let it hog all the batter: it gets really mushy and floppy.

There's nothing wrong with that, technically. They will cook fine and actually be the most delicious of all the bread pieces.

 

Unfortunately, it means that the rest of the bread will not have much batter to soak in:

And will be drier and less flavorful than the rest of the batch.

Which, honestly, is nothing a little honey can't remedy.

See how it doesn't brown evenly because there's not as much
batter on the outside of the toasts.

 Regardless, in the end, you will have a glorious pile of eggy bread:

Eggy bread.

 

Serve plain or topped with butter, sugar, jam, maple syrup, and/or my favorite: honey.

French toast with Michigan cherry butter.



Homemade Biscuits

I make things more difficult than they really are.

I make bread (admittedly mostly in my breadmaker) and pizza dough and all kinds of things from scratch. I make cookies and cakes and brownies and pancakes not-from-mixes (and also from mixes, especially if the mix is Trader Joe's Truffle Fudge Brownie Mix).

But somehow I always thought biscuits were complicated. So we didn't eat them, except on the exceedingly rare occasion that I would buy the little refrigerated tubes o' biscuit.

YOU GUYS.

Biscuits are not complicated to make.  I don't know why I thought they were. If you skip the resting step (and have a magically fast preheating oven), you could have warm biscuits on the table in thirty minutes or less. And even given resting and preheating the oven, these take less than an hour.

Also, they're delicious.

With honey.

Biscuits and honey.

Homemade Biscuits
Adapted from The Simple Homemaker's Sleeping Baby Biscuits recipe. You should check out her cute post, especially if even this is sounds like too much work--she also has a recipe for Screaming Baby Biscuits (one-handed dump-and-mix process), which might show up here in a few months! ;-)

Mix in a nice big bowl 2 cups flour (I used white but will be experimenting with ratios of whole wheat), 3-4 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. salt, and 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar (for a fluffier biscuit; if you don't have cream of tartar, make sure to use 4 tsp. of baking powder. I used 4 tsp. baking powder AND the cream of tartar 'cause I like my biscuits fluffy. And because my cream of tartar is ancient and I have no idea if it actually still works anymore).

Ingredients.

Cut in 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter. Cutting means using a pastry cutter (pictured) or a couple of table knives in a rocking sort of motion. The end result will look like coarse crumbs, with tiny bits of cold butter coated in flour. You can also just soften the butter in the microwave and stir it in with your spatula, but that will make the biscuits less flaky. And a flaky biscuit is pretty much the ideal for me.

Cut your cold butter into smaller pieces and scatter them
in the bowl of flour+.

Pastry cutter. Rock it back and forth to simultaneously
chop and mix the butter into the flour mixture.

It resembles coarse crumbs when you're done, but still may
have larger chunks of butter and loose flour.

In a measuring cup (or a small bowl), mix 2/3 cup milk (or water) and 1 Tbs. honey.

Mixing in the measuring cup saves you a dish.

Pour liquid ingredients into dry ingredients, and mix until moistened and it holds together somewhat.

This time it was a little gloppy; with wheat flour it's often
a little dusty. Fine either way.

Around this time, depending on your oven, you should preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lightly flour your counter and dump the dough out onto it.

I flour a silpat just to help define my working area and
because who knows how sanitary my counters really are.

Pile o' dough.

Knead approximately twelve times. To knead, you gather your dough into a mound, then punch it in the middle, pushing half of it back away from you.

Mound o' dough.

 

Kneading is good stress relief.

Then pick up that back half, fold it back onto the rest of the dough, and repeat, changing the direction from which you fold the dough.

Pick up the back half and fold forward.

New mound o' dough.

Punch again, maybe toward one side.

Pick it up and fold again.

Flatten the dough and use a biscuit cutter or the top of a glass to cut out a dozen biscuits. Or eleven biscuits and one the-rest-of-the-dough-mashed-into-a-rough-biscuit-shape runt. It will depend on how thinly you flatten your dough and the diameter of your biscuit cutter/water glass.

No need for a rolling pin. Just stretch and mash it a bit.

Drinking glass biscuit cutter.

Place on a baking sheet (I advise a Silpat thing, if you have one) about two inches apart. TSH says you can stick them all close together in a pan for softer, pull-apart style biscuits. If you'd like, brush the tops with melted butter or milk.

Resting.

Let rest twenty minutes before baking, though they will be perfectly edible if you toss them in the oven right away.

Bake at 450 for 10-15 minutes or until slightly browned (or however you like your biscuits).



Lightly toasted. Whole wheat biscuits will be darker, and
these could have been left in a little longer with no problem.

Eat plain, buttered, with jam, with honey, topped with an egg and bacon...however you eat them, they're delicious!

I've been making them in the evening and eating them with honey or eggs for breakfast, and with honey for an afternoon snack or a dessert.

Nom nom nom.

What's something you thought was "too hard" to cook that turned out to be super easy?