nicole bakes for braden cooks for nicole

insomniac baking: the 4am honey wheat loaf

for a recipe N made up, at 3:30am, when unable to sleep, without even putting in contacts, this bread turned out really awesomely and both loaves are already gone. Made monday night, baked tuesday evening. 

Insomniac Honey Wheat Bread

• 4 cups wheat flour
• 2 cups white flour
• 1/3 cup honey
• 2 2/3 cup water
• 1 packet yeast
• 1 tsp salt

Combine flours and salt in a large mixing bowl. In another bowl, combine 1/3 cup honey and 1 cup hot water to make a honey simple syrup. (You can just do this in a 2 cup measuring cup, it’s easier.) Add the packet of yeast to this honey simple syrup, stir, and let sit for five minutes, until you can see yeast has activated and is foaming (maybe bubbling a bit). 

Add this mixture to your flours. Add the remaining 1 and 1/3 cup water. Mix until incorporated, then knead five to ten minutes. At the end of this time, form dough into a ball.

Wash out and dry the mixing bowl. Add 4 tbsp vegetable oil to coat the sides of the bowl. Place dough in the bowl and turn so all sides are coated with oil, then set in the bottom of the bowl. 

Cover with a towel and allow to rise until around noon the next day (or until dough has doubled in size). Divide dough in half, roll into logs, then place into two loaf pans. Preheat oven to 400. 

After loaves have risen for an hour  (or until they’re as tall as you’d like), put in the oven and bake at 400 F for 45 minutes to an hour. 

Eat while still warm. 

Peach, Plum, Pear Pie

first, the song:

Joanna Newsom - Peach, Plum, Pear

then, the pie:

Peach, Plum, Pear Pie

a special recipe for people who love fruit, pies, and Joanna Newsom, by N. for anyone feeling blue and unwell.

(note: this is the first time N has ever used refrigerated, buy-at-the-grocery-store pie dough, and not made her own. IT IS SO MUCH FASTER. You don’t have to dread making pie dough anymore!)

Filling:

• 1 pear (I used bosc because it’s what they had)
• 1 peach
• 2 plums
• 4 tbsp sugar
• 2 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg

• 1 pie crust

Topping:

• 1/2 cup rolled oats 
• 2 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 tbsp melted butter

Preheat oven to 400. 

Slice pear, peach, and plums into very thin, long strips. Thinner the better. Put them in a bowl together and add sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir it all together and let it sit while you prep the crust and topping; that way the sugar will bring out the juices in the fruit. 

Mix the oats, brown sugar, and melted butter together (in the measuring cup is fine). These oats don’t really cook in boiling water, so use rolled oats—you can eat them without cooking them and it’s fine. These just get a little crunchy on top. 

Put pie crust dough into your pie dish. Set the peach, plum, pear sugar/spice filling into the pie dish, and cover the top with the oatmeal topping. 

Bake at 400 degrees fahrenheit for 10-15 minutes, until crust is brown and done. 

Eat this pie! Rejoice, because thanks to this pie, you no longer feel blue or unwell!

the thinly-sliced peach, plum, and pear

the adorable PI pan (get it ahhhh it’s so cute) with the peach/plum/pear

the finished pie. 

Purple Sweet Potato Pies

Purple is N’s favorite color and sweet potatoes are among her favorite foods. So of course when she saw purple sweet potatoes at Hong Kong Market she couldn’t resist, despite not knowing what to do with them. 

Luckily foodgawker (an amazing site to get on at work when you’re hungry…..or not) provided the answer in the form of this recipe from Jun Belen. 

These are the cooked product. They don’t change very much. 

Directions are simple: make a pie crust using your favorite recipe (N’s favorite, super fast pie crust recipe that doesn’t even require you to cube cold butter and mix with flour in a food processor! no one can taste the difference she swears!); make the Ube (purple sweet potatoes) into mashed sweet potatoes, adding milk, sugar, and butter just like regular potatoes; then combine!  N used a little tapioca flour, as well, to help the finished product be a little glossier and more pie-like. Obviously next time she should use more. 

Reactions to these were “what am I putting in my mouth and why is it this color”, but they really do taste just like little sweet potato pies. And making them in a muffin tin is so much cuter than making a big pie, you know it. 

N’s first chocolate layer cake

baking layer cake is hard, guys. it just takes A LOT. A lot of what, you ask? A lot of everything. Ingredients. Time. Effort. Pans. Washing. EATING. It takes a lot of eating too. 

N wanted to make this herself, but halfway through the taking-out-of-the-oven process got distracted with a friend who came over with a trunkful of free clothes she found some girl giving away on Craigslist, so of course had to go try on secondhand dresses and shirts in the streets, leaving B to take this out of the oven himself. It’s okay, we did the frosting together the next day. 

look at how tall this is. SO TALL. 

the frosting after it had set in the fridge overnight. 

the first piece. It did taste just as amazing as it looked: which was really amazing and almost overwhelming. Eating a whole piece by yourself was a chore. 

Chocoate-Chip Cookie Dough Cupcakes

These cupcakes are probably the one thing N is most proud of making all summer. They were that amazing.

The cupcakes themselves came from this recipe from allrecipes.com, while the frosting (which we made by hand! man creaming butter and sugar is not at all the same thing as melting butter then adding sugar! Who knew. It was a learning experience for N anyway) was from this recipe for cookie dough frosting.

First you bake vanilla cupcakes, then cut a cone out of the center and insert a ball of cookie dough (from a tube if you’re not fancy, and uncooked of course). Add the top back on and frost with the cookie dough frosting you just made. 

If you’re like N, of course you want to use all the extra cookie dough you have, so you make them into the world’s tiniest cookies and use them to decorate the cupcakes and plate. These are just like regular cookies only baked for a much shorter time. We wanna say ten minutes? And watch them carefully so they don’t burn, poor little things. 

peanut butter chocolate chip muffins

N impulse baked some peanut-butter chocolate chip muffins. Hey, when you have peanut butter and chocolate chips (as well as flour/sugar/baking powder/muffin tins), it’s hard not to. 

B also made….looks like scrambled eggs with a lot of veggies? We are not exactly sure right now but it looks really delicious. 

N used this recipe, and added chocolate chips. The dozen did not last long. 

Berger Cookies

everything about these cookies was pretty amazing. 

half chocolate, half cookie. The chocolate, melty though it looks, hardens to almost fudge, while the cookie part still stays soft and crumbly. 

B dipping the cookies into chocolate

the process

and the finished product, after the chocolate hardened overnight:

brunch by the pool + N’s basic bread recipe

A longstanding tradition of ours is brunch. (Dating back to our very first dates. Dawww.) Every weekend we’re together we cook Sunday brunch, even if it has to be squeezed before/after other obligations. 

The very first brunch ever (in March, after N/B’s collective birthday, on Lundi Gras morning) was German pancakes with honey and lime and iced tea (sugary sweet, of course). Unfortunately there are no pictures of this momentous initiatory brunch moment of our relationship history; the next best thing is this poolside brunch orchestrated by B in April:

according to N’s year-planner, this was officially brunch #3. 

N by the brunch and the pool.

B not holding still for the camera and wearing a silly Hawaiian shirt. 

This brunch included eggs over easy (two each), 3 links of sausage, a vegetable hash (consisting of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and…..other things, knowing B), some broccoli-cheese soup (recipe from Cooks’ Illustrated, B’s subscription), N’s basic bread, fresh strawberries, strawberry and apricot jam, coffee, and mimosas with orange juice and champagne. Probably the $6 kind you find at Winn-Dixie. 

close-up. It looks lovely. It tasted lovely, too. Tablecloth, decanter full of orange juice, and presentation all by B. 

And, since N cannot find a suitable online recipe, the recipe (from memory) that she uses for then “whenever-I-want-bread-the-next-day” kinda bread:

(picture from august 2010. Been making this bread for a year and a half now, and not disappointed us yet!)

Everyday Bread

(adapted from reading a bunch of online slow-rise recipes, none of which a quick google can reveal, so it’s not like she’s stealing an idea that belongs to anyone…)

• 6 c flour (usually 4c white and 2c wheat, if we have wheat)
• 3 c warm water
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 package (or 2 tbsp if you buy the jar like N) yeast

Activate yeast by adding to 1c warm water—very warm tap water is usually fine. Wait for it to start foaming so you know it’s active; if it takes a few minutes, feel free to add a tbsp or so of sugar to the water, give a good stir, and give it more time.  

(fun fact from N’s cell and molecular biology major: yeast, also known as saccharomyces cerevisiae, metabolize glucose and lactose, so you can prep yeast in sugar or milk! Sugar, however, will be much faster, as yeast only process lactose when there’s no glucose present. For details, go to a genetics class during the lac operon lecture.)

Mix the dry ingredients in a large bowl with a wooden spoon. Add the activated yeast/water mixture, as well as the remaining 2c warm water, and stir until incorporated. Dough will be clumpy and not very wet.  

Coat the top of the dough with a dusting of flour and cover the bowl in saran wrap. Allow to sit overnight (at least 6 hours, if you do it in the morning for bread a night). Dough should double in size.  (At this point, feel free to eat the raw dough off the spoon. N always does and it is always more delicious than you think it will be.) 

When you’re ready to bake, preheat oven to 450 F. Punch dough down and divide in half. If you want, you can roll into two balls and place onto a floured cookie sheet, or flour two loaf pans and drop balls into each. N’s done both successfully.

Bake for 35-35 minutes until top is browned and outside is crusty. Take it out and eat immediately, because for four ingredients this is some crazy good bread.