Peach Crisp

Peach Crisp is a tasty alternative to apple crisp, and a favorite in our household in the summer or winter. If you've never tried it, you don't know what you're missing. I use my home canned peaches for this recipe (2 quarts), which makes throwing everything together really simple. You can use the same recipe for apple crisp, which is equally delicious, or experiment with other fruits in place of the peaches.

This is a tried-and-true recipe that I have been using since high school. Please do not try to substitute additional butter for the shortening (it will turn into an overly greasy topping which is not very pretty!).

If you are using fresh peaches, blanch* them in boiling water first to remove their skins. Use "free-stone" peaches so you can easily remove the pits.

Filling:

• 3-4 cups sliced peaches
• 1 Tablespoon flour
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon nutmeg
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Topping:

• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 ½ cups flour
• 1 cup quick cooking rolled oats
• ½ cup butter/margarine
• 1/3 cup shortening

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8x8” square pan and set aside.

2. Mix together all filling ingredients and pour into greased pan.

3. Mix together all dry topping ingredients and cut in butter and shortening with a pastry blender until well incorporated. Spread topping evenly over filling and bake for 45 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.

*How to "blanch" peaches: Bring a medium sized pot of water to a boil. Once boiling, carefully drop in 2 or 3 peaches into the water. Wait 30-60 seconds, or until you see the skins starting to peel. Remove peaches from the water with a slotted spoon and allow to cool briefly. Cut peaches around through to the middle from stem to bottom, and using your knife or fingers, remove the skins. Skins should slide off easily.

Grandma's Easy Sugar Cookie Recipe

Although my Grandma Williamson has passed on a number of sugar cookie recipes, I find this one to be the easiest. Mainly because it doesn't require chilling any dough or going through the rather laborious process of rolling and cutting dough. Score! I topped these beauties with a lemon icing this time around but I'll give you both icing recipes so you can choose between the two.

Sugar Cookies

• 1 cup butter, softened (or half butter/half shortening)
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 cup milk
• 5 cups flour
• 2 tsp baking soda
• 2 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp salt
• 2 tsp vanilla

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Beat butter and sugar together until well blended. Add all other ingredients and mix until well incorporated. Use either a cookie scoop or a rounded tablespoon to drop batter onto a greased cookie sheet. These do spread a little when baking so leave some space between them. Bake for 12 minutes or until they start to be golden brown.

Standard Icing

• 3 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
  
• 2 T milk
• 2 tsp vanilla

Lemon Icing

• 4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
  
• 2 T milk
• 4 T lemon juice or to taste
  

For the icing, I just beat together the softer, or liquid, ingredients first and then incorporate as much powdered sugar as is necessary to get it to spreading consistency.

After I got my icing to the lightly lemoned state, I set aside about 1/3 cup and colored the remainder with yellow food coloring. The picture shows the finished product with all the pieces put together! The squiggles are nothing more than the basic icing squeezed through the snipped tip of a Ziploc bag. Be as creative as you want to be and enjoy!

Dobos Torte

The August 2009 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Angela of A Spoonful of Sugar and Lorraine of Not Quite Nigella. They chose the spectacular Dobos Torte based on a recipe from Rick Rodgers' cookbook Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Caffés of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague.


A side profile of one of my mini dobos. We were supposed to take the time to evenly cut out all the sponge cake layers, coat everything in the chocolate buttercream after stacking and garnish with hazelnuts or some other nut...but I took the busy mother's route instead. The taste is still impossibly good. There is so much butter in the buttercream but yet it doesn't taste that way at all. Very rich and creamy and worth repeating on its own.

The caramel-coated sponge cake pieces on the top were a mild failure for me but I included them in the pictures nevertheless. The torte tastes delicious but, like many of the challenges, it involves so many steps and so much time that it makes it impractical for a casual gathering. But that's my thought being now almost 9 months pregnant and having to take care of my almost 1-year-old on top of it. Simple, quick and delicious would be really nice!

Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies

The July Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Nicole at Sweet Tooth. She chose Chocolate Covered Marshmallow Cookies and Milan Cookies from pastry chef Gale Gand of the Food Network.

Since we had a choice between the two items, I decided to go with the item that required me to make my own marshmallows - something I had never attempted! The somewhat time consuming process to make these little numbers was worth it. They were great! Thank you, Gale Gand, for the recipe and Nicole, this month's DB host, for the idea.

For the first step, you make the cookie base. The dough is chilled after mixing it up but you will need to let it set after you take it out of the fridge. I chilled mine overnight and found it nearly unworkable until it had warmed back up a little. As you can see, this makes a ton of cookies! If you're going to go with this one, plan on having some people over to help you eat them. I'm sure they won't mind.


After the cookies have cooled is when you put together your marshmallow concoction and pipe it out over all the cookies. Although the recipe says that the marshmallow will be "stiff", it certainly doesn't have the traditional stiff peaks that egg white will produce. I basically just beat the heck out of it and went from there. Work quickly though as the gelatin involved WILL start setting whether you're ready for it to or not.


After you let all the little marshmallow clouds firm up it's time for the chocolate. I love this part! I had to melt down about twice the amount of chocolate chips suggested to get all of my cookies well dipped. I also think that it would probably work better to use shortening, not vegetable oil, with the chocolate chips. The chocolate wouldn't harden until I actually refrigerated it and even then, it was kinda soft. Maybe adding some paraffin would help as well. You'll also want to watch out because anything and everything that touches the marshmallow sticks to it!


I'm ready to make these again but probably only for a special occasion. All the time required to harden, set or chill makes this impractical for a busy mom!

Strawberry Bakewell Tart

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England.

Just posting some pictures of my completed work with a few notes. I'm not going to repost the different recipes needed because, unfortunately, I wasn't too impressed with the product! The crust is basically made of a shortbread dough. We had our pick of fillings so I just used some of the strawberry freezer jam I had just put up. Then the frangipane seals it all in. I don't believe I've had frangipane before but that's probably because I'm not a fan of almond and it has both almond extract and ground almonds in it. There's also a lot of egg involved so it's rather "squidgy", as the DB website puts it.

Frozen Mocha Pie

I can't honestly recall where this recipe originated from but it's a good one! It's a super easy dessert to make with the only trick being that you do have to make it ahead of time. This is no last-minute idea, alright? So, let's get down to the nitty gritty...

• 1 chocolate cookie pie crust
• 8 oz. cream cheese
• 2/3 c. chocolate syrup
• 14 oz. sweetened, condensed milk
• 2 T. instant coffee, dissolved in a bit of hot water
  
• 1 cup heavy whipping cream, whipped
  

Beat together the cream cheese, syrup, milk and dissolved coffee until smooth. You want to make this as consistent a texture as possible. Fold in the whipped cream and pour into the prepared pie crust. Freeze overnight before serving! Use a serrated knife to help cut through the frozen pie - it works better.

Possible substitutions:
I didn't actually have quite the right ingredients to put this together last night so I made a few changes. The recipe is pretty forgiving so go ahead and experiment!

• used a graham cracker crust instead
• used 1/3 c. sugar-free chocolate syrup + about 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa
• beat in about 12 oz. or so of whipped topping that I had already in the freezer

Note: If you pull it out of the freezer too soon, it'll be looking more like this when you eat it. Equally yummy but much softer.

Pear & Walnut Strudel

I'm now a member of the Daring Bakers! If you're not familiar with this group, you can read more about it on their website but the short story is that it's a group of people who bake a "challenge recipe" every month in order to increase their baking skills. We all make the same recipe but whomever is "hosting" that month can also allow some leeway in how we go about doing it. For the month of May, the theme was strudel. I had certainly never made anything like it before so I knew it'd be a new experience! The basic dough recipe came from the book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafes of Vienna, Budapest and Prague but the filling was my choice.

• strudel dough
• 6-8 firm pears (not too ripe), peeled, cored and sliced about a 1/4" thick
• 1 orange, juiced
• 3 T. agave nectar
  
• 1 cup walnuts, coarsely chopped
  
• 1/2 cup sugar
• 1-2 T. cinnamon

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
2. Pour the juice and agave nectar over the pears and mix it together well enough to coat all the pear slices. Set aside. In a separate bowl, combine the sugar and cinnamon together and set that aside also.
3. After mixing the strudel dough ingredients and letting it set for the recommended time, you go through the somewhat time-consuming step of rolling it out. I followed the directions by laying out a tablecloth on a large table, rubbing flour into it and setting my dough in the middle. (I made a double batch of the dough so that I would be sure to have plenty. I knew I could always just cut off the extra.) I rolled it out as far as I could make it go with the rolling pin. Then I gently worked my hands underneath it to stretch it out even further. It was sort of reminiscent of the pizza chefs except that the dough didn't fly into the air...thankfully! The finished size was probably around the expected 24"x36" but I did make sure to get rid of all the thickness along the edge. The goal is to have it turn out as flaky and pastry-like as possible, after all.
   
4. Brush a thin layer of melted butter on the dough at this point. I almost missed this part!
5. Just inside of the shorter edge of the rectangle I layered the walnuts, the marinated pears and the cinnamon & sugar mix, leaving a bit of room on either end to seal off the finished product.
6. Use the tablecloth to start rolling the dough over the ingredients. At this point, the dough is far too thin and fragile to manipulate excessively. Keep rolling the strudel up until you get to the end. Cut off any extra dough, especially on either end, and fold under each end to help seal in the filling.
7. Transfer to a greased baking sheet, molding it into more of a round shape, if desired. Brush the top with melted butter and bake until dark golden brown.
8. Let the strudel cool for at least a half hour before slicing but eat it as soon as you're able since it doesn't keep forever. A serrated knife works best to cut through the pastry without damaging it. I would recommend serving the strudel with vanilla bean ice cream or whipped topping as it tastes very much like an apple pie.

It may look somewhat diseased but I'm not 100% sure why!

























The May Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Linda of make life sweeter! and Courtney of Coco Cooks. They chose Apple Strudel from the recipe book Kaffeehaus: Exquisite Desserts from the Classic Cafés of Vienna, Budapest and Prague by Rick Rodgers.

How to make Croutons

I got the idea to make croutons while watching the Food Network channel the other day. I didn't write down the instructions, but it looked so easy I had to try it! The results? Delicious.

What you need:

• A loaf (or partial loaf) of crusty bread - something hearty, not too soft, that will hold up to being chopped up into squares. I used Trader Joe's whole wheat sourdough bread. You can also use an unsliced loaf, or a loaf of bread that is on the verge of "turning."
  
• Olive oil
  
• Salt
  
• Pepper (freshly cracked is best)
  
• Italian seasoning (optional)
  

The process:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
   
2. Slice your bread into 1/2 inch slices (if not already sliced). Remove crusts from bread, if desired, and cut the remaining bread into 1/2 to 3/4 inch squares.
   
3. Arrange the bread cubes on a shallow baking sheet, somewhat evenly distributed.
   
4. Drizzle bread cubes generously with olive oil (at least a few Tablespoons).
   
5. Toss bread cubes by hand to coat with oil. Arrange bread cubes evenly across baking sheet.
   
6. Sprinkle bread cubes lightly with salt, then pepper and Italian seasoning. Use enough spices so that you can see the pepper and seasoning on all of the bread. 
   
7. Place pan into preheated oven. Check after 8 minutes, and toss with a spatula. Continue to bake in 3 minute increments until desired "crunchiness" is attained. Mine took approximately 14 minutes.
   
8. Store in a jar or sealed plastic bag. Use on salads or other recipes.
   

Enjoy!

Black Bean and Corn Soup with Chicken

This recipe is perfect for the chilly months. It warms your bones and is great for dinner or lunch.

Black Bean and Corn Soup with Chicken

Ingredients:
3 chicken breasts (frozen or on the bone)
2 cans black beans
10 oz package frozen whole kernel corn
1 cup chopped onion
4 cloves garlic, minced
10 ounce can Mexican style stewed tomatoes
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 tsp salt
3 cups boiling water
1 can chicken broth

Optional garnishments: sour cream, tortilla chips

Directions:

1. In a large pot, cover 3 chicken breasts with water. Cook over medium-high heat until no longer pink. Remove chicken from water, cool slightly, and shred the meat with two forks.
2. In a crock pot, combine the beans, corn, chicken, onion, garlic, tomatoes, cumin, and salt. Pour boiling water and chicken broth over all. Cover; cook on low heat for 8 to 10 hours or on high heat for 4 to 5 hours.
   
3. To serve, mash beans slightly with a potato masher to thicken soup. Garnish with sour cream and serve with tortilla chips if desired.

Makes about 6 servings.