It has been a while since I have posted a yeast bread recipe. This isn’t because I haven’t been baking them, however. I have simply been sticking to old favorites for a while, like Sourdough and Country White Bread, and have been working on a new baguette recipe that I really like (not ready for prime time yet, sorry!). What this all boils down to is that I have been in a bit of a rut and was finally kicked out of it by a box of cinnamon raisin granola. The granola was so good that after running through a box of it for breakfast (and snacks), I decided that I needed to make some cinnamon raising bread for toasting in the morning as a replacement.
Cinnamon and raisins obviously played a role in the bread, and I went for a fairly plain loaf, rather than doing the slightly more traditional cinnamon spiral. Since granola is a whole-grain product, I also decided to go with whole wheat in my bread. I used both whole wheat flour and white whole wheat flour, as I wanted to maximize the amount of whole grain in the bread but didn’t want the texture to be too coarse, which can be a fault of whole wheat-only breads. I used honey, instead of regular sugar, to add some sweetness to the bread, and I used both buttermilk and butter to ensure that the finished loaf had a hint of a buttery taste to it. The buttery taste is a good feature in bread meant for toasting.
All in all, the bread turned out to be very satisfying. It wasn’t too heavy or dense because I gave the bread a long time to rise a develop small air pockets as the yeast did its thing. The final loaf also had the tenderness that the relatively low gluten (lower than regular flour, anyway) whole wheat flour provides. The cinnamon was mild in the untoasted bread, but came out beautifully in the finished product. I wish now that I would have tried a few slices of french toast with the loaf, but the call of the toaster was just too tempting and just about every single slice ended up there.
Butter, jam and peanut butter (not necessarily together) are my top three toppers for toast made with this bread, but use whatever strikes your fancy. But be sure to toast it. It’s well worth it!
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Black Forest Cake was once the pinnacle of all desserts. Every restaurant worth eating at – or that wanted to look like it was worth eating at – had it on the menu. The cake is from, as you might suspect from the name, the Black Forest region of Germany, where it began as a cherry and liquor dessert before morphing into a cake. The cake itself has layers of chocolate cake with lots of whipped cream and cherries stacked between the layers. Some recipes will use rum or kirsch, but the important things are the chocolate, cream and cherries.
Combining these three things can turn anything into a “black forest.” The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf coffee shop chain in LA, for example, makes a delicious ice blended coffee drink with maraschino cherries, chocolate and coffee called the Black Forest. Faced with a jar of perfectly preserved (in cherry juice) Morello cherries, I decided to make my own version of the Black Forest – in tart form.
I made a crust out of chocolate wafer cookies (you can use the ends of Oreos or similar cookies, with all the filling removed), filled it with a smooth cream cheese filling and topped it with the cherries. The dessert was so simple, yet it managed to seem perfectly balanced. It definitely falls into the comfort food category before the gourmet one, but that’s not always a bad thing, right?
If you don’t have cherries or other fruits are in season, go ahead and top the tart with strawberries, raspberries or some combination of other fruits for a chocolate fruit tart. Don’t forget a little dollop of whipped cream on top of each piece!
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The other day when I was at Trader Joe’s, I noticed the most unusual fruit in the freezer department. Now, when it comes to fruit, I always like to have fresh on hand for eating and frozen on hand for baking. After all – it can be difficult to get wild blueberries (which I adore in all kinds of cakes, muffins and scones) in January. The fruit I found on this particular occasion was sliced, peeled peaches that were passion fruit flavored – by which they seemed to mean that the stone fruit slices had been soaked in passion fruit juice before freezing. I didn’t think that you can go too far wrong with either peaches or passion fruit, so I bought a bag.
When still cold, but slightly thawed, I could taste both fruit flavors in the peaches and they went splendidly with yogurt. Sticking to my original plan, however, I dutifully chopped up some of the slices and folded them into a batch of muffins. The passion fruit flavor didn’t quite carry over in the way I had hoped, but I like to think it was there in a (very) subtle way.
Despite the lack of passion flavor and the rather plain look of these muffins, they were actually very good. I added a fair amount of vanilla, which blended nicely with the fruit. The peaches worked out perfectly and had a great texture – far, far better than what you’d get with any canned peach and much easier than working with a fresh one (especially in the off-season!).
The only change I would make to this recipe is that I would add a sprinkle of coarse/raw sugar to the top just to make them look a bit prettier
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