Category:

Sour Cream Fastnachts for Mardi Gras

2/7/2016

Wow, it's been quite some time since I posted---my last blog post was before Christmas and here we are about to start Lent! But before the Lenten austerities get underway, treat your family to some deliciously rich Fastnacht fritters. I may have posted this recipe before, but it's worth it share it again.

The full name for these donuts is fastnacht kuchen, “Fastnacht” being the German word for the day before Ash Wednesday. There are as many different recipes for these Shrove Tuesday donuts as there are German grandmothers (the Polish grandmas call them paczki). The majority of them are made with a yeasted dough containing mashed potatoes. I offer here a simpler recipe, easily made and best served fresh.

Depending on the date of Easter, Fat Tuesday is often on or around Valentine’s Day. Using heart shaped cookie cutters for your fastnachts is a good way to combine the two holidays. Plain granulated sugar or powdered sugar may also be used to coat them. Without a sweet topping of some kind, fastnachts can seem a little bland to the American palate, as the recipe has far less sugar than the usual sour cream donut.

Fastnachts
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/3 sugar
¾ tsp. ground mace or nutmeg
1 cup sour cream (room temperature)
2 eggs (room temperature)
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking soda
2 tsp. baking powder
Vegetable oil for frying
Cinnamon sugar for topping

In a medium size bowl, combine oil, sugar, sour cream, and eggs and beat with a whisk for two minutes. In a separate bowl, sift flour and baking powder and stir until thoroughly combined. Add egg mixture and stir until just combined. With dough still in bowl, knead gently for 8 or 10 strokes. Allow dough to rest for 5 minutes. Preheat oil for frying to 350 degrees. Pat or roll dough out on a lightly floured surface to about ¼ inch thick. Cut dough into rectangles about 2” x 3” and cut a short slit down the center of each one. Fry in hot oil a few at a time, 2 minutes per side, until golden brown. Drain on paper towels, then toss in cinnamon sugar to coat. Best if served fresh and warm.

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Spring Valley Historical Society Recipes

11/23/2015

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Here's three of the recipes I presented at my demo for the Spring Valley Historical Society. You can find Bolo Rei on the "Recipes" page. Don't burn the scones!

Pumpkin Spice Donuts
with Chai Latte Frosting

1 cup pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling)
2 eggs,
½ cup pumpkin spice creamer (liquid)
¾ cup packed brown sugar
¼ cup canola oil
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
½ teaspoon salt

Chai Latte Frosting
½ cup sweetened chai tea
2 tablespoons pumpkin spice creamer (liquid)
¼ cup butter
2 cups powdered sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prepare two donut pans (12 donuts total) with cooking spray and set aside. In a medium size bowl, combine pumpkin, eggs, creamer, sugar and oil. In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, pumpkin pie spice, and salt. Add the flour mixture to pumpkin mixture and stir until nearly smooth—do not overbeat.

Transfer the batter to a large ziploc bag and expel excess air before sealing. Snip one corner of the bag and pipe batter into donut pans---each section will be slightly more than half full. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until donuts are lightly browned and spring back when touched. Allow donuts to rest about five minutes in pan before removing to cool on a wire.

For frosting
In a small saucepan over low heat, bring sweetened chai tea to a simmer and reduce to about three tablespoons. Cool completely and stir in creamer. Whisk in butter and powdered sugar until smooth. Use to frost donuts. If you want a light glaze instead of frosting, omit butter and use only one cup of powdered sugar.

Chocolate Raspberry Scones

2 cups all-purpose flour
¼ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
½ cup granulated sugar
1 Tbs. baking powder
1/8 tsp. baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
½ cup (1 stick) of chilled butter
½ cup buttermilk
1 large egg, beaten
1/3 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips, chopped fine
½ cup raspberry preserves or cake filling
OR 1 cup of fresh raspberries

Preheat oven to 400 degrees, and lightly grease a baking sheet or cookie pan. Sift flour, cocoa, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt into a medium size bowl and stir thoroughly. Cut butter into small pieces. Using a pastry blender or two sharp knives, blend butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in chopped chocolate chips. In another small bowl, whisk buttermilk and egg together until well blended. Pour into dry ingredients and stir with a wooden spoon until just moistened, but do not overmix. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead gently for 8 or 10 strokes. Divide in half, and on a lightly floured surface, pat each piece into a flattened 8” round. Lay one round on the pan and spread the top with the raspberry preserves or fresh raspberries. Lay the second round on top. Using a large knife or metal spatula, cut dough into 8 wedges, wiping knife after each cut. Bake at 400 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, or until round is firm on the edges but still slightly soft in the middle. Cool on a wire rack, then cut apart before serving.

Apricot Skillet Bread

1 cup yogurt (plain or flavored)
2 eggs (or egg substitute)

½ cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup spelt flour (or all-purpose)
2 Tbs. brown sugar or honey
1 Tbs. wheat germ
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp, ground coriander seed
½ tsp. ground ginger
½ tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 400° F. In a medium size sauce pan, warm yogurt over low heat until liquid. Remove from heat, and add apricots and eggs; stir until blended. In another bowl, mix all dry ingredients thoroughly. Lightly grease a 10" cast iron skillet, and place in the oven for five minutes. Pour yogurt mixture onto dry ingredients and stir until just moistened. Remove skillet from oven and pour in batter, smoothing the top with a spatula or spoon. Immediately place in oven and bake for at least 20 minutes. To test for doneness, insert a toothpick in the center of the bread and remove--if it comes out clean, the bread is done. If not, return to oven for five more minutes. Leave in the pan for five minutes after it comes out of the oven. Then, remove the flatbread by placing one hand (protected by an oven mitt or towel) on top of the bread and turning the pan upside down with the other hand, catching the bread in your hand as it comes out. If bread does not come out easily, allow to cool in pan for a few minutes, then try again. Allow to cool on a wire rack for 10 more minutes, then cut into wedges and serve.

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Breadhead Breakfast Countdown Day #113/120

10/12/2015

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Chocolate Mint Muffins

We’re getting down to the wire on my cookbook deadline, or as my publisher and I put it, “about to cross the goal line.” I don’t like to use the word “deadline” because it gives the impression that you have to kill yourself to get there, but “goal line” suggests the crowd going wild as you spike the ball and do your signature touchdown dance in the end zone! Only a few treats left, mostly tested recipes that just need a decent photo.

So I’m back to our little retreat cabin at Lake Thunderbird (near Henry Illinois), with its tiny sink, reliable oven, and back wall of windows that creates beautiful light for food photography. It’s Columbus Day, no school, so the abbot excused me from my monastic duties to come here last night and all day today to bake and take photos. I made chocolate mint muffins last night (recipe HERE) along with a batch of white bread.

A Pyrex Bake-A-Round and a portion of the resulting loaf

I baked the white bread in a vintage Pyrex Bake-A-Round, a glass tube in a metal rack which produces a cylindrical loaf of bread. I’ll be honest here: I have no idea why anyone would want perfectly round slices of bread. Hamburger buns, maybe, but the apparatus is so bulky and fragile that it hardly seems worth the effort to store the thing. That being said, it’s still one of my favorite piece of bakeware, no longer available except at garage sales and on eBay. And those round slices are ideal for French Toast Custard Cups.

French Toast Custard Cups

You can plenty of recipes for larger French toast casseroles, and they usually serve six to eight. But what if you’re single---do you have to host a brunch before you get to try that recipe? Or what if you have the whole family over for the holidays, but not everyone likes French toast? So I developed these individual serving casseroles, so you can make as few or as many as you like. Keep your eyes open at second-hand shops for soup bowls with handles—they are just the perfect serving size. You can find the recipe HERE.

The photos for those two recipes took up my morning, which exhausted my camera batteries, so I ran into town for a fresh set, dropping off samples at a local family and at the police station. Then it was back to the cabin to make Sunday Brunch Waffles. This past summer I found a brand new Cuisinart waffle iron at Goodwill for a whopping $5, and I’ve been using it ever since to make sourdough multigrain waffles every time my sourdough starter needs to be renewed.

The convenience of pancake mixes and frozen waffles make them ordinary breakfast foods these days, but my Grandma Tootsie taught me how to make waffles with whisked eggs whites, and the result is the lightest waffle you’ve ever savored. The ones I made today are certainly not to be considered health food---four eggs, three-quarters a cup of oil, topped with butter and syrup---which is why I named them to suggest a special Sunday treat.

Next on my list was Tropical Scones. I spent about two weeks in “The Scone Zone” testing scone recipes almost every day, much to the delight of the brethren and the lay faculty of our school. Scones are ideal for our busy modern schedules, because they can be mixed and baked in about 30 minutes and can be flavored sweet or savory. You can use just about any kind of dairy for the liquid; milk, cream, and buttermilk are the most common, but sour cream and yogurt can be used as well. Seeing coconut yogurt in the store inspired me to develop a scone recipe with tropical flavors. They are best served warm with a dollop of apricot chutney.

I finished off the day with a retest of Baked Chocolate Donuts. I used to make baked donuts with yeasted dough but that took more time than most people have in the morning, so I developed a baked cake donut recipe that can be done in half an hour. My first version, however, made too much batter and overflowed the pan, so I cut back on the amount of flour and buttermilk to make less batter. The results were much more satisfactory. The cookbook will have a recipe for mocha frosting, but I made these with a chai tea glaze instead. We had some containers of sweetened chai tea left over from a fundraising event, so I put a cup in a saucepan and simmered it until it was reduced to about a quarter cup. While it was still warm I whisked in a cup of powdered sugar and a pinch of salt, which yielded a scrumptiously exotic glaze for the chocolate donuts.

Now I have to pack up all my equipment and head back to the abbey. There are still a few recipes left to test, but it’s fourth and goal to go!

God bless and happy baking!

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Pastry Blenders and Classic Strawberry Cream Scones

9/26/2015

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Strawberry Cream Scones--use the good china!

If I were going to choose a recipe to teach to a newbie baker an I had less than an hour, I would definitely choose scones as my ideal recipe: easy to make, infinitely versatile, using simple ingredients and prepared with ordinary equipment. AND you get to eat them, warm with butter, within forty-five minutes or less. What's not to love?

Vintage pastry blenders

Some people might take exception to the "ordinary equipment" part, since not everyone has a pastry blender in the drawer. I was surprised to discover this week that there are kitchens without a rolling pin! However, you can achieve the same goal (cold butter cut into small pieces blended with flour) with a pair of ordinary knives or (gasp!) a food processor. However, if you do have a Cuisinart and not a pastry blender or granny fork, I'm not sure we can be friends. I have several varieties of pastry blenders, and the one on the left with the metals "blades" seems to me to be the most useful. When you are using cold butter (necessary for really flaky pastry) the harder blades are more effective than the wires on the right, which tend to get bent.

Besides appreciating the time factor, I like scones because they aren't as sweet at other breakfast breads coated with glaze or slathered with frosting. Granted, I love caramel pecan cinnamon rolls more than most sugar addicts, but it's hard not to feel guilt afterwards. With scones, you feel like you've had "a treat without a cheat". Some commercial scones are about as healthy as a Krispy Kreme donut, but the ones you make yourselves are no worse than a biscuit. Just go easy on the clotted cream and you'll be fine.

This recipe will appear in my upcoming cookbook Breadhead Breakfast Treats, which I hope to have available by May 2016

Strawberry Cream Scones

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cold butter
1 cup chopped strawberries (1/4” dice)
¾ cup heavy cream

Preheat the oven to 425° F. Lightly grease a 9 x 13-inch baking sheet and set aside. Place flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium size bowl whisk together until blended. Work the butter into the flour with a pastry cutter until the mixture resembles coarse bread crumbs. Add strawberries and stir till evenly distributed. Add cream and mix until a cohesive ball of dough is formed; do not over-mix

Transfer the dough to a well-floured work surface. Pat or roll the dough into an 8-inch disk about ¾" thick. Use a chef’s knife, bench knife or large pizza cutter to cut the disk into 8 wedges. (You may also use a round or heart-shaped cookie cutter.) Transfer scones to the prepared pan, evenly spaced. Bake the scones for 20 to 25 minutes, until golden brown. Cool on the pan and serve warm.

Breadhead Backstory
I'm in “the scone phase” of recipe testing, and last week I discovered that we had several pints of fresh strawberries that needed to used up pretty quickly. As a practical baker, that was reason enough to make these! Strawberries and cream go together, and the richness of the cream means you can use a little less butter on this recipe. In a convection oven (with the blower on), there’s real risk of the strawberries on the surface of the dough getting scorched black, so if you are using one be sure to cover the pan lightly with aluminum foil until the last few minutes of baking. The strawberry flavor of these scones is rather delicate, so don’t serve them with an overwhelmingly strong coffee or heavily flavored tea—for the latter, I recommend Formosa Oolng.

This is fairly classic scone recipe, and you could substitute raisins, dried cranberries, or blueberries with equally delightful results. I like to use dried apricots or snipped dates with chopped pecans and serve them with clotted cream and a little spoonful of orange marmalade. When I tested the recipe, this strawberry version was enjoyed both by the monks at breakfast and some of the faculty at lunch, and the only criticism I received was that I hadn’t made enough for the whole staff!

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Orange Cranberry Rolls

9/18/2015

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The pinnacle of breakfast breads!

The Breadhead Breakfast project has been inspiring me to think of new variations on some of my old favorites. Although my monastic brethren love cinnamon rolls (a moment of silence as we all contemplate the glory of Fab's Nutty Goodness) I've been experimenting with different fillings in the last year or so. I've made Strawberry Rolls and little spirals of pastry and pineapple filling using Shortcut Croissant dough, and even added Chinese Five Spice instead of cinnamon. None of this is particularly adventuresome compared to, let's say, chefs of Chopped, but it is making me explore some new flavor profiles.

DON'T USE THIS STUFF!

For several weeks I've been planning to experiment with cranberry sauce, because I found a small can of it in the pantry. I DON'T mean the stuff that looks like cranberry jello and can be serve in slices. This was whole berry cranberry sauce---not as good as fresh cranberries, but it's what I had in the kitchen without having to to the store. I once enjoyed a delectable cranberry salad with mandarin orange slices, so I decided to add that flavor as well.

I made a batch of Basic Roll Dough but I used only 4.5 cups of flour, leaving the dough very soft. As it rose, I took the cranberry sauce (14-oz. can.) and stirred in a teaspoon of freshly grated orange zest (about half an orange--the rest goes in the icing), and 1/4 cup of orange juice. I thought the filling lacked tartness, so I added 1/2 cup of dried cranberries--much better. I rolled the dough out as usual (about 15" x 12"), spread the filling and rolled it up for slicing. I made 15 rolls, but you could do 12 and make more generous servings. They went into a 9" x 13" greased pan and rose for about half an hour. In my commercial convection oven they baked in 18 minutes at 350, but in a regular oven it would take about 30 minutes.

The icing was made with a cup of powdered sugar whisked with 1 teaspoon of fresh orange zest and two tablespoons of orange juice. I heated it in the microwave on high for ten seconds and then drizzled it over the rolls. Go easy on the icing--the filling is plenty sweet. They were much enjoyed by the monks and several lucky members of the faculty of our high school.

A little Internet research revealed that there are a wide variety of orange-and-cranberry-flavored breads out there, from rolls to scones to muffins. Some roll recipes use fresh cranberries in a food processor with orange marmalade, which made for a beautifully rich, red filling; some added walnuts for a little crunch. Plenty of recipes still to be explored. If there is leftover cranberry salad after this year's Thanksgiving feast, I have a pretty good idea what I'll be serving for breakfast the next morning!

God bless and happy baking!

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Tools for Batter Breads

8/11/2015

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Butter Pecan Breakfast Bread is an example of a quick bread or batter bread.

Although yeast breads are my specialty, I do enjoy making quick breads or batter breads, meaning breads that are leavened with baking powder or baking soda (or a combination of both) and therefore take less time than yeast breads. Scones, muffins, biscuits, waffles, pancakes and cornbread all fall into this category, so many of them are served at breakfast, brunch, or tea time. My new cookbook Breadhead Breakfast Treats will feature quite a few batter breads, since I have a supernatural love thing for anything that can be served with maple syrup and Irish Breakfast tea.

You can mix batter breads with nothing more than a bowl and a wooden spoon, but over the years I've found a few other utensils that make the process a little easier. I find that the plastic scraper in the upper left is handier than a rubber spatula for getting batter out of a bowl, plus it can be used to divide pizza dough and clean a counter top. Hodgson Mill sometimes gives them away free at demos (I usually have an ample supply at my demos) but you can get them at a lot of cooking stores for less than a dollar.

The three whisks pictured here are all made by different companies but serve the same purpose. They're all sturdier than most wire whisks and can mix batter breads faster and with less effort than with a wooden spoon. Since batter breads--especially muffins--can become dense and gummy when overmixed, it could be worth it to invest in one if you bake batter breads often. The top whisk is made by Best Manufacturing of Portland OR, the same company that makes my favorite flour duster and is a new addition to their catalog.* It's a little big for a single batch of pancakes, but if you mix larger batches of batter breads for Christmas gift giving, it's worth getting. I used it to make a double batch of zucchini bread this week and found it to be a great help, and easier to clean than a brotpiskar or dough whisk, which is what the next two tools are.

Brotpiskars are a Scandinavian invention (Danish or Swedish, depending on whom you talk to!) and are also for mixing batter breads and even yeast doughs. They come in two sizes, usually 14" and 11". The larger one in the photo is one my mom bought for me in 1979, and it's mixed hundreds if not thousands batches of dough. They are available from several distributors, including Amazon, King Arthur Flour and Fox Run. The smaller one was imported from Poland, and is available from Saint Bede Abbey's own Monks' Market website.

The small tool at the bottom of the photo is a heat-sensitive cake tester, manufactured by Nordic Ware. You insert the probe into your batter bread and wait a few seconds. The tip turns red when the cake or bread is done. (Please note that the cake tester is not for yeast breads, which finish baking at a lower temperature.) I know I can use a toothpick or a piece of uncooked spaghetti to test, but I saw this in a restaurant supply store for less than $5, so I decided I needed it! I appreciate having it when I have altered a recipe or used a different size of pan than the recipe calls for, so I'm less sure of baking times.

Since I posted a blog recently about owning too many tools, I'm hesitant to encourage more spending on utensils. But if you enjoy baking and do it often, you may find these mixers worth keeping in the drawer. I must confess, sometimes having the right tool encourages me to bake a particular recipe more often. Besides, none of the people who enjoy the results of my baking obsession have ever complained about the clutter!

God bless and happy baking!

*Full disclosure: Best Manufacturing sent me a sample of this "Baker's Whisk"--I received no additional compensation or benefit and all opinions expressed here are my own.

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Breadhead Breakfast Testing Countdown: Day 2/120

6/30/2015

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Day #2

Fine Tuning

,

The new cookbook is going to have a number of coffee cakes made with the same basic yeasted dough, a variation on my Best Ever Crescent Rolls dough. That recipe produces a soft dough which results in a tender crumb, but it's a little tricky to handle for braiding and some other kinds of shaping---notice the tear in the side of the rolled up dough pictured above, which I made yesterday morning. That sort of fussy dough can be problematic for beginning bakers and even for those with more experience. So I need to fine tune the recipe a little more.

I don't want to suggest that I'm not satisfied with the results---this Nutella-filled babka with a streusel topping turned out just fine. But it was a tad frustrating to handle and I did utter a few words that a monk ought not to use. So I'll try another batch rtomorrow with a little less liquid and see what I get.

The other recipe I made was Apricot Blossoms, which I used to call Apricot Daisy Coffee Cake, until I realized it doesn't resemble a daisy as all. The filling is pastry filling and the icing is made with powdered sugar, orange zest and juice. It's baked on a 16" pizza pan, although you could make a pair of smaller ones with a couple of 12" pans. The secretaries in the Lake Thunderbird club house office preferred these over the chocolate babka, much to my surprise.

Later in the afternoon, I did something I don't do at home very often---almost never during the school year---I took a nap. Ahhh, summer!

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Coffee Cake Exceptionale revisited

6/16/2015

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In May of 2012 I posted a brief blog and a recipe for Coffee Cake Exceptionale, a recipe I adapted from a spiral-bound family cookbook---not MY family, but thank you, Kathy Miller of Norway, Iowa!. The original, however, is from Betty Crocker; remember these old recipe cards that came in a yellow or green box?

Anyway, Coffee Cake Excpetionale is a classic sour cream coffee cake, marvelously rich and delightfully versatile. The original recipe calls for a traditional brown sugar cinnamon filling, but over the years I have used fresh peaches sprinkled with ginger sugar and nutmeg, Solo cake filling in various flavors, pineapple ice cream topping, homemade apricot preserves, and store-bought marmalade. Leftover cranberry salad from Thanksgiving? Sure! Some slightly mushy blueberries you would hate to throw out? Don't mind if I do! Whatever fruit's in season, whatever's in the pantry, chances are you've got something that will make a great filling for this breakfast treat.

I got the recipe out again because I had to make a thank you gift for one of the guys who works in the abbey powerhouse who did me a favor. Everybody calls him Scooter, and he looks like a ZZ Top groupie, long beard. tats and all---nicest guy you'll ever meet. Anyway, I owed him a favor, and when we were talking about our various canning exploits, he told me that he had some strawberry rhubarb jam that just didn't set up. With some urging from his wife he discovered that with some ice and milk in a Bullet blender, the failed jam made a great smoothie, but he had a lot of it to use up. So I asked him to bring some in and I would use to make something yummy.

A mid-afternoon snack using my Great-grandma's china.

I've been in coffee cake mode lately, since I just gave a demo on yeasted coffee cakes to the Home and Community Education chapter at Effingham, IL (recipe handout HERE). The one you see on the right has a salted caramel hazelnut chocolate filling (yes, JIF makes such a thing) and a light sprinkling of the kind of streusel topping you'd find on apple crisp. I served it at the HCE demo and it was a big hit. (Incidentally, special thanks to Seimer Milling and to Hodgson Mill for providing quality ingredients and some terrific goodie bags for our attendees. They are both members of the Home Baking Association--more about that organization in a future blog.)

I considered the possibility of just using my Best Ever Crescent Roll Dough, which makes outstanding breakfast rolls no matter what filling you use. But like I was in coffee cake mode and decided to save the strawberry filled swirls for some other morning. The ones here were made just like cinnamon rolls, but with strawberry pie filling mixed with fresh strawberries rolled up in the dough.

In the end I opted for good ol' reliable Coffee Cake Exceptionale, but had to sub Greek yogurt for the sour cream (we'd used up all of the latter on taco salads at lunch). If you're wondering about how much filling you need, I used a 12 oz. can of strawberry cake filling mixed with the pint of runny preserves, and had just enough. Using a more liquid filling like fruit helps keep the coffee cake more moist, too.. I also added a streusel topping, just because that's how I roll. (1/2 cup each of flour, brown sugar, and quick cooking oatmeal, mixed with 2 tsp. of cinnamon and 3 Tbs. of softened butter). The recipe makes a 9" x 13" cake, so I served half in modest portions to the brethren, then dressed up the rest for Scooter and his wife.

Need to tell a co-worker "thank you" this week? Want to show a friend or family member that you think they are "exceptionale"? Ten minutes of prep and and hour with the oven is all you need. Click HERE to get the recipe. (And for those noticed the omission of the sour cream from the ingredients, I fixed it! 1.5 cups).

God bless and happy baking!

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Marcus Aurelius and Coffee Cake

6/11/2015

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Marcus Aurelius’s original statue in Rome, by Zanner. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Recently I started reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. You might wonder what value there might be in such a project; you'll find a thoughtful blog HERE written by an Oxford professor about the Meditations' relevance today. For myself I offer no explanation other than it seemed to me that a well educated person should have read them at some point, especially someone like me who minored in Philosophy.

Surprisingly, my scholarly reading intersected with my passion for baking yesterday. I have been experimenting with various forms of yeasted coffee cakes, and decided to use my Best Ever Crescent Roll Dough, which I consider the gold standard for soft rolls and anything sweet. The dough, however, proved to be a little too soft and sticky; I had trouble rolling it out evenly and it developed several tears in the course of my making a chocolate-filled babka (click HERE for the recipe that was my inspiration). But I trudged on undaunted by the mess on the counter, my sticky hands, and the lopsided twist in the Bundt pan before me.

The result, however, was surprisingly appealing. In fact, I would argue that its attraction is based on its imperfections: the unevenly-sized twists, the long split that reveals the chocolate filling inside, even the lopsided profile all contribute to what I would not hesitate to call a truly beautiful loaf. Anyone who passed by as it sat cooling on the counter remarked on how attractive the babka was, how the open side revealing the filling made it more so.

Marcus Aurelius, as it turns out, would agree. That very morning I had read the following passage:

[W]hen bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker's art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit. And the ears of corn bending down, and the lion's eyebrows, and the foam which flows from the mouth of wild boars, and many other things- though they are far from being beautiful, if a man should examine them severally- still, because they are consequent upon the things which are formed by nature, help to adorn them, and they please the mind . . .
Meditations Book III, section 2

There is much to be admired in Marcus Aurelius' character and his writings, but I'm especially drawn by the fact that the most powerful man in the Roman empire of the 2nd century noticed the details of the baker's art, the graceful arch of the bending corn, and the regal structure of the lion's brow. Many of his reflections stress the need to live an intentional life, that no action should be without an aim, no choice be made thoughtlessly. A little something to ponder the next time you select a muffin from the case at Starbuck's, or sit down to enjoy a slice of homemade coffee cake.

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Yeasted donuts

6/4/2015

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Make no mistake--donuts are NOT a "heart-healthy" food. But me no buts about baked donuts or multigrain batters or paleo flours. Donuts made with reduced fat and alternative grains can be delicious, but they simply can't compare with a fresh, warm, glistening Krispy Kreme, cooked in hot oil and drenched in powdered sugar glaze.

As I diabetic, I have to be careful around donuts---I'd probably pass up chocolate cake for a day-old long john---so I don't make them often. But Friday, June 5 2015 is National Donut Day, so I stayed up late Thursday night to make some Spudnuts.

(According to the Nibble, National Donut Day is celebrated the first Friday of June.
The holiday was created in 1938 by the Salvation Army, to honor the women who served donuts to servicemen in World War I. June 8 is Jelly-filled Donut Day, Cinnamon Roll Day is October 4. OK, back to Spudnuts).

Spudnuts was a national chain of franchised donut shops started by the Pelton brothers in Salt Lake City in 1940. Their proprietary donut mix used potato flour for added softness and flavor (this ingredient had just become commercially available---before that fresh mashed potatoes were needed). In 1964 when the brothers sold the company,. there were 314 franchises nationwide. Wikipedia can tell you more HERE. There still individual shops around, sometimes with a recipe adapted from the original. Naturally there is a website for Spudnuts fans which includes a list of existing shops by state.

I've had a Spudnuts recipe in a three ring research binder since about 1999, but there are about a half dozen recipes online, all of them slightly different, one of them really different: the one offered by Saveur magazine uses ground mace, cracked black pepper, and lemon zest. Looking all these recipes over, most of them bear a striking resemblance to my Best Ever Crescent Roll Dough. So that's what I use for my yeasted donuts, except that I use only 1/2 cup of mashed potato.

Some other tips about donuts:
1) Don't over knead or over work the dough, or the donuts will be tough and not tender. After the first rise, don't punch the dough down too hard and never knead it a second time. Deflate it gently and roll it out to about 3/4", using a minimum of flour on the board.
2) Don't twist the cutter, which can seal the edges of the donut and keep it from rising properly. Just press down firmly.
3) Let your donuts rise the second time on individual sheets of waxed paper or parchment. It makes it simpler to ease them gently into the hot oil.
4). The oil should be 375 degrees F. Use a candy thermometer clipped on the side of a deep skillet, or an electric fryer with a thermostat.
5) Don't crowd the pan---3 or 4 donuts at a time, and let the oil reheat between batches.
6) Wait until donuts are almost completely cool before glazing or frosting. And no, I don't really have a glaze recipe, because I never measure anything for it. If you're reading this, you can obviously Google it! Alton Brown has a good one HERE.

Sound like a lot of fussy work? Perhaps these photos will help convince you:

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