Puffy Oven Pancake

We couldn't believe that we hadn't posted our Puffy, Fluffy, Oven-Baked German Pancake before! This recipe is a favorite of ours going back a few years - a great brunch item, easy to make and VERY tasty. We usually make this oven pancake in a glass baking dish but decided to try the cast iron skillet this time - it didn't really work out (stuck to the bottom, didn't fully "puff") so we'll be using the glass dish going foward. Same exact recipe, but we'd recommend using the glass dish or pie pan.

First, oven goes to 400 degrees. When getting close to being preheated, throw 2 tbls of butter into that glass pie dish and let it preheat in the oven - to get it the butter all melted and everything heated up.

Lightly beat 2 eggs in a bowl, then add 1/2 cup of all-purpose flour, 1/2 cup of milk, and a little pinch of salt. Combine until just smooth. Also, cut up a good baking apple (Golden Delicious, for example) into thin wedges or rounds.



Take the hot pan out - with potholders! - and brush the butter around so it fully coats the dish. Then sprinkle about 2 tbls of brown sugar and some shakes of cinnamon onto the bottom of the dish and lay down your apples in one layer.



Finally, pour the batter over the apples.



Into the oven for 25 minutes and your puffy and golden brown and delicious! Carefully flip it out and over onto your plate so the brown apple bottom is facing up - a little sweet with the flavor of baked apple... like a pastry! We like ours with an egg over easy and a cup of coffee.

Bacon Toffee

Yup, bacon candy!

As we stumbled across blog posts for Bacon Toffee, we looked at each other and said "bacon candy?!?!" and laughed... but as we read the various rants and reviews and posts around the web - we decided we had to make some to bring to our Super Bowl party! Get it - pigskin? At least the Toffee was a bigger hit at the Super Bowl than the Patriots were... grumble, grumble.

The bacon toffee is similar to the Peppermint Bark we make around the holidays, but this candy is made FROM SCRATCH (oh, and this candy has bacon in it).

We started by crisping up 5 strips of good Boar's Head bacon (and saving the drippings for a Cast Iron Bacon Cornbread...) and set the cooked bacon aside. Then, we started 1/4 cup water in a small-ish, heavy-bottom saucepan over medium-high heat. To that, we added 1 stick of butter and let that start to melt, breaking it up a little bit. Then, we added a big pinch of kosher salt and 1 cup of sugar. Then we stirred.



And we stirred. And we stirred. Keep the heat pretty high and keep stirring as the sugar melts and it all becomes a liquid, then starts bubble and turn sort of candy-like (kind of a sticky gel) and begins to turn tan. About 10-12 minutes of stirring later, you'll have a nice tan-brown "toffee" color and a sticky consistancy and you'll be ready to make your candy.

Quickly stir in the broken-up bacon pieces (I said to break them up, right?) and pour all of your stuff out onto a very-lightly greased cookie sheet. And that's it. No refrigeration needed, just wait as long as you can for it to harden up (maybe 2 hours) and then break it up and eat it!

(While you're waiting, fill that saucepan with water and start it on high to boil along with any utensils you used to clean off that hard candy residue).

Surprisingly - or not - excellent! Sweet candied toffee with just a hint of smokiness and a little meat mixed in! Not overly "bacon-tasting" at all, and certainly addictive.

Pumpkin White Chocolate Cookies

Happy Thanksgiving! We just got back from spending a wonderful holiday weekend in upstate New York with family. I thought I'd share a cookie recipe that I've now made 3 times in the last month since they've been such a hit! If you don't like chocolate chips, you could fold in nuts, raisins, or nothing at all! But I think that hidden surprises in cookies are delightfully fun.

Sift the following (this recipe makes about 30 cookies):
1 2/3 c. flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat oven to 350. In a separate bowl, cream 1/3 cup softened unsalted butter with 1 cup of sugar. Then add in 2/3 cup canned pumpkin, 2/3 of an egg (silly, I know!) and 3/4 tsp vanilla extract. After that is incorporated, add to the dry ingredients. After all the flour is mixed in, fold in some white chocolate chips (about 1 cup).



Plop down the dough in about golfball size rounds onto a greased cookie sheet and then flatten down a bit since they will fluff up during baking as these cookies do take on a cake-like consistency (but not as bad as some other recipes I've tried). Bake in the upper third of your oven for 14-18 minutes depending on your oven and then transfer to a cooling rack with paper towels underneath the rack.

While cookies are cooling prepare a light icing that consists of lots of powdered sugar with a bit of ground ginger and cinnamon with a little bit of milk. I've never really measured, but you don't want it too thin or it won't adhere to the cookies! Drizzle on, let harden about 10 minutes, and you're good to go. For a more decadent icing, you can add melted butter.

Funnel Cake, Buffalo Wings, and Fried Oysters

Funnel Cake, Buffalo Wings, and Fried Oysters - must be Super Bowl fare! Since the Patriots had been eliminated, we got to focus on the food on Super Bowl Sunday - and we wanted to do something different. We dug out an old gift we had received a few Christmases ago - an electric fryer - and decided to put it to use.



We started with fried oysters. We drained one of those small 1/2-pint containers of oysters and dried them pretty good, then added salt and cayenne pepper to them before rolling them in a mixture of 1/2 white flour and 1/2 corn meal, seasoned with salt and more cayenne. Allowed to sit in the fridge to solidify the "batter", we loaded up our fryer with canola oil and heated it up to 375. Took the oysters back out and it seemed some moisture had broken through the batter, so we panicked a little and rolled them one more time in corn meal before frying them up for about 3 minutes. Despite the extra layer on the outside (that was probably unnecessary) they came out really good! Ate these with some tartar sauce...



We moved on to Wings by halftime... We air-dried our little chicken parts with some kosher salt on them as long as we could - then we threw them in the 375 oil as-was. After about 8/9 minutes, they were ready to come out (the frying-noises had pretty much stopped). Let them cool for a minute and then tossed them in Buffalo sauce. We had pre-made Frank's buffalo sauce as someone had seemed to buy out all of Stop and Shop's hot sauces - but we've made buffalo sauce before. It's really easy, 1/2 melted butter and 1/2 hot sauce.

We ate these with a big iceberg/cuke/celery salad with blue cheese dressing - dipping the wings in the dressing as well. These came out so good - there is really no substitute for that texture you get from frying the wings instead of baking them.



Finally - Funnel Cake! We made a simple batter of white flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, egg, milk, and a little salt. We made sure to make it extra liquidy to be able to squeeze it out into the oil. Added the batter to a ziplock bag and cut out the corner and squeezed the batter in - and it CAME TO LIFE! It was fun to watch these cook, after a minute or two we used tongs to flip them over. Out they came for a pat-dry, then we added some powdered sugar.

So good! None of the flavors from the other foods are transferred, as we feared. We ate these cakes warm with a little iced cream... DELICIOUS!

Peppermint Bark

First of all: thanks, Just Braise! We used Just Braise Stacey's recipe as inspiration for our own version of Peppermint Bark because it was so simple and looked so delicious on her site.

Like Stacey, we also hear all about Williams-Sonoma's Peppermint Bark - from my brother singing it's praises to Williams-Sonoma catalogs and stores to it's mention in food blogs... blah, blah, blah! It's $25/pound! For that price, I better be eating some grass-fed, locally-grown, aged beef or a blood-red piece of tuna right off the boat! Even those things aren't $25/pound - and I can't make those at home...

All this recipe takes is a bag of Nestle Chocolatier's Dark Chocolate Chunks ($3.99/10oz), peppermint extract ($3 for a bottle that will last us for many Christmases to come), and a rack of candy canes ($1.99/10). That's it.

First, construct a double boiler out of a sauce pan and a mixing bowl - glass or metal - that just fits down into the sauce pan but is suspended from the bottom. Put an inch or two of hot water in the saucepan and turn the heat on medium-high so it get's simmering and steaming, which will produce the heat necessary to melt the chocolate in the mixing bowl:



Pour those chocolate chunks in and get to stirring! Add a little capful of peppermint extract as your chocolate is getting smooth and give a taste. Add more peppermint until you have a delicious dark chocolate and peppermint combination... flavor it to your taste. We ended up using maybe two little capfuls.



At the same time, drop half of those candy canes in a paper bag - we used five of 'em in the bark and hung the other five on our Christmas Tree, for now - then fold up that bag and head out on the deck with a hammer. Smash those candy canes up good on the deck railing (seemed like a good place to do it) until you have big chunks, little chunks, and even powder. The paper bag won't rip and possibly get some plastic mixed in like a ziplock or plastic shopping bag might.

When you've got nice, smooth chocolate flavored with peppermint to your taste, pour it out onto wax paper that is laid over a cookie sheet and smooth it out into a nice, thin layer - about 1/8" thick - with a spoon. Immediately start spreading around your crushed candy cane...



And that's it! Into the fridge for as long as you can stand... we were picking at the edges within a couple of hours. After about 5 hours in the fridge, we took it out and broke it up into large chunks and we were bringing some to our neighbors shortly after that. It came out better than we had even expected, it is crispy and chocolatey and delicious! Enjoy!

Banana Pancakes

We all experience deep-seeded, all-encompassing cravings... sometimes we have to give in.

Which brings us to pancakes! Its breakfast! Its sweet! Its baking (kindof)! Its delicious! WE WERE CRAVING THEM LIKE THE WORLD WAS ENDING! Let's give in to temptation this time.

Of course, we try to avoid just eat a bunch of all-purpose flour with sugary syrup on top. Is there a way to add volume AND some sweet flavor to pancakes? Indeed, bananas can do what we need! We mashed up the very ripe bananas with a fork to add structure to the batter - filling in for some of the flour. The banana, once cooked, also provides some sweet flavor.

1/2 cup all purpose flour and 1/2 cup wheat flour, 1 tbls baking powder, 1 tbls sugar, and a pinch of kosher salt on the dry side. Two mashed bananas, a cup of milk (our house milk is 1% - yours?), 2 tbls canola oil, and 1 beaten egg on the wet side.



Stir these two together until just combined. Then, onto a heated and buttered pan and about 5 minutes on each side. This ended up making nine 3-4" pancakes. We like ours with a couple over easy!



A little maple syrup and some microwaved bacon (it works - one minute/slice on a plate covered with a paper towel, then taken out and patted dry by another paper towel).

Before and After: