Lemon Poppy Seed Bread

So I still had part of a Costco-sized bag of lemons, and I didn't feel like making lemon tarts, lemon curd, or lemon bars... too many eggs and butter and different parts and meh, I was lazy and had been baking a lot. (I had been baking and coking a lot last week... including a whole wheat multi-grain bread, 2 of these lemon poppy seed loafs, vegetable stew, and hot cross buns!  And then a tiramisu cake!) Unfortunately, most lemon cookies or muffins or whatnot require the lemon zest, but not the lemon juice. So what better than a lemon quick bread that requires soaking it with a lemon syrup? ...And then top it off with a lemon glaze?? Not only does it then use lemon juice, but it is also lemon and buttery and delicious.

Okay, confession. I don't really like poppy seed. Maybe my parents bought one too many Noah's poppy seed bagels (By the way, I love Noah's bagels. Grab me a plain bagel, a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, and an asiago bagel and I will love you forever. Okay, for a moment, until my waist line disappears, then I will hate you. It's that whole love-hate thing, ya know?). Or maybe I really hate how they get stuck in your teeth. Or maybe the flavor's a little too strong. Either way, I don't like poppy seed. But my roommate likes things with poppy seeds. And so do other people. And I found out a couple weeks ago that the local market sells poppy seeds for not to bad a price. So I grab myself a bunch of poppy seeds, figuring that I'd use it for something. Then I remembered, of course. Lemon + poppy seed. Who hasn't heard of that combination?

It seemed to be very popular.

And the glaze. I love sugar. I wanted to lick my cookie sheet after all the excess lemon glaze dripped off of the bread. ...I might've scraped off a few spoonfulls of that delicious lemon-sugar combination. But enough about me, more about the bread behind the jump!

Meyer Lemon Ginger Muffins

...with cream cheese filling. Doesn't that sound yum?

So not only did I have a bunch of lemons that I took forever to use, I also bought a package of meyer lemons from Trader Joe's thinking that I would be completely inspired and do something awesome with them.

Yeah, that was a complete fail. The lemons have just hung around idly in their little package for the past few weeks and all I've done is stare at them and then go somewhere else. Finally, my friend was leaving for a one-day ski trip (read: leaving way too early in the morning and arriving home way too late) with a group of people, so I figured, why not used that as a motivator to use my meyer lemons for some good. I debated using them just as a stand-in with any other lemon recipes that I have... maybe even the lemon bars that I made last time. At the same time, I've never used meyer lemons before and I was terrified that I was going to make something that just wasn't quite right. For those of you that aren't familiar with meyer lemons, they are a hybrid of true lemons and mandarin oranges, making them a little sweeter with an oranger (sure, that's a real word) than normal lemons.

So, for the most part, I didn't feel too adventurous about messing with recipes calling for normal lemons (probably irrational, but whatever, deal with it). Finally, running through some recipes of meyer lemons and trying to decide what would be easiest for a group of groggy people to eat for breakfast or as a on-the-slopes snack, I decided on making meyer lemon ginger muffins (with a cream cheese filling!). I've been avoiding making muffins and cupcakes for a while because I always hate washing out muffin tins, but I should get over that silliness. (By the way, do muffins count as a quick bread? I think it does, right? Or is it in its own special category?)

I definitely need to bake more with lemons vs. meyer lemons to try and figure out the subtle differences between the two, but until then, click below for more pictures and recipe!

A week of baking: Oreos, Galettes, Banana Bread, Crostatas, Brioche, and Tortes

Why hello there. It's been a while... the past week has been full of baking, and not much blogging. Still, it's now ridiculous o'clock since I have screwed up my sleeping schedule for the past 2 days, and since I am still running off the energy of just finished cleaning up my kitchen from a week of crazy baking, I figure why not bombard you with a ridiculous amount of pretty photos of food? (So I might also be running off of the bleach fumes from cleaning the kitchen... but that's aside the point)

First off in this ridiculous week of baking are home-made oreos from Wayne Brachman's Retro Desserts. If you love Oreos, but love softer cookies, this is the cookie for you. It's amazing how ridiculously close the taste is to the true Oreos. (By the way, Double-Stuffed Oreos are the best things. Ever.)

The cookies themselves are of the softer variety--though, if you bake them longer, they get crunchier.



Aren't they pretty? They're even prettier when stuffed full of unhealthy, but ridiculously tasty filling. Yum.



The same day, I also worked on these hand-sized berry galettes for dessert, which turned out better than I thought they would. I basically took 4 or 5 different galette recipes and combined them all to suit what I needed. I don't think they turned out too bad. I'm still trying to figure out the type of dough I like for something like this... I used a different type of crust than the usual one I use for pies and quiches, but I'm not sure which one I like better yet.

Galettes are fun to make, and it really does save on the trouble of rolling out the crust to make it all fit into a pie dish properly, but it's also a little harder to cut. I do like the rustic look to it, though. (Not the best photograph in the world, but it'll do for now.)



Oh yes, and I just have to say: Berries are the best food group. Yes, that's right, food group. :)



I could probably live off of blackberries and never get sick of them. <3 True, I might get diabetes, but who cares... they're blackberries. They're just amazing when you squish them against the roof of your mouth with your tongue. :)

That was all one day, then a few days later, I baked two loaves of brioche for my mother's birthday--she claims she doesn't like sweets (I'm not sure I believe her, still!), but she does love a good loaf of soft bread--and an apple crostata and a lemon torte for a lazy Sunday afternoon BBQ. This required staying up until 2:00 am and waking up at 6:30 in the morning in order to bake the brioche (which required resting in the fridge overnight after ridiculous kneading and 4 hours of rising and being attended to). It was worth it!

The brioche was probably the hardest dough to work with. I used a recipe from Epicurious. In retrospect, I'm not sure why I chose this recipe instead of another one, for example, from Peter Reinhart's book. But I did, and it was too late to change it after I had already warmed my 3 sticks of butter to room temperature. Yes, this recipe made one loaf in my 8" and one in my 9" loaf pan, and it required 3 sticks of butter and 3 eggs. Next time, I'm going to try and make it and cut the butter down by half a stick, because I think it was unnecessarily buttery, even for a brioche.



The dough was ridiculous, and veeery hard to knead by hand. It took a ridiculous amount of arm strength, and I swear my right arm is becoming a lot stronger than my left arm, but I did it, yay! What was frustrating was the part of waiting 2 hours for the first rise, and then constantly deflating the dough in the refrigerator for another 2 hours, then needing to wait for the dough to rest overnight before shaping and allowing for another rise before baking. Still, they still came out beautifully and they were well-received, yay! Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of the inside of the bread, but it was definitely one of the softest breads I've ever made!

So, for the BBQ, I used the left-over crust dough from the berry galettes for an apple crostata. It was fairly tasty. It's basically the pie crust, apples (I used granny smiths, as per the usual apple affair), and a cinnamon-sugar crumb topping.



Then, I wanted to use up all the lemons I had bought from Berkeley Bowl earlier in the week!



So, I used them and almond meal to make a lemon torte:



Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a picture of it sliced, but the torte had a nice, dense crumb. This lemon torte is not the flourless type of torte, but does use almond meal with the flour. I think it was pretty darn good, especially with the lemon glaze, yum.

Oh yeah! I had bought almond meal from Trader Joe's, and I had actually used it to make more banana bread for somebody who was diabetic, so I had used whole wheat flour and substituted almond meal for half of the flour, reduced the sugar, etc. It was supposedly received very well, so yay. In fact, I actually baked TWO loaves of banana bread on the same day, hehehe.

Hopefully loading this page wasn't getting ridiculous with all the pictures. Now I need to decide what to make next in my sparkling clean kitchen... :)

Backpacking and Banana Bread

Yay alliteration! ...Kind of.

So in the past week or so, there has been some banana bread and backpacking at the Emigrant Wilderness. The backpacking was amazing. Three of us, Mike, Ben, and I, went to the Emigrant Wilderness to go on a supposed 3-day backpacking trip. Seeing as this isn't a backpacking blog (unlike my travel blog), I'll just give a brief account. Basically, a 3-day backpacking trip was turned into a 2-day backpacking trip, but highlights of the trip involved:

Three people crammed into what was supposedly a queen-sized bed, but I swear it was a full-sized bed in kind of a creepy hotel in Jamestown:



Amazing views of granite landscapes and of gorgeous lakes:



And lots of snacking under beautiful weather:


Photograph courtesy of Benjamin Bracamonte

I look tired and miserable there, but I swear it was a blast--the whole 6.5 miles in and 6.5 miles out. :)

That said, I had made a banana bread the day before heading out. It was great--I had tried out this new banana bread recipe found on a baking community (Unfortunately, it is a locked post, and I do not feel comfortable re-posting other people's recipes without giving proper references, I will not be posting the recipe) and had only tried it out once. It was a hit--it was moist, without being overly dense and heavy. This time around, I switched up the ratios of the ingredients a bit, substituted ingredients, and used only white whole wheat flour since I was still out of all-purpose flour. Personally, I think it turned out even better than the original recipe. :P


Whole Wheat Banana Bread

Isn't it gorgeous? The texture was great, and was the perfect way to use up the last 3 bananas that were definitely turning black. I think I always insist that my roommate buy bananas (I don't really eat them, but he likes them), just so that I can make banana bread.

That's all for now--mostly cooking has been backpacking pantry including tuna from a bag, instant oatmeal, and experiments with cous-cous. I hope to be making a nice loaf of bread soon, because it's something that's definitely missing in the apartment. AND, I just got all purpose flour from Costco, so yay!