1.5qt Slow Cooker Applesauce

I was given a 1.5qt slow cooker for Christmas. It is tiny and cute, but I have no idea what to make with such things. I spent a while searching for recipes the other day, and I found one for applesauce! I never thought I could be so excited to make applesauce, but yes... applesauce! This is very easy to make and just cooks overnight. You can keep the applesauce in the fridge for up to 2 weeks as well. I may never buy applesauce again.

Applesauce
4 or 5 baking apples
1/4 C water
1/2 to 1 t cinnamon
1/4 to 1/2 C sugar

Wash and peel the apples.I used Cortland apples.

Cut them into cubes or chunks and toss them into a clean 1.5qt slow cooker.

Pour in the water. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Add the sugar. (Cinnamon and sugar amounts are "to taste".)

Turn the slow cooker on low and let cook for 8-10 hours. I stirred it a few times. The applesauce will be chunky. If you prefer thin applesauce, smash down the chunks or use a food processor.

Enjoy!

Apple Cake II

Yes, another apple cake. These old cookbooks have a lot of apple cake recipes, plus I still have a few bags of frozen apple slices in the freezer! Those need to be used up so we can restock the freezer with even more frozen apple slices. I'm also not brave enough to attempt strudel yet. I have a lot of strudel recipes, but they are all intimidating...

This apple cake is good. I can't really give a comparison to the other recipes since I make them so far apart. The best part of this cake is the crumbly goodness on top. The directions to assemble the ingredients were kind of weird at one point, but it turned out nicely. I also like that no mixer is required!

Apple Cake

1 C sugar

1/2 C shortening

1 egg

1 1/2 C flour

1 t baking soda

1/4 t baking powder

1/4 t salt

1/2 C milk

1 t vanilla

4 apples, peeled and diced

1 T butter, melted

1/2 C brown sugar, packed

2 t cinnamon

2 T flour

1/2 C chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

In a bowl, stir together the sugar and shortening with a fork until well blended and kind of fluffy.

Add the egg and mix until combined.

In another bowl, sift together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.

Add the milk and vanilla. Stir until combined. This will be a thick and kind of dry mixture. That is how it is supposed to be, so continue on unfazed.

Place the flour mixture into the bowl with the sugar mixture and combine. Make sure it is decently combined!

Add the diced apples and mix.

In yet another bowl, combine the melted butter, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nuts. Stir until blended.

Pour the batter into a greased 9x9 inch pan. Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture on top.

Bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. If you are using frozen apples, the baking time will increase a bit. Let cool for at least 15 minutes before serving.

Enjoy!

Quick Coffee Cake

I haven't found the perfect coffee cake yet. Fortunately, I still have plenty of coffee cake recipes to use before I attempt to make my own version. This recipe is pretty good. I think I will try it again at some point and use a larger pan. I didn’t follow the directions completely and the coffee cake puffed up a lot in the center. The recipe said to use two pans, but I only used one 9x9 inch pan. Maybe a 9x13 inch will work better.

The “quick” part of the title is accurate. It only takes a few minutes to mix it up and assemble it all together. You may finish the assembly part before the oven is even preheated! The baking time isn’t too long either: only 30 minutes. The brown sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on top is to taste and you can even add some chopped up nuts if you like that sort of thing.

Quick Coffee Cake

2 C flour

3/4 C sugar

2 T unsalted butter, softened

1/4 t salt

1 T baking powder

1 egg

1 C milk

1/4 C butter, melted

1/2 C brown sugar

brown sugar, cinnamon, and nuts to sprinkle on top

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sift together the flour and the sugar. Add the salt, softened butter, and baking powder. Mix together as you would for a pie dough. I used a pastry blender. A fork can be used instead, just press it repeatedly through the flour mixture until the butter is combined in.

Lightly beat together the egg and milk in a separate bowl. Add to the flour mixture and stir until combined.

Pour the batter into a greased 9x9 inch pan (or two 9x9 inch pans or a 9x13 inch pan).

Mix together the melted butter and the brown sugar. Add a bit of milk if it seems thick. 

Spread this on top of the batter.

Sprinkle the cinnamon, brown sugar, and nuts on top.

Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Let cool for 15 minutes before serving. The melted brown sugar gets very hot!

Enjoy.

Sweet Dough - Cinnamon Rolls

Since I decided to take this bread making thing seriously, I did a bit of searching on the internet to find out if I was actually kneading the dough in the proper way. I was doing the "stretch it out with the palm of your hand" thing. Turns out that is the way most people do it, however... It is not the best way. The reason it is a flawed method is because it allows you to add too much flour to your dough. The new method of kneading dough I use is kind of a "pick it up, flip it over, smack it down, stretch it out, and fold it over" method. There is a video below in the middle of the recipe, don't worry.

The video I found came with a recipe by a pretty awesome chef (in my opinion based on my limited knowledge of chefs!). His name is Richard Bertinet and he has a few bread books that I would like to own. The dough is a "sweet dough". I wanted to make the dough but had no idea what to do with it. I made the dough and figured out a plan after it was finished rising. My decision was delicious: I made cinnamon rolls.

This method of making dough uses no machines at all. Just a bowl, a small scraper, your hands, and a clean table. The kneading method is very energy and time consuming if you aren't used to kneading this way! It took me twice as long as suggested in the video and my arms were sore the next day. Maybe in a few months I'll have some muscles from making bread!

Sweet Dough (Link to recipe on Gourmet.com)

1 C plus 2 T milk

1 package dry active yeast

3 3/4 C flour

1/2 stick unsalted butter

3 T granulated sugar

2 t salt

2 eggs

Heat the milk to 120 to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, place the flour in a mixing bowl and sprinkle the yeast on top.

Stir in the sugar and salt. Crumble the butter into the flour mixture.

Pour in the heated milk and eggs.

Stir by rotating the bowl with one hand and scraping the ingredients together with the scraper in your other hand. The dough will be sticky when you are finished.

Watch this video before proceeding to learn how to knead the dough!

Plop the dough out onto a clean surface and start kneading.

Once the dough is smooth and non-sticky, cover it with a bit of flour and form it into a ball. 

Place the dough ball into a lightly floured bowl and let it rise. If your dough doesn't seem to be rising, place it in the oven with the oven OFF and place a bowl of boiling water in the oven as well. Close the door and let it rise until doubled. The hot water will provide a small amount of heat and moisture, two things that yeast loves!

Once the dough is doubled, lightly punch it down.

To make cinnamon rolls, split the dough into two pieces. Roll out one piece of dough to about 1/4 inch thickness. Brush the top of the dough with melted butter and sprinkle a generous amount of cinnamon sugar on top. Roll up the dough and slice into the desired size. Place these slices into a greased baking dish. Repeat with the remaining piece of dough.

Let rise until doubled in size, approximately 30 min to 1hour. 

Bake at 375 for 15 to 20 minutes.  Let the cinnamon rolls cool for about 10 minutes before servings.

Optionally, before serving, make a simple glaze for on top. Do this by mixing 1 cup of powdered sugar with 2 tablespoons of milk and a little bit of vanilla with a fork. If it is too runny, add some more powdered sugar. If it is too thick, add a little bit of milk. Drizzle on top of the cinnamon rolls with the fork you used to mix.

Enjoy!

German Coffee Cake

Here is another coffee cake recipe. You can never have too many of these. At least that seems to be the opinion of all these cook books. There are plenty more and they all seem to vary in some way. Luckily, all coffee cake seems to be very easy to make and, so far, they all have different flavors.

I'm guessing that the ingredient which made this coffee cake German was the nutmeg. I didn't use nutmeg when I made this recipe because most people around here don't like that flavor much. I just doubled the amount of cinnamon. I also didn't put nuts in it. Other than that, it is a very yummy coffee cake!

German Coffee Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Recipe)

2 C flour

1/4 t nutmeg

1/4 t cinnamon

1 t salt

4 t baking powder

3/4 C sugar

1/4 C shortening

2 eggs

1 C milk

1/4 C butter, softened or melted

1 C brown sugar, packed

1 C nuts

1/2 t cinnamon

4 T flour

In a bowl, stir together the flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Set aside.

Mix together the sugar and shortening until well combined.

Beat in the eggs for about 30 seconds.

Alternate mixing in the flour and milk. I did three additions of flour and two additions of milk. Pour this batter into a 9x13inch greased pan.

Stir together the butter, brown sugar, nuts, cinnamon, and flour.

Sprinkle the brown sugar mixture over the batter in the pan.

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting. The cake is very soft and crumbly!

Enjoy!

Cinnamon Coffee Puffs (success!)

With all the failures of baking that have occurred in the process of making posts for this blog, I feel it is only right to redo most of them. The first redo is of the Cinnamon Coffee Puffs. The problem with the first attempt had to do with me using too much flour and not making sure the yeast was properly proofed. If you saw the original post for this recipe, you can tell the outcome was no where near what was intended. This attempt turned out amazing and is definitely what was intended!

I've learned a lot by working with old recipes (most dating to the 1950s or so). One thing I've learned (the hard and failure paved way) is to almost always sift the flour. A long time ago in every kitchen where delicious goodies were being baked, people sifted flour religiously. This was to break up clumps and remove any "impurities". Sifting the flour makes it lighter and the measurements will be more uniform since flour settles over time. So, I suppose, the lesson is to sift flour or you will use too much. Although, some recipes specify to sift the flour before or after measuring, so take care to read closely! Most of these old and cryptic recipes, however, do not. But fear not, you have me to fail multiple times before deciphering the recipe for you.

Cinnamon Coffee Puffs (Printer-friendly PDF Version)
3 C sifted flour
1 packet active dry yeast
1/4 C warm water
1/4 t sugar
1 C milk
2 T sugar
1/2 C margarine
1 t salt
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 t vanilla
1/4 C sugar mixed with 1/4 t  cinnamon

Sift some flour and measure out 3 cups. Set aside.

Place the active dry yeast and 1/4 t sugar into the warm water. Set aside for 15 minutes or so. If the yeast results in a lovely foam, then the yeast is good to use. Otherwise, toss it out and try again.

Scald the milk and pour it over the 2T sugar, margarine, and salt. Let set 10 minutes or until lukewarm.

Add the yeast mixture, eggs, and flour. Mix well.

Add the vanilla and mix well once more.

Cover with a clean, dry dish towel and leave it alone for an hour. It will poof up!

Stir the dough down and drop by spoonfuls into greased muffin tins. Sprinkle the cinnamon sugar mixture on top. Cover once more and let set for another hour.

Bake at 375 for 25 minutes. Cool and enjoy. The recipe suggests serving with applesauce, but I was lacking applesauce and could not try this suggestion. Let me know if you do!

Crumb Cake 2

I have a lot of recipes, have I mentioned that? Most of them are variations of some other recipe in the collection. I didn't count how many crumb/coffee cake recipes I have, but I'm sure there are over twenty. Each one is different, so I can't simplify the list due to similarity.

This is the first crumb cake that I made that is actually crumbly. Not that I made it right, of course. I added too much baking soda. Actually, I imagined that the recipe called for baking soda and baking powder, so I added baking powder when I shouldn't have. It turned out okay. I'm not fond of the flavor of this, but we shall assume that is simply because I made it wrong. I should start giving myself a gold star when I follow a recipe correctly!

Crumb Cake (Printer-friendly PDF Version)
2 C flour
2 C brown sugar (packed)
1/2 C shortening
1 t baking soda
1 egg
1 C sour milk
1 t vanilla
1/2 C nuts and/or raisins (optional)

At this point you may be wondering what "sour milk" is and whether it is something you want to cook with. My 5 minutes of internet research informed me that back in the days when refrigerators weren't common, milk went sour from sitting at room temperature. Instead of tossing out the milk, they made used it in baking. Sour milk isn't something you can buy at a store; it needs to be made.

To make sour milk you need 1 T vinegar (or fresh lemon juice). Place this in a measuring cup. Add milk up to the 1 cup line and stir.

Let it sit at room temperature for 15 or so minutes. It will start to slightly curdle, which is gross.

Place the flour, brown sugar, and shortening in a mixing bowl. Combine these all together into a crumbly mixture. I cut it like pie dough and stirred it with a fork.

Remove 1/2 C of the crumbly mixture and set it aside. Stir in the baking soda into the mixing bowl full of crumbly mixture.

Once the milk is soured, place it into a small mixing bowl with the egg and vanilla. Lightly beat together. Pour this liquid mixture over the crumbly mixture and stir well.

Pour the batter into a well greased cake pan. Sprinkle the top of the batter with the 1/2 C of crumbly mixture.

At this point you can sprinkle the top of the mixture with the raisins and/or nuts. You can also mix these in the batter before pouring it into the cake pan. I know picky people who don't like raisins or don't like nuts, so it had to be obvious which half was which.

Bake at 350 degrees for 25 - 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. The bake time depends on the size of cake pan you use. The larger the pan is, the shorter the cook time.