ellie’s posterous

Final rating: 5/5 stars

Up for next week: Lemon Poppyseed Bread 

Totally unrelated to baking, I came across this article today while surfing the web.  Considering some reader's comments last week, I thought it's timing was funny.  Who says I don't have a sense of humor?  

               

Apparently there is this webite going around called mymomisafob.com where people post things their Asian moms do.  Most of the posts have to do with their Asian mom's having bad grammar or accents that end up with funny results.  I guess there a lot of people who think this site is funny.  I would like to go on record and say that I do not.  I think the site is extremely disrespectful and degrading.  I understand that some people with think I'm just overacting or don't have a sense of humor.  But this is my blog, so suck it.

This week I tried a recipe out of my Betty Crocker cookbook.  Since my husband loves baked apple things, I thought it would be fun to try an apple muffin.  I also happened to near a farmer's market this weekend, so I bought some Mutsu apples.  They were giving out samples, and I thought they would be good baking apples.  They were kind of like Granny Smith apples, but not nearly as tart and a little bit sweeter and very crisp.  They were also very yummy fresh.

           

I wanted to make a website with all this stuff on it so people could find it easily.  But I don't have a website.  So I thought I'd list some of the goodies here for now.  These are sites that are more action oriented, or just kind of interesting.

Well, this week started off a little behind because I read the recipe wrong.  Instead of reading 2 cups of bananas, I thought it just said 2 bananas, so I didn't have enough bananas.  Since I wasn't about to make a whole new trip to the store just for some bananas, I ended up looking online to see if there were any banana bran muffin recipes that used fewer bananas.  So I ended up with this recipe that only needed 1 and 2/3 cups of bananas.  But I pretty much only had a cup of bananas, so I knew the muffins were going to be pretty dry, especially since this recipe only used oat bran and had no flour to lighten it up.  I added a little more milk to compensate for the need for more moisture, but I was scared to add to much cause batter can be tricky stuff.

       

Wow, these bars are sooooo gooood.  The only problem with them is that they're not really something you would want to eat for breakfast.  They're really more of a dessert bar.  So the unfortunate thing is that by the end of the week, I couldn't stand having them for breakfast anymore because it was just too much sugar and sweetness.  But oh my gosh, they really are delicious.  And even better, it's easy to change the type of fruit flavor they are because you can just change the type of preserves you use!  I will definitely make these again, just not for breakfast.

               

Yum yum yum!  We have a winner!  Finally, I am happy to report a recipe that I really liked.  Yum yum yum.  Who doesn't love peaches and bran muffins?  I love both.

       

These breakfast bars had a strange start because it wasn't until I was already making the recipe that I noticed two strange things.  First of all, the recipe calls for a 10 x 6 x 2 inch pan.  What on earth is a 10 x 6 x 2 inch pan?  As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't exist in any normal kitchen.  So I went around and measured all my pans trying to find one that was close to 60 square inches.  The closest I could find is a normal 8 x 8 dish, and so I had to spread it pretty thin to get it to fit.  Secondly, if you go all the way down to the bottom of the recipe, you'll notice that it doesn't tell you anything about baking instructions.  Whoops!  So I used my past experience cooking breakfast bars and cooked them for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees.  

         

This week I tried this recipe.  I substituted raisins with dried cranberries and added a few pecans.  Unfortunately, I have to say the muffins were rather disappointing.  They were just a little too dry, maybe because of the whole wheat flour.  They would have been much better with some honey or better yet, honey butter (yummmmm), but that goes against rule #1 - no spreading involved.  Also, these muffins just didn't have enough flavor.  I really couldn't taste the "orange" at all.  Maybe some orange zest would have helped out.  Also since the muffin didn't have much flavor, the only tasty part was the dried cranberries, and 1/2 a cup was not enough!  By the end of the week, the muffins were just too dry and they'd start to crumble when I ate them, so by the time I got to work I had to spend a minute brushing all the crumbs off my clothes and car seat.  Sorry muffins, but I just can't say that you were very tasty.

             

As the new school year has now arrived, I've decided that I'm sick of eating clif bars for breakfast all the time.  That gave me the idea of trying to bake different types of things (scones, bars, muffins, etc.) that I can eat for breakfast instead.  Then I could also vary it every week and, thus, not feel like I have to eat the same thing every morning since I'm a fan of variety.