Read Your Recipe!
Alternate title: So Easy a Middle Schooler Could Make Them. Seriously. My middle school students make this exact recipe. Now, there are plenty of simple recipes that my middle schoolers make that I wouldn’t deem bloggable, but this is not one. These pretzels have a crisp exterior with a chewy center; the flavor has just a hint of sweetness which offsets the salt so well. I considered playing with additions but then I thought, why mess with perfection?
With this picture and title, I doubt I’ll have to work very hard to convince you how delicious this bread is. My husband averaged four pieces a day and it was gone in a flash – I still have leftover bread flour so I’ll most likely be making it again this weekend. Instead of going on and on about the nooks and crannies and how it’s far and away better than anything store bought, I’ll talk about how EASY it was to make.
I really really really love my pizza dough, seen here, but now that my husband and I have a kid and adore Friday nights “in”, sometimes I just want one big ol’ pizza for the two of us. If I’m going to eat half a pizza, let’s make it whole wheat so I feel a little better about myself. I’ve made this a bunch of times now and am always shocked at the ease and tastiness – definitely not as chewy and yeasty as my normal pizza dough, but close. Do you want a big ol’ less-guilt-but-still-delicious pizza this Friday night? Read on…
True story – when you buy “wheat” bread at the grocery store, all it’s saying is that it’s made from the wheat plant. That wheat is stripped and processed, yielding a flour made mostly from the white fluffy inside of a wheat kernel (called the endosperm). By removing the bran and the germ the flour becomes devoid of most nutrients. Look on the ingredients list – unless you read “whole” in the first three words, the product is not whole grain. Even store-bought whole wheat bread has several unpronounceable ingredients. Can we bypass those unknowns? You bet we can.
Easy cinnamon bread that contains YEAST! Yes, this is a hybrid of a quick bread (a bread leavened with chemical agents such as baking powder or baking soda) and a yeast bread (leavened with yeast, obvi). Yeast can sometimes seem scary, but yeast breads have become my absolute favorite thing to bake! Once you “get it”, it’s permanently “gotten” and you get to create results that make people say, wait, you MADE this bread? This particular bread makes your house smell AMAZING and if my family’s consumption of said bread can speak for anything, we ate the whole loaf in two days.
I’m always on the lookout for new recipes, new ideas. I have yet to pick up a Parenting magazine at the gym, as there’s usually some cooking magazine I’d rather peruse (sorry, Tessa). There are several recipes I’ve made, however, that cease my search for that particular food. Case and point, this pizza dough. I’ve been making it for years, to the point that I no longer use a recipe; it’s taken up permanent lodging in my head. It makes 4 pizzas so it’s best for entertaining – though the dough freezes well (I’ll tell you at what point to freeze). This recipe has been on my site for over a year, but the pictures were terrible and it was hard to follow. Hopefully this new and easier to use recipe will inspire a pizza party at your house in the near future.
I think it’s funny that we only use pumpkin in the fall. It’s like a nod to the original settlers who could only eat pumpkin when they harvested it in the autumn months. The thing is, people, we can find perfectly wonderful canned pumpkin every single day of the year at our local grocery store! Not only should we find it, we should buy it and bake with it! It seems like before the first leaves turn we get hit with a deluge of pumpkin bread/muffin/cake/pie recipes (have you looked at Pinterest lately? Geesh), and I’m happy to say I am going to jump on that (healthy, delicious, seasonal) bandwagon.
No food processor, no standing mixer, no kneading – no lie! All you need is a bowl, a whisk, a spoon, and a baking sheet. Now some recipes I post here barely need the “how-to” pics as the directions are pretty standard; this recipe (and all that use yeast), benefits from the photos. I will show you EXACTLY how it should look so that you know things are working properly. This will make a simple recipe even easier, if that’s possible – and there is nothing tastier than fresh, garlicky, olive-oily bread.
Really, why mess with a good thing? These rolls are basic – a simple, tender dough rolled up with brown sugar and (lots of) cinnamon. Instead of a thin, runny, sugary glaze they are smothered with a thick cream cheese glaze. The glaze is tangy instead of sickly sweet, so it pairs perfectly with the sweet rolls.
Whenever we sell our current home, I am going to make this bread before the open house. If you walked into a house that smelled like this bread, you’d make an instantaneous offer well over the asking price. It’d be a reflex, you’d not be able to help yourself. It smells like cinnamon, and also like Christmas morning. It tastes slightly sweet and yeasty… amazing. The best part is, you don’t need (or, knead, mwahaha) a bread machine to make this!
Okay, listen up. If you don’t have a fun Christmas morning food in mind, you NEED to make these. Direct quote from my mom, who cooks and eats extremely well. “Those rolls were the highlight of my Christmas”. The woman doesn’t mince words.
I’m no dummy, I know that dinner rolls are really easy to buy at the store. I also know that if you are hosting Thanksgiving, the idea of homemade rolls make you hate me. However, if you are attending the holiday at a relative’s house and haven’t offered to bring something yet, say you’ll bring the rolls; you won’t be sorry.
Monkey Bread is basically a varied form of a cinnamon roll. It is made from the same exact yeast dough, but instead of being rolled up and cut it is rolled into balls, dipped in butter and brown sugar/cinnamon, and stuck back together in a pan to be devoured piece by piece.
I heart yeast. It’s super fun. I’ve recently reignited my passion for toasted, lightly buttered rye bread. I’ve made french bread before and other yeast breads, but I’ve never tried rye.
This is my FAVE pizza dough out there. I searched long and hard to find this, and now that I’ve found it, I will share it with you! It is a chewy, crunchy, delicious tasting crust. I’ve made pizzas, calzones, and stromboli with it and it’s not failed me yet!