Baking Frenzy
I spent the weekend baking. I get into these moods every now and again. Suddenly I must check out a dozen cookbooks from the library. I scrounge through them for recipes and off I go to the grocery store--in the daytime, even--and back home to bake, cook, bake. This weekend I checked out brunch cookbooks and suddenly I just had to make bread for the first time. Real bread, that is. With yeast and the waiting for it to rise and the punching down the dough, etc. I made this absolutely heavenly concoction called bubble bread which you bake in an angel food cake pan, parting the dough into 24 balls or "bubbles" that have been coated in melted butter and rolled in a cinnamon/sugar/walnut mix. It's like donuts more than bread. It made me very happy. (But I gave half of it away so I do not develop bubble butt from bubble bread.)
Bubble bread wasn't enough for my baking kick though. In short order, before the bread had even cooled, I was defrosting and draining frozen spinach (it takes forever to get all the moisture out and you can't use damp spinach) in order to make spinach strata---french bread base, spinach middle, cheese on the spinach, more french bread on top, all soaked in an egg and milk mixture, refrigerated, then baked.
But spinach strata wasn't enough either. So today I made apple streusel muffins from the apples my Mom picked at a local orchard. (I had no idea we had local apple orchards in the Phoenix area, but somewhere, somehow, we do.) This was by far the simplest recipe of the trio--your standard flour, sugar, egg, sour cream, cinnamon concoction with apples. I must have been running of out steam at this point because when the muffins were done cooling, I was done baking. And simultaenously the weeked was drawing to a close.
Just call me Julia Child. Go on, call me Julia!
Bubble bread wasn't enough for my baking kick though. In short order, before the bread had even cooled, I was defrosting and draining frozen spinach (it takes forever to get all the moisture out and you can't use damp spinach) in order to make spinach strata---french bread base, spinach middle, cheese on the spinach, more french bread on top, all soaked in an egg and milk mixture, refrigerated, then baked.
But spinach strata wasn't enough either. So today I made apple streusel muffins from the apples my Mom picked at a local orchard. (I had no idea we had local apple orchards in the Phoenix area, but somewhere, somehow, we do.) This was by far the simplest recipe of the trio--your standard flour, sugar, egg, sour cream, cinnamon concoction with apples. I must have been running of out steam at this point because when the muffins were done cooling, I was done baking. And simultaenously the weeked was drawing to a close.
Just call me Julia Child. Go on, call me Julia!