Chasing away the Monday blues...

Its Tuesday and around here, that can only mean one thing -  time for Tuesdays with Dorie! This time, we got a break from the cake making and were tasked with making biscuits, a recipe chosen by Ashley from eat me, delicious. Given that at the time I heard what the recipe for this week was going to be I still had three quarters of a cheesecake sitting in my fridge, I was thankful to be making something that had a chance to be finished in this household of two.

Rather than leave this to the last minute, I decided to wake up early on Sunday morning to make these biscuits as an accompaniment to breakfast. Note I said "accompaniment" and not actually breakfast itself. You see, M's favourite meal of the day is breakfast. He often tells me in fact that he goes to bed looking forward to his bowl of cereal / granola / muesli in the morning. So you can imagine that replacing his cereal with biscuits would not have won me any popularity contests here.

In hindsight, I needed have worried. Contrary to some of the earl responses I read on the TWD blog, I thought the biscuits turned out beautifully. Whether eaten plain or with a generous helping of creamy French butter, the biscuits were divine. I had halved the recipe in order to minimize the amount of wastage, and all 7 biscuits were quickly devoured by M and myself. For those of you must know, M had 5 and I had just 2.

Pecan Sour Cream Biscuits

From Baking: From my home to yours

2 cups all-purpose flour (or 1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour and 1/3 cup cake flour)

1 tablespoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 cup (packed) light brown sugar

5 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 10 pieces

1/2 cup cold sour cream

1/4 cold whole milk

1/3 cup finely chopped pecans, preferably toasted

Getting Ready: Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Get out a sharp 2-inch-diameter biscuit cutter and line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat.

Whisk the flour(s), baking powder, salt, and baking soda together in a bow. Stir in the brown sugar, making certain there are no lumps. Drop in the butter and, using your fingers, toss to coat the pieces of butter with flour. Quickly, working with your fingertips (my favorite method) or a pastry blender, cut and rub the butter into the dry ingredients until the mixture is pebbly. You'll have pea-size pieces, pieces the size of oatmeal flakes and pieces the size of everything in between-- and that's just right.

Stir the sour cream and milk together and pour over the dry ingredients. Grab a fork and gently toss and turn the ingredients together until you've got a nice soft dough. Now reach into the bowl with your hands and give the dough a quick gentle kneading-- 3 or 4 turns should be just enough to bring everything together. Toss in the pecans and knead 2 to 3 times to incorporate them.

Lightly dust a work surface with flour and turn out the dough. Dust the top of the dough very lightly with flour, pat the dough out with your hands or toll it with a pin until it is about 1/2 inch high. Don't worry if the dough isn't completely even-- a quick, light touch is more important than accuracy. 

Use the biscuit cutter to cut out as many biscuits as you can. Try to cut the biscuits close to one another so you get the most you can out of the first round. By hand or with a small spatula, transfer the biscuits to the baking sheet. Gather together the scraps, working with them as little as possible, pat out to a 1/2-inch thickness and cut as many additional biscuits as you can; transfer these to the sheet. (The biscuits ca be made to this point and frozen on the baking sheet, then wrapped airtight and kept for up to 2 months. Bake without defrosting-- just add a couple more minutes to the oven time.)

Bake the biscuits for 14-18 minutes, or until they are tall, puffed and golden brown. Transfer them to a serving basket.

Makes about 12 biscuits

Pumpkin Harvest

Since my previous experiment with pumpkin turned out so well, I’ve been looking for opportunities to use pumpkin in my baking. If I lived in the US, this wouldn’t be a problem since pumpkin features so heavily in Thanksgiving cooking. Thankfully, Sugar High Friday comes to the rescue as the theme for the 37th SHF is The Beta Carotene Harvest. This episode is hosted by Leslie of Definitely not Martha. I very nearly missed the announcement altogether but am glad that I found it just in time to squeeze in an entry this past weekend.

Looking through my treasure trove of recipe books, I found a scrumptious sounding recipe in a book that I really like but haven’t made anything from recently. That’s the problem when you have over 100 cookbooks fighting for your attention and not enough time to try all the recipes and not enough stomachs to feeds.

This time, rather than pairing pumpkin with the traditional mix of spices such as cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg, the recipe simply calls for pumpkin and orange juice. Yet, although surprising simple, I found the cake exceedingly flavourful. I think I’m really starting to develop a love for all things pumpkin. Best part is since this cake is called a breakfast cake, I feel like I’ve been given the green light to substitute this for my daily bowl of cereal.


Pumpkin and Orange Breakfast Cake
From In the Sweet Kitchen

1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 tbsp finely grated orange zest
3 large eggs, two of them separated, all at room temperature
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cake flour
2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Preheat the oven to 350F. Butter a 9-inch fluted tube pan and set it aside. Cream the butter, sugar and orange zest together until light and fluffy. Add the whole egg and the two egg yolks, one at a time, beating well and scraping down the sides of the bowl between each addition. Beat in the pumpkin puree.

Sift together the flours, baking powder an salt. Add to the pumpkin batter in three or four stages, blending gently but thoroughly after each. Stir in the final addition of dry ingredients by hand if you have been using a mixer, so as not to overwork the batter. In a clean, small bowl, whip the egg whites until they hold soft peaks. Fold into the batter, then scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the surface. Bake in the centre of the oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or until the top of the cake is springy when lightly touched, the sides are beginning to pull away from the sides of the pan and a wooden skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack and cool completely.

This cake keeps very well for several days, well wrapped, and it freezes beautifully for up to 2 months.

Makes 10 servings

My favourite meal of the day

My favourite meal of the day, hands down, is breakfast. Unless of course you consider brunch a meal, in which case brunch would win. But since brunch is really a combination of two meals, I think it doesn't really count.

I'm not quite sure when my love for breakfast came about. In fact, growing up it used to be the one meal of the day that I always skipped. At that time, the extra 15 minutes of sleep that I could get by skipping breakfast were just more important. Now I know better and I'm sure you have also seen the countless studies that have shown breakfast to be the most important meal of the day. Not that I need a reason to want to eat breakfast anymore. You see, sometime in the last few years, I've developed a love affair with cereals and granola.

It probably started out with Post's Blueberry Morning cereal. Prior to that, much of my cereal eating had been confined to kiddy favourites such as rice krispies and frosted flakes. Blueberry Morning showed me there was more to cereal than strangely coloured fruit loops and overly sugared cornflakes. Blueberry Morning was my first grown-up cereal.

Last June I discovered a new favourite breakfast combination when I visited Stockholm for the first time - a Swedish granola called Start eaten with fil (a kind of soured milk similar in taste to yogurt but much less viscous). In fact, I was such a fan that I left Stockholm with 2 boxes of Start in my suitcase and since then, whenever M goes back home or I visit Sweden, they are on my must-buy list. I have since discovered that you can buy Start and fil at a little Swedish grocery store in London but it costs at least twice as much. Rather than pay the exorbitant prices, I've discovered a good granola recipe and have modified it to suit my tastes. Its great with fil, regular yogurt or even just with plain milk. In fact, I sometimes even have it for dinner!

Almond granola with berries

4 cups old-fashioned rolled oats
1 cup sliced almonds
1/2 cup soft brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 ground cinnamon
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp sugar
1 cup dried berries

Preheat the oven to 300F (150C).

Mix together the oats, almonds, brown sugar, salt and cinnamon in a large baking pan.

Heat together the vegetable oil, honey and sugar in a heavy saucepan until it just comes to a boil. Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla extract.

Pour the liquid mixture over the oat mixture in the baking pan and stir well to mix.

Place the baking pan in the oven and bake for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally to ensure that the granola browns evenly.

Remove the granola from the oven and leave it out to cool. To encourage the granola to form clusters, refrain from stirring during the cooling process. When cool, stir in the dried berries and store in an air-tight container.