What are You Baking the Week of February 18, 2017?

[BakerAunt]

I baked raisin bran muffins for breakfast this morning, using some of my cultured buttermilk. I cut the salt to 1/4 tsp., and I did not notice a difference.

[wonky]

WOW bakeraunt I believe you can now call that recipe yours'. I hope you love that bread after all those changes. It sounds wonderful.

[BakerAunt]

Wonky--I'm following in your floury footsteps!

[BakerAunt]

For Saturday night's dessert, I baked "Cinnamon-Apple Bars with Peanut Butter Glaze," from KAF's Whole Grain Baking (345-346). I reduced the brown sugar from 1 1/3 cups to 1 1/8 cups, and I reduced the salt from 1 1/2 tsp. to 1/2 tsp. The top glaze is made of peanut butter and honey and is really more a frosting than a glaze. I used Jiff Peanut Butter. For eating, we always use the old-fashioned peanut butter--the kind you stir the oil back into--but most recipes do not work well with the healthy peanut butter.

My husband and I had the same reaction: the peanut butter-honey frosting needs to be deleted. The issue with this recipe is that the peanut butter is so strong it overwhelms the applesauce-spice bars it covers. I will probably make this recipe again, and maybe even reduce the sugar to 1 cup, but instead of the peanut butter-honey frosting, I would use a light vanilla glaze that would let the applesauce and spices come to the fore.

That peanut butter frosting might go well on assertive dark chocolate brownies.

[wonky]

BakerAunt...thank you for that wonderful comment...I'm sure you could beat me hands-down. But I am very tickled by your comment.

Off topic...but I am sure many of you also can fruits, vegies etc. In my younger day, when my kids were all growing up, we had a huge garden, and I canned hundreds of quarts of produce. I also bought pears, peaches, apples by the bushel, and canned those. Since we no longer farm, and the kids are all gone, I haven't done much canning in quite a while. When we moved to town, I gave all of my canning equipment, jars, pressure cooker etc. away to a young mom with 6 small children. I have always missed it tho, and kind of regretted giving everything away. Last fall, my sister and I bought a bushel of pears, and got together to can them. We had a blast. We ended up with 25 pints each. I had forgotten how delicious they were, compared to the ones in the store. Needless to say, I now have 3 pints left. My DH absolutely loves them, and so do I. Long story short, my sister stopped today, and had been at one of the local Amish stores, and ran across huge pears. You could buy them by the pear, or by the bushel. They need a little ripening, but we plan to can at least another bushel. She is also running short. Now we are planning to do peaches, plums etc next fall. I am looking forward to that day, not only because of the canning, but also to spend the day with my sister, doing something we both love.

[chocomouse]

A wonderful story, Wonky. Thanks for sharing. Treasure that time with your sister.

[luvpyrpom]

Bakeraunt - I love the Cider donuts from KAF website. I usually make them as muffins or in the cake pop machine so they come out like donut holes. I skip the maple glaze, just toss them in cinnamon-sugar once I get them out of the oven. I also have made the KAF Baker's grains sourdough bread - not my favorite either but have been making it occassionally to use up the Ancient Grain flour.

I didn't do much baking - mainly eating all the baked stuff I had in the freezer. I did make the KAF Peanut Butter Energy bites. Probably will do more baking next week as I have to feed my starter.

[luvpyrpom]

Wonky, I love your story about canning. I had started canning a few years ago - mainly jams. In the last batch, I also included canning fruit syrups. It's taken me a while to eat them, so in the last year, I had stopped canning. I hope to get back into canning some jams this year but we shall see how fast I can consume the jam/syrups this year.

[BakerAunt]

I also got into canning jams and blueberry pie filling a few years back. No canning happened this summer, as we arrived too late for most of the fruits, and my canning supplies were buried. I've since found them, and I am looking forward to jams this summer--as long as the weather does not yo-yo and a freeze kill the developing fruit.

In the meantime, we are still finishing the last jars of jam from 2016.

Wonky, you are so fortunate to have kitchen time with your sister! My sisters live too far away for that. Your story also makes me think that perhaps I should consider trying to can some fruit this year.

Once canning season starts for 2018 (maybe it already has for Wonky!), let's start a dedicated canning thread.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

We gave away our canning pot a few years back. I've got a 24 quart stock pot that would probably handle all the way up to half-gallon jars, though USDA recommends against canning most things in them.

I prefer to freeze most things, it heats up the kitchen (and the cook) less. I'm still working through the tomato sauce I made last summer, good thing I didn't add salt to any of it.

I've got canned pickles left from several years ago, but I can't eat them any more. :sigh:

[wonky]

BakerAunt...I only wish it was canning season...February in Wisconsin means piles and piles of snow. Sorry, but canned snow does not taste good, and I question it's nutritive value. We got 8 inches of the stuff last Saturday alone. As I look outside, the piles of snow are about 5 feet high. I can see one rose cane...about 4 inches of it..sticking out of the snow. My DH always make sure to blow as much snow as possible on my roses, and he comes through every year. I grow Knockout Roses, and I Love them, so I try to take special care of them to look forward to their massive blooming starting in spring, continuing til a very hard frost in late fall. If you like no muss, no fuss roses, I highly recommend them.

I picked 2 ice cream pails of raspberries this past summer. Some were made into jam, the rest, tray packed and frozen for smoothies and desserts. My son, who loves to pick berries brought me a pail of blackberries also. An aside, he said as he was picking, he thought he had stumbled upon a bunch of bumble bees, and he started to run, as he said he heard them very close. He had a chance to turn around and look, and discovered a pair of Humming birds, in fast persuit of him and, and realized he must have come to close to their nest. He said he had to sit down on the ground to recover from his run. He did however manage to save the berries.

I also do jam's and jelly's, both frozen and canned. We had a thread on the BC re refrigerator pickles, and there were so many good recipes there.

A canning thread would be great. I am sure there are many good tried and true recipes from our fellow bakers. Wonky

[S_Wirth]

Just for you, Wonky:

Refrigerator Pickles Thread from BC

Refrigerator Pickles by jej

[Joan Simpson]

Wonky my Mama canned pear preserves, my Daddy's favorite on toast or biscuits.She also put a can of crushed pineapple in the preserves when they were almost done and that is so good.I made some one time and shared with a best friend and she said she even put it on vanilla ice cream as a topping.I love canning jellies and jams too.

[RiversideLen]

Wonky, when July rolls around, you're gonna wish you canned some of that snow.

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