What are You Baking the Week of September 9, 2018?

[BakerAunt]

I will not be baking again until tomorrow, but for those of you who are, here's the start of this week's thread.

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[BakerAunt]

On Sunday evening, I decided to try a new recipe and mixed up the dough for Graham Crackers. I am using the recipe in Peter Reinhart’s Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor (pp. 296-297). He says that the crackers taste better if the dough is held overnight at room temperature, so I will wait to roll and bake them until tomorrow.

[BakerAunt]

On Monday morning, I baked the graham crackers. The dough was very difficult to roll out. I had to resort to Big Bertha—my heavy maple rolling pin from Williams-Sonoma—to get it to where I could roll it with the regular pin and dough wands. I had added 1 Tbs. extra flour last night when kneading the dough by hand. Perhaps I should not have done so, but the dough was forming a paste all over my hands. Maybe it would be best to make the dough in the mixer, give it a short rest period, flatten it into a rectangle, and put in a shallow oiled dish for its overnight rest. The recipe does not make a lot. I got 16, with an average size of 3 ¼ inches by 2 ¼ inches, and with dough rolled to 1/8 inch, they are thick. These are hard crackers and would work well for dunking. I like the flavor, so I will try the recipe again.

[BakerAunt]

Wednesday afternoon, I baked Toffee-Pumpkin Snack Cake, a recipe from Better Homes and Gardens Fall Baking (2017), p. 28. I discovered it last year, and I think this is the fourth time I've baked it. The recipe is more than half wholegrain and seeds (spelt, buckwheat, chia seed). It’s not bad in the saturated fat department, as it uses pumpkin puree (from my freezer) and canola oil. The difficult ingredient is the toffee pieces, which have 2.5 g saturated fat per Tbs. My half recipe of the cake calls for ½ cup. I’d rather spend my precious saturated fat allowance elsewhere, so I cut the amount in half. I also decided to try reducing the canola oil from ½ cup to 1/3 cup. I make my own pumpkin puree, so it tends to be moister and less dense than the canned pumpkin. I put some Autumn sprinkles on top. If cut into 8 pieces, each piece has 2.5 g of saturated fat. The cake was fine in taste and texture without that additional oil, so I will use that modification in the future. It does seem a little too sweet, so I might cut the sugar by 2 Tbs. next time.

[RiversideLen]

BakerAunt, one of the things I do is to reduce oil in box cake mixes by subbing 1/2 of it with plain Greek yogurt. It works pretty good.

Yesterday I made a box vanilla cake (Arrowhead Mills). I added a generous teaspoon of cake spice from The Spice House and as stated above, subbed 1/2 of the oil with Greek yogurt. I used walnut oil.

A little while back I was looking at peach pie recipes on youtube and was jealous of the nice stoneware pie plates some people used so I went on Amazon to look at them (and bought one). While there I ran across a video posted by Emile Henry about an apple pie that has a cinnamon bun top crust. It isn't a yeasted top crust like you would expect from cinnamon buns, but rather it is a standard pie crust that you turn into cinnamon buns, then roll it out to the size you need and put that on top of the pie. I will try to post the link here,

Cinnamon Bun Apple Pie

I want to make it soon!

[BevM]

This afternoon I baked KAF's Old-fashioned Apple Cake with brown sugar frosting. I used some red delicious apples that needed to be used. It's really sweet so a small piece is perfect. Part of it will go home with my kids this weekend. It's probably jam-packed with calories, but who's counting? !!!

[BakerAunt]

Len--thanks for the tip about nonfat Greek yogurt. I like it, so I always have it in the house.

Oh, that apple cake sounds so good, Bev. It's good you have people to help eat it!

[skeptic7]

I've reduced fat by substituting in apple sauce or pumpkin puree or some other sort of liquid. I rarely try to completely remove fat, but I had a carrot cake that went from 1 1/4 cup oil, to 1 cup applesauce and 1/4 cup oil. Also a lot of recipes can have oil reduced without doing many more changes. I have a recipe that uses 1/4 cup oil which can be reduced to 3 tablespoons.
I've made yeast breads and quick breads without any fat -- these should be eaten quickly as they dry out faster. I don't do this often but I had a quick bread recipe that would normally have 1 cup zucchini and 1/4 cup oil, and I made it with 1 1/4 cup zucchini instead. The only fat in that bread came from the egg.
I was cooking for a friend on a low fat diet, I did quick breads with pumpkin puree, and applesauce.

[BakerAunt]

I tried baking Bernard Clayton's Multi-Grain Bread from New Complete Book of Breads (revised and expanded), pp. 2228-231. The sad details can be found in the Adjusting Another Bernard Clayton Bread Recipe thread.

[RiversideLen]

Yesterday I made the cinnamon bun apple pie. I used Honeycrisp apples. The pie in the video is prettier than mine, but they may have made several dozen of them to get a photo worthy one. The cinnamon roll top crust is more show then taste. It came out kind of hard. It's possible the fault is the crust recipe I used (I used an oil recipe, 2 1/2 cups of flour and a half cup each of oil and milk). The pie in the Emile Henry video uses a store bought refrigerated crust.

The pie itself is good, it's just that the top crust wasn't worth the effort.

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[Mike Nolan]

An interesting idea, probably better done with pie dough, which shouldn't get hard.

A shortbread dough might have worked, too, since it's closer to pie crust than bread dough.

[BakerAunt]

Last year I made a peach cobbler recipe that had cinnamon-swirl biscuits on top. Of course it uses butter, as it is a biscuit dough. It baked at 375 for 25 minutes.

[Mike Nolan]

A cobbler generally doesn't bake as long as a pie does, so the cinnamon roll idea on top is more likely to work.

[RiversideLen]

The top crust has softened up since it's been covered but it still doesn't taste like cinnamon buns. Like I said, it's more show then substance. I had to try it, once.

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