cinna-brunch!

After puttering around in many an airport with the smell of Cinnabon permeating the air, it was time to answer the craving with a Sunday cinna-brunch.


I've had this long time fear of making cinnamon rolls. Something about yeast and me with a rolling pin. I've had a recipe bookmarked for years, but never went through with it. Fortunately the baker scientist in me finally won over and I made TWO versions of cinnamon rolls for direct comparison. If you're gonna cinna-brunch, you might as well go big.

And what did I find out? Cinnamon rolls are fun and kinda easy to make. And if you make two batches you have 24 rolls. Which means you just made up to 24 friends.

I went with a straightforward recipe with a buttery dough filled with cinnamon and brown sugar, and a fancier one from Saveur that involved folding cream cheese into the dough (a la croissant style), maple syrup, and cloves.

The verdict? Anything smeared with cream cheese frosting straight out of the oven is kinda amazing. Both were deliciously soft, fluffy, and all-over-your-face sticky. The Saveur one was considerably more work, but not actually better - the fancy touches didn't really stand out. Cinnamon rolls aren't a subtle food, after all.

Get the recipe from Smarticus, charming vitriol and all!

Also, check out imafoodblog.com or YeastSpotting for other Saccharomyces inspirations.

research

Researcher translation #23: I'm going to a conference = I'm renting a car and going beach hopping on the research slush fund. This is how I learned about my new found love of chocolate covered frozen bananas.

They dip frozen bananas in melted chocolate on the spot, then roll it in your choice of toppings before the chocolate hardens. I opted for everything. Why hold back?

Chocolate-covered frozen banana rolled in chocolate and rainbow sprinkles, peanuts, walnuts, almonds, Oreos, and Heath bar. Hooray, summer!

spritely ginger spice cookies

"Only once the cookie jar is full can the brain be filled." - fortune cookie

Okay, I made that up, but it's true. I needed these cookies to study, paper write, and generally function. True story. When your pantry is plundered after a week of deadlines, these ginger spice cookies are the open arms you turn to.

The cookies are sneakily seductive, showcasing a melange of fresh ginger, molasses, and cardamom. A little bit of cocoa powder melds the spices together. Fattened up with oil and yogurt, they bake up light and soft.

For a fancy schmancy touch they are topped with coarse salt and rolled in rapadura, an unrefined, ungranulated cane sugar. It looks a bit like sand, has a slightly fruity smell, and tastes just barely sweet, practically unrecognizable as anything we usually perceive as sugar. The most fascinating part is that it leaves an almost effervescent feeling in your mouth. The sensation of lightness complemented the softness of the cookie really well. Sucanat is a very close, slightly more common rapadura analog. If you see some, I definitely suggest trying it!

Spritely Ginger Spice Cookies

Rather adapted from Prudence Pennywise

1/2 cup canola oil

1/4 cup yogurt

1 cup granulated sugar

1/4 cup molasses

1 tsp fresh ginger, grated

1 egg

2 cups all purpose or whole wheat flour

¼ cup cocoa powder

2 ½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp cinnamon

½ tsp cardamom

½ tsp cloves

¼ tsp salt

rapadura

coarse salt

Preheat oven 350 F.

Beat together oil, yogurt, sugar, molasses, and ginger. Next, beat in the egg. Hooray emulsifications!

In a separate bowl, mix all the dry ingredients together. Slowly add this flour mixture into the oil mixture and stir. The dough will be pretty sticky, so chill in the fridge for at least 30 minutes.

Scoop out ping pong sized dough balls, roll them in rapadura, and top with a few grains of coarse salt. Bake approximately 12 minutes - shorter if you want a softer cookie, longer if you like it crunchy.

blackberry banana bread

Last week I took a glorious four day weekend to Seattle, but in order to get there I baked this bread up to swap for airport transportation services. This bread is gorgeous with the red and purple of the berries and green flecks of pumpkin seeds. The blackberries give a nice tart bite to the richness of banana bread, and couldn't be easier to mix up.


Blackberry Banana Bread

8 tbsp unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup plain yogurt
1 tsp vanilla extract

1½ cup whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon
½ tsp nutmeg

1 cup mashed, very ripe bananas (2-3 bananas)
½ cup toasted pumpkin seeds
1 cup blackberries

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter a loaf pan.

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs and vanilla, beating well. Mix in yogurt.

In another bowl, mix dry ingredients together and add to butter mixture. Blend well. Add bananas. Mix, mix, mix. Stir in the pumpkin seeds. Gently fold in blackberries and pour into the pan.

Bake 45-60 minutes, until the middle springs back when you push down on it. If it's getting too brown and it's not done, cover the loaf with foil and keep baking.

Woot!

basic brownies

I know brownie baking is very much a practice of personal preference, and there's no pleasing everyone. I'm a corner piece gal myself. We made a double batch for the Food Championship aftermath lunch, and they were just the right amount of fudgy and cakey to please most palates. I suppose the palate also adapts in the face of free brownies, but I think they were pretty solid by any standard.

This recipe uses one of my favorite baking with chocolate tricks by incorporating coffee into the batter. Nevermind that I've never worked a coffeemaker before and had to ask one of my cohorts to do it for me. Grad school is about discovery, right? The astringency of the brew balances the richness of the chocolate and adds a nice warm undertone of something good you can't quite put your finger on. The use of brown sugar instead of the standard white is a nice touch. This recipe happens to be vegan, too.

The brownies are fairly sticky, so I highly recommend lining your pan with parchment paper, and maybe spraying it, too.

Basic Brownies
Adapted from a source I can no longer find

1 1/2 c all-purpose flour
1/2 c cocoa powder
1 1/2 c brown sugar
3/4 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt

3/4 c coffee
3/4 c soy milk (I use unsweetened)
1/2 c canola oil

3/4 c semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven 350 F.

Mix all the dry ingredients (brown sugar included) together. Combine the coffee, soy milk, and canola oil. Add the liquid to the dry ingredients while stirring. Throw in the chocolate chips or any other brownie flair of your choice.

Pour into parchment lined 9x9-in pan. Bake for about 25 minutes, or to the fudginess of your liking.

rice krispy treats

Rice Krispy treats are possibly one of the few retro childhood pleasures that taste just as good when you're older. I will admit I still drink Nesquik.

Follow the directions straight off the box, and you'll have puffed sticky goodness in 10 minutes flat. For a slightly gooier, sticky treat, throw in an extra handful of marshmallows. A handy (ha ha!) trick I learned from my baking maven classmate is to wet your hands before patting down the melted marshmallowy cereal mix in a pan. It's allll sugar, so wet hands won't stick.

P.S. 10 oz marshmallows = 4 cups

watermelon casualty #1

In attempt to start research strong, I went out today in search of watermelon. Upon returning to lab to drop off the cucurbitaceae cornucopia, this guy rolled out of the trunk and hit the pavement. Bad sign of things to come? This could be a lonnnng summer...

At least the fault line looks pretty cool. "Failure analysis of seedless watermelon varieties" sounds like a much more interesting thesis...