English Muffins

We've really been working on eating organic foods lately. I'm tired of putting food in my body that has been made with weird chemicals with unpronounceable names. To me, there's nothing more organic than handmaking and kneading bread at home AND what can be better than homemade English Muffins with those tasty nooks and crannies topped with some freshly churned herbed butter? Also, we're in our bread and baking curriculum at school and have been teaching the kids about yeast (what fun!), so needless to say I'm in bread making heaven! Some of the recipe I've been doing at home but just have not gotten a chance to post include: homemade dinner rolls with freshly made butter, braided challah, herbed focaccia, and I also perfected my pizza dough recipe, which I will have to post. But anyway, I digress. For the English Muffins, I found two recipes online and, of course, in true form, I didn't like either of them by themselves so I decided to combine/amend them. The recipes came from petebakes, which is a baking blog I frequent, and The Culinary Institute of America. Oh and the best thing about this recipe is that it is only 6 ingredients and most items can be readily found in the pantry already!

Ingredients:
1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 cup water, warmed to 110F
2 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup cornmeal, or as needed
Oil
Directions:
1- Place the yeast and warm water in the bowl of a mixer and stir to completely dissolve. Let the yeast proof until foamy, about five minutes. Add the flour, butter, sugar, and salt to the yeast mixture.
2- Mix the ingredients until the dough comes together. When it starts to come together, begin to knead the dough on a floured surface for 10 mins. (That's the proper way, but I usually knead right in the bowl to save clean up!)
3- Shape the dough into a ball and place it into a lightly greased bowl. Cover with plastic wrap and let the dough rise in a warm place for an hour.
4- After an hour, punch the dough down one or two times.
5- Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces and shape into balls and flatten the balls into discs.

6- Sprinkle cornmeal onto a cookie sheet and coat both sides of the discs with cornmeal.
7-Cover with saran wrap and let them rise for another hour.
8- Heat the oven to 350 F and heat up a skillet on medium heat on the stovetop. Brush the skillet with oil and gently transfer the discs to the skillet a few at a time.
9- Allow them to cook on the skillet for 5-8 minutes, until the bottoms are nicely browned. Flip and cook the other side for about 5-8 minutes more.
10- When the muffins look as if they are about to burn, remove them from the skillet with a spatula and transfer quickly to a baking sheet. Bake at 350 for 5-8 minutes. Do no wait until all of the muffins have been cooked on the skillet before moving them to the oven – as the first batch is baking, move the second batch of muffins to the skillet.
11- Transfer the baked muffins to a cooling rack and cool before slicing or serving. Store them as you would muffins you buy in the store – in a sealed Ziploc bag in the fridge or freezer.
Have fun:)

Super Easy Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

If I had to pick my all time favorite confection, it would have to be Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. When I think about, I have to wonder why it took me so long to make homemade cups since they're just so easy! I wish I would have taken pictures, but they were gone before I even thought about it! Next time...

To make these delicious treats, you only need 5 simple ingredients and mini cupcake liners. This recipe adapted from Have Cake, Will Travel will make about 12 peanut butter cups. Now, I have to say that these came out perfectly fine without tempering, but if you want a nice crunch on the outer shell and also prefer not to have the chocolate melt in your fingers, I would temper. I definitely plan on doing that next time I make these.

Ingredients:
12 mini cupcake liners
3/4 cups semisweet or milk chocolate chips.
1/2 cup peanut butter + an additional spoonful to add to the melted chocolate
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
pinch sea salt or plain salt

Melt the chocolate in the microwave stopping the microwave often to stir the chocolate so it does not burn. Or melt the chocolate over a double boiler, which is my preferred method. Or you can temper the chocolate. After the chocolate is melted, let it stand to cool for a minute and then add in the extra spoonful of peanut butter. Once the PB is incorporated, take a spoon and coat the bottom and the sides of the cupcake liners. Use enough to make a thick outer shell, but not too much that you don't have enough to go on top of the peanut butter. Once all the papers are coated, stick them in the refrigerator and start to put together the peanut butter filling.

For the filling, mix the last four ingredients in a small bowl. It should look like a paste almost.

Check to see if the shells are hard. If they are, remove them from the refrigerator and put a spoonful of the peanut butter filling in each shell. After all the shells have filling, pour the rest of the chocolate over the tops of each cup, making sure there is no peanut butter showing. Put back in refrigerator to harden. You may have to re-melt the chocolate.

Have fun:)

Chocolate Truffles with a Hard Outer Coating

I found a super easy truffle recipe online so I decided to make truffles on this snowy Saturday, but I didn't really like the chocolate combination the recipe called for and I also didn't like that the outer coating chocolate was not tempered, so I decided to change that as well.



The recipe is adapted from The Pioneer Woman (http://thepioneerwoman.com/cooking/2009/10/chocolate-truffles-with-sea-salt/), but I've changed some of the essentials.

Truffles
8 oz bittersweet chocolate. Depending on what you like, you can use 60% cacao, but I bought 70% at the store because I'm not as much of a fan of 60%.
8 oz semi sweet chocolate.
Small can of Sweetened Condensed milk

Over a double boiler of simmering water, add the chocolate and the sweetened condensed milk. Keep mixing until totally melted. Put in the refrigerator for about 2 hours so it can become workable. After 2 hours, take chocolate out of the refrigerator and roll chocolate into small balls. This will become the middle of the truffle.

Once all the chocolate is rolled into small balls, it is time to temper the chocolate. Tempering means heating and cooling chocolate to dip or coat things. Tempering will also give chocolate a nice shine and won't melt in your fingers. Those truffles from Godiva and Lindt have a tempered chocolate coating. When you temper, it just means that you are distributing the crystals evenly in the chocolate. For tempering, you need a candy thermometer. Make sure it measures temperatures under 100 degrees as well as over.

While the process of tempering is easy, you have to remember that chocolate is very very picky.

Here is the method I use to temper chocolate as adapted from Ghirardelli's website:

Grate or chop the desired amount of chocolate. Place two-thirds of the chocolate in the top pan of a double boiler. Heat over hot, not boiling, water, stirring constantly, until chocolate reaches 110°–115°F.
Place the top pan of the double boiler on a towel. Cool to 95°–100°F. Add the remaining chocolate to the top pan, stirring until melted. The chocolate is now ready to be used for molding candies, coating, or dipping.
When you take the chocolate off the stove and start dipping, it cools very quickly. Stay near the stove and warm the chocolate on the double boiler every so often so it does not harden as you dip. It is very hard to get the chocolate as perfect as the store bought truffles, but that's what makes these special. Let them sit out for awhile to harden. Immediately after dipping each truffle, you can add a topping to it, like toasted coconut or nuts or anything else. You might want a friend to help you with this part because like I said, properly tempered chocolate will harden quickly. So irresistible!

have fun:)