Dogs and Carrot Bread

So while I was in Chicago, I thought it would be nice to make something for my parents. I decided to go with a healthy carrot bread recipe.  They had all the ingredients and, more importantly, I didn't have to stay in the kitchen while the oven was on.  It was hot and humid in Chicago. I didn't want to be anywhere near the oven. So I made a simple Carrot Bread. It tastes like a carrot cake minus the frosting.  But It's way healthier, and ALMOST from scratch. I used store bought yogurt. This makes a good dessert, breakfast, or snack.

Recipe

Shredded carrots look kinda like shredded cheddar.

1 pound carrots, peeled and shredded
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar (I used half sugar, half honey)
2 tbsp butter, melted
3/4 cup nonfat yogurt
2 large eggs
raisins, nuts, coconut or any carrot cake add ins you like, to taste. I used raisins.

Preheat the oven to 350. If you're in a hot, muggy climate, you'll want to leave the room at this point. But don't. You have carrot bread to make.

Dry ingredients and carrots

One of the best things about this recipe is it's simplicity.  You can pretty much dump everything in a bowl, mix, and go.  I do things a little less haphazardly than that, but not much.

In a large bowl, mix the dry ingredients and the carrots. I added the sugar at this point, even though sugar is often considered a wet ingredient in baking recipes.  

Adding the wet ingredients.

Next, add the wet ingredients. These are the eggs, yogurt, and melted butter.  You can also leave out a little of the yogurt and add some lemon juice if you'd like. I didn't. It tastes good, though. 

Once all the wet ingredients are added, add any add ins like raisins or nuts, and mix thoroughly.  I mixed and then added the raisins, because I forgot. It still worked fine. Or so I've been told.   There's a story coming.

Once everything is mixed, dump it in your VERY WELL GREASED baking vessel of choice.  This makes a good loaf, good muffins, and would probably make good layers for a carrot cake.  Unless you're making muffins and using paper liners, you need to grease the pan well. This cake/bread/muffin likes to stick. 


At this point, nothing left to do but bake the thing.  You're probably sweating from the heat of the oven on an already-muggy day, and want to get as far away from the oven as possible. Or maybe that was just my experience. . . .

Baking Times
This bakes at 350 no matter what form it takes.
- As a loaf like this, it took about an hour. The test is inserting a sharp knife or toothpick into it. If it comes out clean, or with just some moist crumbs clinging to it, you're good to go. I started checking at about 40 minutes.
- As muffins, they take about 20 minutes. Mini muffins would take way less. I don't like mini muffins. They're never moist enough.
- As a cake, a layer would probably take 30 minutes.

Let it cool in the pan until you can handle the pan comfortably. At that point, turn it out onto your enviably pretty granite countertop (the cheap counters work too. so does a plate).   You can either slice it right away, or wrap it in plastic for safe keeping. Once it's sliced into, this goes away fast. It's just that delicious. Or. . .

. . . You come into the kitchen with your mom after taking the dogs for a walk. You notice there's a slice missing so you go ask your dad if he liked it. Because one is always open for critique.  You go back downstairs, and find mom frantically gesturing at you. She's on the phone, but something is wrong. The cake is gone. Even though you both think you know where it is, you ask dad if, perhaps, you were seeing things, and he stashed it somewhere else.  You were not.  But this dog looks incredibly pleased with herself.

It's not that the carrot loaf was put where she could get to it easily. It was up on a counter that is almost chest high on me, wrapped in plastic.  My mother found the plastic on the floor and the cake gone.  There's no way the other dog could have reached. And no way that this dog (Ginger) would have shared.



I remade the carrot loaf as carrot muffins, since 2 of us didn't get to have any. I added walnuts the second time. They were delicious. I didn't take pictures. I was still mourning the loss of my beautiful carrot loaf. Didn't even to get a picture of it sliced and delicious. You'll have to ask Ginger how it tasted. . .

Butter and Jam

As we learned, I was making bread.  And a lot of the bread making process involves waiting. And I'm not always the most patient person. While I was waiting for my bread, I tried cleaning my fridge and came across a jar of my favorite cherry jam.

     
"That'd be good on bread,"  I thought.  "But wait, that surely isn't homemade.  I better make my own."  I had cherries in my fridge, so I tried to come up with a way of making good cherry jam.  All my recipes involve the use of pectin. I had no pectin.  So I experimented and googled, and thanks to the genius of David Lebovitz, I came up with this technique.  I made a few tweaks, but that's just fine.  It's not like he used an actual recipe.

Where he used lemon zest, I used both lemon and orange zest.  Where he used white sugar, I used half brown sugar and half splenda.  Would it have tasted better with sugar only? Quite possibly, but I'm working on losing weight.  I also used significantly less sugar than the "recipe" called for, and just cooked it for longer.  It was absolutely delicious. I finished mine with almond extract, not kirsch. Why?  I had almond extract in the pantry. I didn't have kirsch.

I didn't can my jam in the traditional, will keep for ages kind of way. It's delicious, so I fully anticipate using it quickly. I put it in an old jelly jar I have. It was definitely clean, but not hardcore sanitized.  If I were making the jelly to keep for ages, I'd use more proper canning techniques.

The jam turned out amazingly.  It was delicious on toast in the morning, and was also delicious over yogurt. No, I did not make my own yogurt this week. I had a little bit that needed to be used, and instead of wasting food, I used the yogurt.  I'm imagining this jam as a beautiful filling in either lemon or chocolate cake as well.   Of course that's not healthy.

Along with Jam, I made butter.  It sounds WAY harder than it is. I had some heavy cream in my refrigerator, so I threw it into the mixer with a whisk attachment.  It's just like making whipped cream, only we're WAY over-whipping the cream  I made this butter very lightly salted. I generally don't bake with salted butter since I like to control the amount of salt in my food, but on bread, I like the taste of salted butter. I made it salted, since I know exactly how much salt ended up in the butter.

I brought my cream through beautifully whipped, to chunky and overwhipped, and kept it going.  I wasn't paying attention to the mixer. I was shaping the bread loaves.  When i started hearing liquid sloshing -- ok, when liquid sloshed out of the bowl and hit me in the eye-- i turned around and looked. Here's what I had. The liquid (buttermilk), and the butter had separated. I had beautiful, dense butter clumped in the whisk.  I shaped it into a log, wrapped it in saran wrap, and refrigerated it.  It is DELICIOUS.