Plantain Chocolate-Chip Muffins

So I'm a muffin addict and I've been using up some plantains I bought, so here are plantain & chocolate chip muffins.

2 cups white flour

1 1/2 cups wheat germ

4 tspns baking powder

dash salt

1 cup chocolate chips

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup milk

1 cup chopped plantain

1/4 cup brown sugar

2 eggs

Take your plantain, chop it up, and toss it with the sugar to soften. If you're on top of the game, do this a half hour or more before you start the rest of the stuff so they have time to soften in the sugar. Start by mixing your dry ingredients together in a bowl, then put the butter, milk, and plantain in a food processor or blender and zap it up smooth. Mix the eggs in with the wet stuff (pulse quickly or just mix in with a spoon), then dump the wet stuff in with the dry stuff, and mix just until combined. Portion out into a greased muffin tin, makes 12 muffins. Bake fifteen minutes or so at 350ºF or until a knife/toothpick comes out clean when inserted in the center of a muffin.

Honey Cookies

Honey is pretty awesome. I don't know if it has any health benefits, and I'm purposefully not looking it up because I want to maintain my delusions that it somehow makes me well to eat lots of honey. I mean, it's a natural organic local product, right, it's got to be good for me?
Anyways, I made some honey cookies because I wanted to make some tasty cookies. Here goes!

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 cups honey

1 tablespoon fresh ginger

2 1/2 cups flour

1 cup wheat germ

1 teaspoon baking powder

chopped nuts or chocolate chips for topping

Cream the butter and shortening together, then beat in the honey and eggs. When that's good and mixed, add the flour, wheat germ, and baking powder. Mix until you've got a good cookie dough, then form them into balls on the size of two tablespoons, dip in the chopped nuts or chocolate chips, and bake at 350ºF for 9 minutes. If you want smaller cookies, make 'em smaller and cook a minute or two less. I like big cookies.
I also forced myself to make cookies without chocolate chips in them but decided to top the last batch with chocolate chips anyways because I am a fiend for chocolate chips.

P.S. Serve with black coffee! They are pretty sweet and simple in flavours but pair well with strong simple flavours like espresso.

Baked Eggs

I was thinking about cute breakfast foods the other day and thought that baked eggs with pastry might be a cool thing to make. Ideally, I'd like to make a dozen baked eggs in a muffin tin, but whereas I do not have a dozen eggs worth of egg-eating people around, I've just done two eggs in a ramekin instead. The recipe is actually set for four of these things, but you can always make as many as you actually want and leave the leftover pastry for scraps for later, or even use them to make a sweet breakfast pastry for after the eggs. I've added in some fried mushrooms, onions, and garlic because I'm eating it for supper, but you can augment these with whatever you might put in an omelette (cheese, chives, roasted red pepper, whatever).

Anyways, TO MAKE:
-mix one cup pastry flour with a dash of baking powder and a dash of salt
-cube one half cup butter, then cut it through the flour
-sprinkle three tablespoons water on a little at a time, mixing gently
-turn onto a floured work surface and work slightly until it is just cohesive
-cut into quarters, place in fridge
-fry up half a portabello, two cloves garlic, and half an onion, all minced
-remove pastry from fridge, roll the quarters into circles, then place them in greased ramekins
-portion the fried business into the ramekins, then crack two eggs per ramekin on top, and season with salt and pepper
-bake at 350ºF for half an hour

I've seen another recipe online that calls for putting in one egg, then the bits and bobs, then the other egg, and that gives a cool effect too, but I just prefer the bits on the bottom of the egg.
Also, I like my yolk hard, so take a few minutes (five or so) off the bake time for runny yellows.

Also, in retrospect, the pastry might still be OK with only a third of a cup or butter. Having an eighth of a cup of butter per serving can't be a good idea.

Plantain Pie!

My objective is to be updating this blog every other day now. I didn't keep up while I was away this past half-week, but I've got two things to type up that I baked but didn't blog while living with the vegan kitchener crew.
Keeping up with regular posts means some of these posts will be cool, some will be 'hey bake this in pastry scraps', and some will be 'so this didn't work, but I think I can fix it'. This plantain thing is a bit of all three.
Peel and slice two plantains and toss them in a bowl with one quarter cup sugar and one tablespoon ginger. Cover and set aside.
If you're making fresh pastry, make enough for a two crust pie or so, and add a quarter cup cinnamon for kicks. If not, that's cool.
Say 'Plantain Pie' a couple times aloud in optional assorted accents. Southern drawl is an obvious contender but british paper-boy is also pretty good.
I think 'flat pie' is going to be a theme of mine for a little while. I rolled this out as a pastry braid again, but if you wanted to do a flat-ish pie that's cool too. I just think they're pretty fun and easier to eat. What you're going for is to be able to layer the plantain pieces two slices thick, cover in pastry, and and bake until the pastry's done and the filling is soft, about forty minutes. Before baking, though, brush the top with water and sprinkle with sugar, and maybe more cinnamon if you're feeling reckless.
It is better hot than cold but it is a passable packable lunch-time snack leftover.

Pastry Scraps: Cream Cheese Braid

Another pastry scrap idea, this time doable with a smaller amount of dough. This is using the scraps from the two pies from lunch today, but it's a fairly scaleable idea.
Quick and simple, I rolled the dough out into a rectangle about six or seven inches across and then as long as it would go. To form the braid, I trimmed the edges so this was a proper rectangle, then cut diagonal strips on the sides as per the following diagram:

The grey areas are to be cut off as scrap, the middle rectangle is where the filling goes, the top flap on the rectangle fold down and then all the little flaps on the side fold over the top, alternating sides. Sorry I didn't illustrate this on the picture, but you only cut off the grey areas and between the flaps on the side, the rest of the lines are just scored for reference. When you do this it should become self-evident when you're looking at it. The first time I made such a thing I did a paper cut-out first and folded it to make sure I understood what was going on.
The filling was about a quarter cup of cream cheese and two tablespoons of honey, creamed together and spread on the rectangle, plus a line of jam down the middle. Make sure to leave room around the edges as it'll spread out when you start folding!
When it's been filled and folded, back it at 350F for twenty minutes or so, or until it's done. Whereas this is a scraps project, the type of pastry you're using or the thickness of the pastry really depend on the circumstances, so just bake it till it's done.
You can glaze it with egg white and sprinkle it with sugar before you bake it, or brush it with sweet glaze when it's done, or, what I did was use up the leftover chocolate sauce from previous adventures and top it with that. Slice it into strips cross-ways (not lengthwise!) and enjoy!

Pastry Scraps: Pears & Jam

So I've made four pies this week, which has left me with a nice pile of scraps that weren't quite enough to make a full pie, but I needed to use them up, so I've made this kind of semi-pie thing which is a pretty decent snack.
I took all my scraps, made a ball, and cut it in half, rolling each half thin until I got two pieces that'd just cover the bottom of a pie shell. I then sliced a pear, tossed the slices with three tablespoons of blackcurrant jam and two tablespoons of honey, and put the slices on one of the two pastry pieces (which was now in a pie tin). The edge of the pastry got wetted by some dabs of water, then the other crust went on top, got liberally slashed for steam vents, and it all baked at 350F for 35 minutes.
In the last ten minutes of baking, I stole my mom's idea and put a little pyrex measuring cup on the stove where the oven vents it's heat, and used that to melt some chocolate chips and butter.
When the pastry was done, I took it out, slid it onto a plate, and drizzled chocolate over top. Scrumptious and pretty low-labour for twelve o'clock at night!
Wish I had a camera...

Chocolate-Chip & Buttermilk Muffins

I am lazy. Very lazy. Especially when it comes to breakfast. Most days of the week I am just like 'ughhhh sunshine ughhhh I don't care wait what you expect me to slice bread, put it in the toaster, then spread stuff on it and get my hands sticky with jam and then crunch my way through breakfast'. Sometimes, it is fun to cook breakfast/brunch but most of the time I just do not care. That is why I bake muffins! Make a batch of one or two dozen at night, and you've got breakfast for a couple days to a week!
The requirements for these muffins was that they be fairly heavy and not too sweet, so that I can eat two or three and feel full but not bad.
Here goes!

1 1/2 cups white flour

1 cup whole wheat flour

1 cup wheat germ (not toasted!)

4 teaspoons baking powder

dash salt

2 cups chocolate chips

1/2 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup honey

2 eggs

Cut up the butter and cream it with the honey, then add the butermilk and eggs and mix that together. Combine all the dry things in a bowl, form a well in the middle, then dump the wet things in and mix just until combined. Don't mix too much, but do be sure to scrape the bottom of the bowl for floury pouches.
Plop the batter into a buttered muffin tray, and bake at 350F until done. Uh, I think that's, like, twenty minutes? I just wash dishes and clean up and check the oven until they look done and a toothpick/thin knife come out clean when inserted into a muffin.

YUM.