Breakfast to go – muffins! Having a batch of muffins made for the week ensures you have a quick and healthy breakfast ready or an afternoon snack calling your name. The dates and raisins make the muffins moist and add huge flavour. I love the addition of the the lemon and orange zest – it just brightens up the flavour of the fruits.
Warm, fluffy, cheese biscuits with a bowl of homemade soup – just what a damp,rainy spring day calls for. These biscuits are simple to whip together and make any bowl of soup a whole lot more satisfying. Using old cheddar cheese elevates the biscuits from simple to spectacular.
These cinnamon buns are a family favourite at our house and quite a few houses other homes we know. Our neighbour at our cottage Gord has been known to hide out in his truck and eat an entire pan by himself and deny to his wife that I had dropped off any cinnamon buns!
Warm cinnamon buns will make anyone happy. You can make the buns up the night before – after rolling and cutting the buns cover them with plastic wrap and put them in the fridge overnight. In the morning pull them out of the fridge when you get up, preheat the oven, jump in the shower and when you get out, pop the pan in the oven and 25 minutes later – heaven!
Bring these to work with you still warm in the pan and you will have smiles on everyone’s faces.
Add some glaze and you have something pretty and delicious!
Do you remember when you could buy a little brick of sponge toffee at the corner store for 5¢? You would nibble at it a little at a time, letting it melt on your tongue making it last as long as possible. If you ate too much your tongue would actually hurt! Can you tell I really like sponge toffee?
Sponge toffee looks like it has the potential to be an intimidating adventure to create, but the recipe only has 4 ingredients. It is all about the chemistry my friends and with a little bravery you can be whipping up a batch in no time at all. Anytime there is melted sugar and a candy thermometer the red flags go up and folks steer away from a recipe, but you can do this!
This is a coffee cake recipe I came up with when Elizabeth was in Grade 5. Her elementary school was having a fundraiser and they made a recipe book to which all the parents and teachers contributed a recipe. That book is still one of my favourite recipe books because you know that each recipe is someone’s family favourite. It is also a nice memento of the those early school years.
Over the years I have changed the recipe up a little, trying to make it a little lighter and I think I have succeeded. The cake is fluffy, full of blueberry and lemon and topped with brown sugar – how much more love can you have in one pan!
Here in Northern Ontario we love our wild blueberries! I spend hours picking them in July and Aug and freeze them to enjoy all year long until the cycle starts all over. No one else in my family will help pick but they sure are eager to eat them! The leaf buds on the branches of the blueberry bushes are just starting to show so fresh blueberries are just a dream right now, lucky I still have a few containers left in the freezer. Summer is coming, hopefully…some day…so in the meantime it is time to start using up what is left from last summer’s harvest.
This blueberry muffin recipe is simple to whip up and makes an amazing breakfast. With the addition of bran to the list of ingredients you can even call them healthy! The recipe calls for natural wheat bran which is usually found near the oatmeal in the grocery store if you aren’t familiar with it.
The lemon zest in the batter is an essential ingredient, at least that is my opinion, whenever you are using blueberries. Then with the lemon glaze on top it just makes the flavour that more intense and creates a good stand-in for dessert as well.
Well my daughter Elizabeth is home from finishing her first year of Law School! We are so happy to have her home for 2 weeks. Tonight her friends came for dinner and it was so great to have all of the girls around the dinner table again. So when I asked her what she wanted for dessert to celebrate with her friends the answer was carrot cake…so carrot cake it is!
This carrot cake recipe has pineapple in it which makes it extra moist and gives it more flavour. The raisins add texture as well as a little chew and of course you can’t have a great carrot cake without cinnamon- cinnamon just brings it to the next level.
This quick bread has so many yummy things in it – banana, apple sauce, dates, raisins, oatmeal- the list just goes on. My friend Karen had shared a new recipe with me that she said I had to try as it was fantastic. So Saturday morning at camp I decide to give it a try and as usual I didn’t have all of the ingredients and ended up changing it up quite a bit and I have to say the result was a definite winner. Someday I will make Karen’s recipe in it’s original version ( it has different yummy things in it) but this one is going into the favourites category for breakfast.
It is very moist and will keep well for a few days, if it lasts that long!
Sugar cookies with a hint of lemon layered with a thick topping of butter frosting – that says YUM! My dad said they tasted like cupcakes in a cookie, I think he is right.
These cookies have very simple ingredients but put together they make something simple taste soft and delicious. I prefer to roll the dough into a log and wrap in plastic wrap and let the flavours meld together for a while in the fridge before I bake them. The dough for this batch was actually refrigerated for 2 days before I baked them. It makes it easy to then just slice and bake, no rolling, no scooping, no rolling balls – just easy slicing.
I first tasted Pulla bread, known in Northern Ontario as Finn bread, when I purchased it a Christmas craft sale about 15 years ago. I had never tasted the spice cardamon before that, but I was hooked. Cardamon is peppery, but is perfect in baking. It even looks like flecks of pepper through the dough. The bread was as beautiful as it was tasty. Braided bread, who knew there was such a thing.
I had made it quite a few times after that using recipes I had found in local cook books and later on-line, but then the Bon-Appetite issue with their Master Sweet Dough recipe arrived! That was it, the perfect recipe for Pulla!
