French Toast

Saturday mornings are now my favorite time of the week. Most of the time, I sleep in or spend it lounging around but every once in a while, I end up actually doing something productive. This morning, I decided to whip up a fancier breakfast than usual with my cousins Henrika and Brianna. So behold our French Toast creations!

Ingredients:

Bread (from the freezer - really, our main impetus to make French toast was to find a way to finish it off)

Eggs

1% Milk

Vanilla flavouring

Ground Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Butter

We gathered together the ingredients based on a few different recipes that we found online.

In terms of proportions, we just added as much as we felt like of each item. We ended up using 6 eggs for 7 slices of bread.

Frying them up on a little butter.

Drizzle a little maple syrup on and we have a deliciously warm, sweet breakfast!

As for the first picture...yes, that is a scoop of ice cream (MarbleSlab Cheesecake Ice Cream!). I found the flavour of the ice cream overpowered my French toast though. I think I'll save it for when I try to make crepes!

A Little Christmas Baking

Blackforest cupcakes with fresh whipped cream topped with crushed candy canes. Yum!

Black Forest Cupcakes

The sour cherry crop this year was not as plentiful as in previous years but I still had enough to make a few batches of cherry filling. With a more limited cherry supply, I decided to be ambitious and try my hand at making Black Forest cupcakes. I've never made stuffed cupcakes before so I wasn't sure if the filling was just going to sink to the bottom and end up being soggy. I was pleasantly surprised to see that my technique of layering cake batter, then filling and then batter again actually worked. I whipped up some cream and shaved a Lindor chocolate on top for decoration and then voila! Looked good and tasted good too! The only thing I think I'll change is that next time, I will add a bit more rum but otherwise, I count this experiment as a success. :)

We start with fresh picked cherries. It's a fair bit of work but incredibly satisfying to harvest your own fruit.

I pitted about 8 cups of cherries by hand. A pair of headphones and some pop music is recommended.

Flour, sugar and cornstarch made up the dry ingredients. Pretty simple.

Then you cook everything.

Lovely, bright red cherry filling - yum!

The tricky part about layering batter-filling-batter is trying not to make a mess.

I've learned over time how much to fill the cups so that my cupcakes are not overflowing.

I was quite proud of myself that the filling worked!

After that, the rest is just decoration. :)

Not bad for our 100th post, eh? Yep, that's right - it took three years but we've finally broken the 100 mark. Time for some (cup)cake to celebrate!

Deluxe Cake Pops

Mmm...four chocolate cake pops with caramel chocolate filling served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, drizzled with chocolate sauce, caramel sauce and topped with pecan nuts and a crispy wafer. It's a fancy restaurant dessert that didn't have a name but boy, did it taste good! :)

Panna Cotta

It's been a crazy busy week at work and when I came home on Friday, I had zero motivation to do anything medicine related. So I decided to make some desserts instead.

Panna Cotta is an Italian desert of sweetened cream thickened with gelatin. I made mine with a hint of coffee and a splash of Tia Maria. Nothing like sugar and dairy to make a person feel better. :)

How Long Does It Take To Make A Chocolate Covered Pretzel?

Answer: Depends on who is making it.

And if it's Emily, Tim and me then the real answer is: a lot longer than it should.

After much debate about how to best melt the candy and some trial and error...we finally read the box. Things went much easier after that.

We eventually did get the knack of it though and produced thirteen beautifully festive pretzels.

Thanks to Emily for providing the ingredients and Tim for the photography. As for me, I just got sprinkles everywhere! :)

Happy New Year, everyone!

It's Cherry Season!

I have a sour cherry tree in my backyard and there is also one at my uncle's place. Each summer, the trees produce a bumper crop of fruit. Two years ago, I picked over 40 pounds of cherries from my uncle's tree alone! There is something beautifully tempting about those glistening red fruits gleaming in the summer sun. Although it is a fair bit of work, I really enjoy the harvest. Of my family, I'm probably the one who spends the most time perched on a ladder filling bucket after bucket. My grandfather was the one who planted the cherry tree over at my uncle's place many years ago and although he has since passed away, every time I pick cherries I feel as if he is smiling down from heaven. Even a suburban girl like me can understand and appreciate how harvest time is a blessing from God. :)

This is what 10 lbs of cherries look like. Yes, I weighed them. :)

So what does one do with 40 pounds of cherries? I give most of them away to friends and family who either eat them straight, bake with them or make sauces, jams or gelatos (yum!) with them. My sister and I have made our share of pies, jams and dried fruit. One of my favorite things to make is a cherry crisp. I am not much of a baker so this easy recipe appealed to me when I first found it. (Okay, the tempting pictures accompanying the recipe also had something to do with it.)

Recently, I made one to bring to a friend's BBQ. I was actually feeling a bit nervous as I was preparing the ingredients because I hadn't baked this in two years and wasn't sure how it would turn out.

A lovely golden brown. 

I should have taken it out about a minute earlier because there were a few crumbs that were burnt but all in all, looking pretty good.

As I wrote to a friend in an email: "Baking is an act of faith. You mix all the ingredients, pour it in a pan, say a prayer over it and then put it in the oven. You can't do anything to fix it while it bakes. Then when it comes out, you have to trust that it tastes okay because you can't really cut a piece out to try it before taking it over to someone else's BBQ." Did I actually pray over this while it was baking? You better believe I did. And it ended up tasting great! ;)

Here's the recipe (I found it on allrecipes.com by ARANDYGAIL):

Ingredients for the filling:
4 cups pitted sour cherries
1.5 cups white sugar
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Ingredients for the crust:
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup old-fashioned oats
1 cup brown sugar
0.5 cup butter
0.5 cup shortening

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F
2. In a large bowl, combine cherries, white sugar, and 4 tablespoons of flour. Pour into a 9x13 inch baking dish.
3. In a medium bowl, combine the 1.5 cups of flour, oats, and brown sugar. Cut in butter and shortening until crumbly. Sprinkle over cherry filling.
4. Bake in oven for 45 to 50 minutes or until the topping is golden brown.