Everyday Style & Recipes. Est. 2010
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays and this list features my favorite bread recipes for the big day!
Rosemary Herb Biscuits
Sour Cream and Dill Biscuits
Parmesan and Rosemary Olive Bread
Baked Bread Stuffing with Sage
Sadly my favorite month of the year has been over ten days but I am still celebrating Fall with new pumpkin recipes! These muffins would like to pretend they are for breakfast, but they are so delicious they seem more like a dessert. The inside is light and fluffy with gooey bits of chocolate chips all over. The flavor of the pumpkin is mild, but definitely present. I added some yogurt into the batter which gave the muffins a fluffier, creamier texture. This recipe has lots of possibilities for variation–adding nuts or raisins would work well as a substitute for the chocolate. If you wanted to replace the yogurt with apple sauce that would work fine too.
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October has gone by so fast it’s hard to believe. Just a few weeks ago I spent some time in a local apple orchard and picked up 8 pounds of Golden Delicious apples. Golden Delicious are suitable for both baking and eating, which makes them special as most apple varieties are good for just one or the other. I was excited to try these out using my mom’s classic rhubarb crisp recipe and just reducing the sugar to compensate for the apples’ sweetness. These apples had a honey-like sweetness with just the right amount of crunch and tartness to keep things interesting.
The crisp is a simple combination of oats, flour, sugar and spices, baked in the oven, and topped with whipped cream or ice cream. It was really good with the golden delicious apples. It will be hard to go back to store bought apples when the season ends!
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For Mother’s Day I wanted to post my mom’s rhubarb crisp recipe I enjoyed every summer as a kid. In the backyard there was a big rhubarb plant and once the stalks were ripe she would cut some off and make rhubarb crisp! Her recipe is easy and not including the rhubarb you probably already have the ingredients at home. Oats, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon cover a layer of chopped rhubarb. Then it’s baked in the oven and the result is soft and melty on the bottom with crispy oats on the top. I topped the crisp with fresh whipped cream. Mom’s recipe is a winner!
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It’s hard to find decent rye bread at grocery stores. That is part of the reason why I undertook this rye bread recipe. When I say ‘undertook’ I mean that it takes about 8 hours to complete so it is kind of an all day project. I enjoyed the process of making the starter, kneading, and watching the dough rise. It is neat to watch the yeast in action and at some point you realize that the bread is a live organism. The amount of yeast in this recipe is less than what I normally use for yeast bread. This is why the rye has a longer prep time than other recipes.
This recipe also uses a neat trick of tossing in a few ice cubes into the oven to create a more humid environment while the bread bakes. Even though the oven is humidified, the outside of the bread is golden brown and crusty, almost like a baguette crust. The inside is soft and the aroma of caraway and rye in the kitchen is fairly intoxicating!
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Curried bread is a simple yeast bread seasoned with turmeric and aromatic spices. I used a blend of cayenne, ginger, paprika, cinnamon, cumin and turmeric. The turmeric gives the bread its bright yellow color (and will also stain your clothes, counter tops, etc). The bread looks like a normal loaf before cutting into it. After cutting, the beautiful yellow center reveals itself. The bread is light and fluffy and smelled so good when it was baking. It reminded me a lot of the Curried Yogurt Rolls I made recently as it had a similar color and flavor. I chose this bread to go with the Coconut Curry Soup and it tasted great together.
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Making yeast based breads is a fun challenge as the bread needs time to rise and plenty of kneading. For me the process of making bread is relaxing and the end result really satisfying! This bread is a potato bread with the added flavor of Parmesan cheese in the dough. The recipe is easy to follow and baking the loaf in the oven produced amazing aromas. The bread is just a tiny bit flaky on the outside and fluffy on the inside. I was looking for a good dipping bread to go with an Italian soup and this was a great recipe for that meal. Dipping the bread in the broth enhanced its flavor even more. I chose to make one extra large loaf which results in long and thin pieces of bread. The size of the slices were perfect for dipping but if you wanted to make more of a sandwich bread cut the dough into two smaller loaves. I can’t wait to make this bread again!
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One of my favorite combinations is mint and chocolate. For St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to make some green chocolate chip cookies and to give the recipe a little kick I added mint extract to the batter. The chocolate and the mint were great together and it was even tastier dipping the cookies into milk. For whatever reason dipping the cookies in milk caused the mint flavor to be more pronounced. This was an easy and tasty recipe for St. Patty’s day!
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Banana bread is a great excuse to let a few bananas sit on the shelf a little bit longer than you would think is a good idea. Banana bread is strangely the best when the bananas are almost entirely brown and soft. My theory is that the bananas start fermenting in the skins (they smell like alcohol) and the flavor becomes more concentrated. This time I decided to try something different and add coconut to the batter. I looked at a few recipes and a lot of them only use coconut extract for the flavoring. I thought it would be nice to use real coconut milk in the batter so I threw that in. I don’t really care for coconut flakes but in most coconut banana bread recipes they are toasted and sprinkled on top of the batter. I decided to go without the flakes and use the coconut milk instead. I’m glad I went with that instead as the banana bread was soft with a nice afterthought of coconut flavor.
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Since I had a jar of maple butter I decided to make a great bread to go along with it. This bread has a really nice maple flavor that makes the kitchen smell great while it’s cooking. Maple syrup is used in the dough and the loaf is topped with rolled oats and brown sugar. This is a yeast bread so it takes a little more time to prepare. It’s also important to incorporate the flour gradually so the dough can rise properly. The bread was really tasty fresh out of the oven and even better with the maple butter.
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