Month: April 2015

Blueberry Muffins with Lemon Glaze

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.

blueberry-muffin-with-lemon-glaze

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This entry was posted in Muffins.

Carrot Cake with Orange Frosting

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.

carrot-cake-

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This entry was posted in Cakes.

Hearty Quick Bread

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!

hearty-quick-bread

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This entry was posted in Bread.

Frosted Sugar Cookies

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.

sugar-cookie

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This entry was posted in Cookies.

Cardamon Bread (Pulla)

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!

 

finn-bread

 

 

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This entry was posted in Bread.

Apple Pie Bars

The smell of cinnamon makes my tummy hungry!  It is one of my favourite spices and put that with apples and of course you have a winning combination for a pie.  Apple pie is a lot of work as it would include the rolling of pie crust, which if you know me, is up there in the category of things I dread to do.

So when I  was leafing through the Canadian Living Holiday Baking 2014 magazine and found a recipe for Dutch Apple Pie squares I said to myself – now that is a wonderful idea.  Shortbread crust with apple pie filling topped with a crumble and every layer with cinnamon in it…can’t get much better than that.

 

apple-pie-bars

 

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This entry was posted in Bars.

Jelly Filled Doughnuts

When I was growing up in the small Northern Ontario town of Blind River there was a local bakery called Golden Bakery.  They had the most amazing jelly filled doughnuts and if my memory serves me correctly we paid 12 cents for one!  The bakery closed when I left to attend college, but the memory of those sugary jelly filled concoctions still lived on.  Later on when we built our cottage the gentleman who had owned the bakery lived a few doors down, but by the time I got up the courage to ask for his recipe he had passed away.  So the hunt was on to find a recipe that could bring back the jelly filled doughnut!

 

Brown Eyed Baker blog to the rescue!!  She posted this recipe for Polish doughnuts called Paczki and they looked and sounded just like what I was looking for so I gave it a try and bingo that was the recipe I was looking for. So when it was time for a dessert for our Easter potluck this year, it was time to make Jelly Doughnuts again and I think these are even better than what I remember from the Golden Bakery.

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