About Carrie Zinnecker

Posts by Carrie Zinnecker:

Apple Cake

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The past week has been a very eventful and exciting one.  A week ago today, we headed to the hospital to welcome this little guy into the world.  Despite his surprise arrival eight days early, we could not be happier that he is finally here.

Since the arrival of Carson, I haven’t been doing much cooking or baking.  Carson was born on Sunday and Ben’s parents and my mom made it to Amarillo in time to be some of the first to meet him.  My parents have been here since then and my mom has been making breakfast, lunch and dinner for us as well as cleaning up and doing laundry for me.  I don’t know how we’re going to survive once they leave this afternoon!  Thankfully Ben’s parents and Aunt Claire will be here on Tuesday, so we won’t be on our own for long.

Last night Patti brought over a pork roast, rolls and gravy; my mom made mashed potatoes and a salad; and my mom and I made this apple cake.  It was a simple dessert and I’m planning to make it again for Thanksgiving.  The ingredient list is short, and there are no special skills required to make this cake…which is more tart- or pie-like, really.  I found the recipe here on A Whisk and a Spoon.

We ate the cake with a scoop of Blue Bell vanilla ice cream.  It was the perfect combination.

Apple Cake

Courtesy of A Whisk and a Spoon

Ingredients

  • 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, plus more for greasing pan
  • 2 large eggs
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 vanilla bean, split, seeds scraped and reserved
  • 1 1/4 pounds (3 to 4 small to medium) Granny Smith apples
  • 1/2 cup AP flour, plus mor for dusting the pan
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 cup milk, at room temperature
  • Powdered sugar for dusting

Directions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Line the base of an 8-inch springform pan with parchment, then smear with thick layer of butter. Dust with flour; turn pan over and tap lightly to remove excess flour.  Melt butter in small saucepan (you can take it a step further and lightly brown it, if you like). Set aside.
  2. Beat together eggs and half the sugar in a bowl (it’s not hard to do by hand). Continue to beat while slowly adding remaining sugar until thick; it should form a ribbon when dropped from a spoon.  Add the vanilla seeds to the batter and add the pod to the melted butter.
  3. Peel, quarter and core apples, then trim ends and slice thinly.
  4. Remove vanilla pod from butter and stir butter into egg-sugar batter. Combine the flour and baking powder, then stir it into batter alternately with milk. Stir in apples, coating every piece with batter. Pour batter into pan, using fingers to pat top evenly.
  5. Bake for 25 minutes, then rotate pan; bake for about 25 minutes more, until cake pulls away from pan and is brown on top; a thin-bladed knife inserted into center will come out clean when it is done. Cool 30 minutes on a rack.
  6. Remove the sides of the springform, cut the cake into wedges and sprinkle with powdered sugar if desired.

Kitchen Disaster: Cottage Cheese Banana Bread

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Some people have asked me how I choose the recipes I put on this blog.  I usually put any new recipe I try, because usually everything is pretty good and worth sharing.  But usually does not mean always.  Let’s use a bread recipe as an example.

I have been on a mission to rid my freezer and fridge of things that need to be used up.  Last week I decided to use the rest of a container of cottage cheese and some bananas I had frozen.  It seemed like an OK recipe.  The only ingredient out of the ordinary was the cottage cheese.  I thought it might create a creamy texture with a little tang.  Kind of like yogurt.  I think it was actually the downfall of this bread.  The cottage cheese curds baked in the bread created a truly funky texture.  The bread took a lot longer to bake than instructed below.  Even after 40 minutes in the oven the middle was gooey.  After 50 minutes I took it out of the oven and after cooling I sliced it up revealing a still undercooked center.  The edges were OK, but I ended up throwing the loaf away after eating half of a piece I had toasted and buttered.  And I don’t throw food away easily.  It just wasn’t worth it.

So, unlike other posts on Hottie Biscotti, this recipe is one that I do not recommend.  If you have a good bread recipe that uses cottage cheese, then please let me know.  At this point I am not likely to try another baked good where cottage cheese is involved.

Here is the recipe, and the source.

Cottage Cheese Banana Bread

Ingredients

  • 2 ripe bananas
  • 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/2 cup low-fat cottage cheese
  • 1/4 cup canola oil
  • Shake of cinnamon

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 325*F.
  2. Coat loaf pan with non-stick spray.
  3. Combine ingredients in large mixing bowl. Blend well.
  4. Pour batter into loaf pan; spread evenly.
  5. Bake for 32-35 minutes.

Oatmeal, Pecan, Coconut & Butterscotch Cookies

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A bag of butterscotch chips in my cupboard greeted me (by falling out onto the counter) the other day and so I took this as a sign to make something with them.  I found a recipe for pecan and oatmeal cookies, and so I just added the coconut and butterscotch chips because I have this, well, it’s a problem.  I like to add too many extras to a cookie.  Sometimes I can keep it simple and show some restraint, but most of the time I have the urge to add more and more goodies.

These cookies are very sweet, so one was enough for me.  I could eat probably 3 oatmeal raisin cookies in one sitting, but one of these sweet little things is enough sweet for me.  You could easily leave out the butterscotch chips or replace them with chocolate chips.  You can play around with the add-ins, so make them how you like them.  Enjoy!

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Freezer Meals

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With baby countdown at 2 weeks and 1 day I felt it necessary to make some freezer meals for those days (of which I’m sure there will be many) that I don’t have time to cook a real meal.  I searched quite a few websites for recipes that would freeze and reheat well.  I cannot attest to their post-freezer goodness , but I did some taste testing along the way and I was pleased with the flavors and a little upset that I wasn’t going to be able to enjoy the food for dinner that night.

I didn’t want to make typical freezer meals.  Lasagna, chili and casseroles that use cans of cream of whatever soup were just not the kind of meals I was looking for.  Yes, I like to make things difficult for myself.  Yes, I am a bit of a food snob.  Ask me a year from now, and I think my love of convenience foods will have grown.  But since I have the time now, why not make something extra good?

Here is what I ended up with in my freezer.  Click on the meal for a link to the recipe.  The pastitsio and shepherd’s pie include freezing instructions.  I added my own for the chicken pasta.

Pastitsio – a layered Greek noodle dish with ground beef, tomatoes and bechamel sauce.  The beef layer is spiced with olives, oregano, cinnamon and oregano.

Chicken Florentine Artichoke Bake – a bowtie pasta casserole with chicken, artichokes, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes and cheese.

Shepherd’s Pie – Turkey, tomato, peas, corn and mushrooms topped with mashed carrots and potatoes.

These are not the quickest meals to get prepped for the freezer.  But the time you spend now will be time you save in a few weeks or a couple months when you go to enjoy the results of your hard work.  I made the pastitsio the other afternooon, I think it took me about an hour and a half to cook and clean up.  I made the chicken pasta and shepherd’s pie Saturday morning, and I think my total chopping, cooking, boiling, packaging and cleaning time was 3 hours.  Here’s my kitchen during its worst moment on Saturday.

I know some of you have now decided that I am crazy to have spent that much of my Saturday morning on this project, but it’s something I’d planned to do…and so I had to do it.  I also kind of like spending that time in the kitchen and having something to show for it.  It makes me feel productive, and it’s a lot more fun that organizing the stacks of paper on the desk in the office.  And look at my fully stocked freezer!  Two 9×13 pans and two 8×8 pans of food waiting patiently to be eaten.  Why does this kind of thing make me happy?

Here are a few quick notes and changes on these recipes.  Some changes were made because of personal preferences, others because I forgot to or chose not to buy an ingredient.  I am becoming more and more comfortable with improvising in the kitchen.  It makes life so much easier, and it saves money too.  A jar of sun-dried tomatoes was going to set me back $5.99…so I used some sun-dried tomato pesto that I already had.  It makes me feel so resourceful when I can do things like that.

Pastitsio:

  • Left out the red wine
  • Used green olives instead of Kalamata
  • Used only 4 tablespoons of butter, 1 cup of milk and 1 egg in the pasta mixture
  • Use a LARGE and DEEP pan, I did not have room in a regular 9×13 to fit all the sauce.  It broke my heart to pour that creamy bechamel down the drain.

Chicken Florentine Artichoke Pasta

  • Cooked 2 chicken breasts in a skillet and chopped it up to make 2 cups
  • Used a 12 ounce package of pasta instead of 8 ounce
  • Used 2 tablespoons of sun dried tomato pesto instead of the chopped sun dried tomatoes
  • Freezer Instructions: Bake without bread crumbs for 15 minutes, then with bread crumbs for 5 minutes.  Let cool completely, then cover with plastic wrap and a couple layers of foil.  When ready to bake, let it thaw in the fridge overnight, then bake @ 350 F covered with foil for 20 minutes and without foil for 15-20 minutes or until nicely brown on top.

Shepherd’s Pie

  • Used 6 carrots and 4 large baking potatoes which was enough to top 2 8-inch pans
  • Made one of my pans with cheese, and one without
  • Used 1 1/2 cups mushrooms, 1 1/2 cups peas and 1 cup corn in addition to the meat and tomatoes

When Ben and I get around to eating these over the next couple months I will give some feedback about how the thawing and re-heating goes.  If you try them in the meantime and bake them right away, please let me know how they turn out!

Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars

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Oh.  My.  Good.  Gracious.  These things are crazy good.  And they came about all because of one lonely jar of chunky natural peanut butter that had been stashed in the back of my pantry for a while.  He was reaching the end of his shelf life on November 8, 2010.  I bet this jar of peanutty goodness never even dreamed of being used in something so wonderful.  He thought maybe he was destined to be the star player in a few PB & J’s or maybe to be spread on some celery.  I had much bigger plans for him.

In order to use my natural peanut butter I just searched “desserts with natural peanut butter” in Google and after searching through a few cookie recipes I found this recipe on Joy the Baker.  Here is the link to the recipe.  I made minimal changes to the original.  Chunky instead of smooth peanut butter, regular brown sugar instead of dark, and semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate.

These taste like a dressed up Reese’s cup.  The peanut butter layer comes together easily in one pot.  The chocolate frosting is also incredibly simple to make and spreads nicely on the cooled bars.  This is an altogether simple and delicious bar that I will definitely be adding to my go-to recipe collection.  After frosting the bars I chilled them in the fridge which makes the quite easy to cut.  We ate them cold from the fridge and they were delicious, but letting them warm up a bit makes for a wonderful melt-in-your-mouth experience.  Enjoy! (more…)

Italian Sausage & Vegetable Soup

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When I bought the ingredients for this soup today it was intended to be “Italian Tortellini Soup”, a recipe I got from a woman who came to a Bible study group I am involved with.  It became this Italian sausage & vegetable soup when I realized that I did not use a large enough pot and had to leave out half the mushrooms and the entire package of tortellini.  Thankfully the soup came out OK and we’ll be enjoying it for the next few days!  It might be a blessing in disguise that my pot was too small.  This way we won’t be eating the same thing all week long.

Soup is quite forgiving.  The world does not come crashing down when you realize you’ve left something out, don’t have quite enough of an ingredient, added your ingredients in the wrong order, or added more of something than directed.  Thank goodness, since almost all of those things happened to me!

Ben was not happy when I told him the tortellini soup had no tortellini.  Ben likes tortellini.  But he ate it anyway and I think he thought it was pretty good.  He had a bowl and a half, so it couldn’t have been that bad.  I really liked how chock full of veggies this soup was.  The amount of sausage made it just meaty enough and provided a nice flavor.  I added a huge handful of torn basil leaves right before serving and that was lovely.  I really enjoy fresh basil and am sad I will have to wait until next summer to grow some of my own.  I have attempted this before…and failed.  But every summer I try again.  Maybe this next time I’ll get it right and it won’t wither and die on me.

Here is the recipe, which was adapted more than just a little bit since I was not quite on top of things when I went grocery shopping.  I will try out the original recipe sometime and post that as well.  Enjoy! (more…)

Candy Corn Sugar Cookies

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Candy corn is one of those things that you either love or hate.  I love it.  Ben hates it.

I know they’re supposed to taste like honey, and I guess they kinda do.  But they really just taste like sweet, sugary deliciousness to me.  If you’ve never tried candy corn mixed in with salted peanuts I highly recommend it; a great combination of salty and sweet.  They’re also good covered in chocolate.  You can find the chocolate covered ones at Central Market.  When I was visiting family in Austin I bought some in the bulk section.  They are evil…in a really good way.

Anyway, we have no Halloween plans.  Since we don’t have kids to take trick-or-treating and we’re not the kind of people who dress up our dog our plan is to stay home and pass out candy if we have any kids come to our house.  We haven’t spent Halloween here yet, so we don’t know how busy our neighborhood is.  I kinda hope no one comes…more Kit Kats for me!

Anyway, I get daily cookie recipes from Martha Stewart, and this is what came today.  The recipe is a small batch and I had all the ingredients so I figured I’d go ahead and make them.  They are adorable little cookies, and they taste pretty good.  So, this is how I celebrated Halloween this year.  Enjoy!

Candy Corn Sugar Cookies

Ingredients

Makes about 36

  • 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, very soft
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 large egg yolk
  • 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup all-purpose flour (spooned and leveled)
  • About 36 candy corns

Directions

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place butter and sugar in a medium bowl; beat with a wooden spoon until combined. Beat in egg yolk, vanilla, baking powder, and salt. Add flour, and mix until a dough forms.
  2. Scoop out level teaspoons of dough, and roll into balls (chill dough briefly if it becomes too soft to handle). Place balls on baking sheets, 2 inches apart.
  3. Bake, rotating sheets halfway through, until edges are firm and cookies are dry to the touch (do not let cookies color), 9-10 minutes.
  4. Remove from oven; gently press a candy corn into center of each cookie (surface of cookies may crack slightly). Cool on sheets 1 minute; transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Daring Bakers: Apple Cinnamon Buttermilk Donuts

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My house now smells of deep frying, I have a pot of oil cooling on the stove that I have no clue what I am going to do with, and a sink full of sticky dishes.  On the bright side I have a rack of apple cake donuts and donut holes covered in cinnamon glaze awaiting consumption.  I guess I can’t complain.

The October 2010 Daring Bakers challenge was hosted by Lori of Butter Me Up. Lori chose to challenge DBers to make doughnuts. She used several sources for her recipes including Alton Brown, Nancy Silverton, Kate Neumann and Epicurious.

There were quite a few donut options for this deep-fried challenge.  All the Daring Bakers could choose from a yeast donut, a buttermilk cake donut, filled bomboloni or pumpkin donut.  I was quite close to choosing the pumpkin since I have been on a pumpkin kick lately, but chose the buttermilk cake donut and added some grated apple and cinnamon to the dough.

The recipe says the dough will be sticky.  I was not prepared for the level of stickiness.  Use as much flour as you need to keep the dough from sticking to the cutters and your counter.  I even found that after my first cutting and re-rolling the donuts cut and handled much better thanks to the additional flour that had been incorporated.  Do not be shy with the flour.

After frying these beauties to a golden brown, let them drain on paper towels.  After cooling you can glaze them.  I used a simple glaze of powdered sugar, cinnamon and milk.  If you don’t want to glaze, you could dip the donuts in cinnamon sugar while they’re still warm and get a nice crunchy exterior.  Or just sprinkle them with powdered sugar. (more…)

Pumpkin Caramel Oat Bars

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I was tempted to not even post this recipe since these bars did not photograph very well.  But Ben brought some of the more attractive specimens up to work, and apparently they were devoured within an hour.  Some people at work asked for the recipe, and Ben assured them I would be posting on the blog.  So, despite the not so great photo, here they are.  These are tasty.  Pretty messy, and a little difficult to eat and cut, but oh so tasty.

This recipe is from the McCormick website, and I did use mostly McCormick spices.  Here is the link.  My vanilla was from Belize (thanks, Kate!) and my cinnamon was….not really sure where this container of ground cinnamon came from now that I think about it.  Anyway, all the spices make this a dessert that makes your entire house smell delicious.  I might have said this before, but I love fall baking.  Instead of using caramels that require a lot of tedious unwrapping I used those caramel pieces that come with the wooden sticks for making caramel apples.  Something I just do not get.  Caramel apples.  Who really eats those things?  It seems like too much work.

My bars did not cut out very neatly.  I might have needed to bake them a little longer.  I also think it would help to press the crumb topping into the caramel layer so that the crumbs don’t fall off the bars when they’re cut.  Regardless of looks though, these are quite good.  Enjoy! (more…)

Pumpkin Cookie Pies

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It is starting to really feel like fall here.  The evenings are cool, the leaves are starting to change and fall off the trees, and it is now permissible to make fall flavored desserts!  So, in honor of this wonderful season I bought 4 cans of pumpkin and am going a little crazy baking pumpkin desserts.

Today I made soft, almost cake-like pumpkin cookies sandwiching a smooth cream cheese frosting.  After making a few of the sandwiches I decided to simply ice the rest of the cookies.  I made the cookies a little big, and so two of the cookies with the filling just made them a bit daunting.

This recipe is from Tasty Kitchen.  Here is the link. If you look at this recipe you will notice that one tedious element is piping the cookies onto individual pieces of parchment paper.  I just used an ice cream scoop and dolloped the cookie batter onto a large piece of parchment.  This works just fine, but does give the cookies more of a mounded appearance.  I fit 6 cookies per sheet and made a total of 35 cookies.

These cookies are quite soft, and the frosting makes them even harder to transport since you can’t stack them.  So, these may be a dessert I make and serve from my our kitchen instead of trying to take them somewhere…like I did today.  Ben liked them because they were not too sweet, and my friend Jackie said they had the texture of a pumpkin bread.  They are quite good after chilling in the fridge for a few hours and eaten cold.

I think fall is my favorite baking season.  Maybe I’ll make a pie here pretty soon.  You don’t have to have a reason to make a pie, right?

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