Bread Machine Diva

Chocolate Coconut Bread

I love this bread for breakfast. I toast it and put peanut butter on top. Yum!

Chocolate Coconut Bread
1 Cup milk
3 Tablespoons water
1 Egg, lightly beaten
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla
4 teaspoons butter
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 Cups bread flour
1 ¼ teaspoons yeast
½ Cup chocolate chips
½ Cup toasted coconut (more about this later)

This makes a two pound loaf. Follow the instructions that came with your bread machine in terms of which ingredients to put in the bread machine first. Make sure you check on the dough after five or ten minutes of kneading. Just pop the top of the bread machine and see how the dough is doing. It should be a smooth, round ball. If it’s too dry add liquid a tablespoon at a time until it looks OK. If it looks too wet, add flour a tablespoon at a time until it looks OK. Most of the time though, the above amounts should be just right.

Different people will have different results with this recipe. It all depends on how hot your bread machine gets. The chips may just slightly melt, they may entirely melt, or you could get some sort of mixture. I used mini chocolate chips for maximum melting. Plus, mini chocolate chips are very cute. Here’s how my bread turned out.

The bread is chocolate flavored with the occasional chocolate burst caused by an unmelted chip. The coconut is very subtle. The next time I make this recipe I’m going to double the coconut.

Toasting Coconut

This was the first time I toasted coconut. I preheated the oven to 300 degrees and spread the coconut out in a baking dish.

I cooked it for 20 minutes and stirred it every five minutes. Coconut can burn very quickly, so keep an eye on it. Here’s how it looked after 20 minutes.

Valentine’s Day

Earlier in the week I caught one of the morning news shows. They had segment on Valentine’s Day gifts. Their proposed gift for your sweetie? A lovely new laptop. A laptop?!?

I’m honestly happy for the people with that sort of Valentine’s Day budget. However, my budget, and perhaps yours, is much more modest.

Since Valentine’s Day is on a Sunday I propose a Valentine’s Day brunch. Here’s the menu:

Coffee
Orange Juice
Apricot Bread or Raspberry Bread
Creamy Scrambled Eggs

Creamy Scrambled Eggs

Serves 3 to 4

1 large green onion, thinly sliced

1/2 tightly packed tablespoon curly parsley leaves, chopped

1/2 tightly packed tablespoon fresh basil, chopped

6 large eggs

2 tablespoons heavy cream

3 ounces cream cheese, cut into about 3/4-inch pieces

Salt and pepper as needed

2 tablespoons butter

1. In a medium bowl, use a fork to loosely combine the eggs and cream. Stir in cream cheese, onions and the herbs. Add salt and pepper to taste.

2. In a large, heavy, non-stick skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the eggs and stir with a spatula for a few seconds.

3. Lower heat to medium-low and keep stirring in a slow steady movement for 3 minutes, or until large curds form. Eggs can be served almost wet (moist yet approaching firm) or quite firm. Be sure not to overcook.

Zesting

Last week there was a sale on oranges at the grocery store. So I bought a few and made orange bread. The recipe calls for orange zest.

In talking with people I’m always surprised at how many people don’t have zesters. They’ll use a potato peeler or a cheese grater and it’s not an easy process.

For those of you that haven’t seen one, on the left is a photo of a zester. Do you see those metal loops at the top? That’s the business end of the zester. There are little blades inside the loops that make lovely slivers of zest.

The only problem is that once you’ve used one of these, there’s no going back. Potato peelers are fine for potatoes. Cheese grates are great for cheese. But for orange and lemon rinds, you need a zester.

Hawaiian Bread in the Bread Machine

My experiment with Hawaiian bread mix made me curious about Hawaiian bread. What would it taste like if I made it from scratch? As it turns out, it tasted even better than the mix.

Hawaiian Bread
¾ cup pineapple juice
1 egg
2 Tablespoons olive oil
2 ½ Tablespoons sugar
¾ teaspoon salt
3 cups bread flour
2 tablespoons milk
1 ½ teaspoons yeast

I made mine with the bread machine set at medium crust. It came out a little darker than I’d like. The next time I’m going to use the light crust setting.

We found the crust to be extra flaky and the bread had a cake-like texture. It was great!

Cinnamon Raisin Bagels

All the bagel recipes I’ve ever read call for putting the bagels in boiling water before they go into the oven. This recipe doesn’t. How do the bagels taste? They may have been a little heavier than other bagels I’ve tried, but they tasted fine. We split them, added cream cheese and had a lovely breakfast.

Cinnamon Raisin Bagels

1 1/2 Cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon dark brown sugar, packed
4 Cups bread flour
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 Cup raisins
2 1/4 teaspoons yeast

Follow the instructions that came with your bread machine in terms of which ingredients to put in the machine first. Set the machine on the dough setting.

When the dough is done put it on a lightly floured surface. Divide the dough in half. Then divide those pieces in half. Keep going until you’ve got 12 equal pieces of dough. Then roll each piece until it’s a 10 inch long rope.

Form each rope into a circle and place on two greased cookie sheets. It’s OK to give the ends a little pinch to make sure things stay together. Cover them with towels and let rise for 30 minutes.

(Please excuse the state of my pans. One of goals for 2010 is to get new ones.)

Bake in a 375 degree oven for 15 mintues. Then turn the bagels over and bake for another 10 minutes.

The bagels were a little more brown than I’d like. The next time I make this recipe I’ll decrease the cooking time by a few minutes. It was a winner though, so I will be making this one again.

Happy New Year!

We started out the new year with a treat from the mother of the Man of the House. She’s Dutch and sent us a box of hagelslag (dark chocolate sprinkles). In Holland people put these on buttered toast. We used them on sandwich bread. Delicious! It was a fun way to start out 2010.

Chocolate Sprinkles

Merry Christmas!

Christmas snowman

Thanksgiving Update and Free eBook

For Thanksgiving dinner I served apricot dinner rolls based on my apricot bread recipe. The rolls ended up fine, but were a little too brown on the bottom. I’m going to play around with the recipe a little bit and then I’ll pass it on to you.

In the meantime I’ve been enjoying the free eBook, How to Bake, from The Prepared Pantry. I really enjoyed the section in chapter three about baking bread on the grill. Have I tried it? Nope, but if I do you know that you’ll hear about it.

Happy Thanksgiving

thanks_child_lg I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

We’re going to have family over for dinner. We’re going to have ham with an apricot glaze. I’ll use the apricot bread recipe to make dinner rolls. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Bread Mix Review – Classic Hearth Hawaiian Bread

Hawaiian Bread Mix

As I gazed at this box of bread mix in Walmart, I realized that I’d never purchased bread mixes for my machine. Once we were given a few by a friend, but that had been years ago. I couldn’t even remember how the bread turned out.

Were mixes any good? Would I like them? Would I be able to taste the difference?

I decided to try it out.

The bread looked and tasted fine. I thought it was fantastic toasted with peanut butter on it. The Man of the House like it but said it had a “funny texture.”

Hawaiin Bread

Making bread with a bread machine isn’t hard. I make sandwich bread about once a week. It takes about 15 minutes including cleanup. However using a mix was much easier and faster.

The Man of the House and I haven’t done a firm workup on how much it costs to make a loaf of bread. We buy our flour, yeast, salt and sugar at Costco. Our rough estimate is that it costs us about fifty cents to make a loaf of bread. Even if it’s double that, a mix is much more expensive than making a loaf from scratch.

So this mix gets points for ease of use and bread quality. The cost is reasonable for a mix, but more expensive than making bread from scratch.

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