These bread sticks are brought to you by Sweet Paul Magazine. Well, more specifically they are *inspired* by a photo that I saw in his magazine, but the recipe that I used is actually my usual grissini recipe. I absolutely love the presentation, and they taste pretty damn good too.
I woke up this morning with a craving for cinnamon toast. Actually, I should say that I woke up at 3 AM with a craving for cinnamon toast, but managed to convince myself that I should probably not wake up the other tenants in the building by running the KitchenAid at 3 AM. I’m considerate like that [grin].
Cinnamon Swirl Bread has a long story in my life. My best-friend-forever’s mother has always made great Cinnamon Bread. Back in high school, I think that I begged her for the recipe at least once per week. Twenty five years later, I still have never gotten that recipe, but my own baking skills have gotten much better so that I grokked my own. This time I added cardamom as well. Cardamom always reminds me of a Swedish friend of the family, who makes this amazing cardamom cake. So between the two things (cinnamon and cardamom), this bread is one of those walks down memory lane.
This pan-sized cinnamon roll is just the thing for Easter breakfast. Instead of making individual cinnamon buns, I wrapped the whole thing into one big one, filing the entire pan. Quite ingenious, actually. We then ended up slicing it just like you would cut a pie, but you could also take it out of the pan, and let people pull off a strip. Either way, a nice presentation and really quite simple to make.
Every year at Easter Time, I make some hot cross buns. It’s pretty traditional, and it’s a Good Friday tradition in the UK. Every year I get a little bored with the recipe as well. So this year, I decided to mix it up and instead of using raisins, cranberries, currants or (as I did last year) dried apricots, I decided to use chocolate covered dried cherries. They we’re a bit big so I did chopped them a little. If you don’t have chocolate covered cherries in particular, I suppose Raisinets would work as well. Or if you like the cherry-chocolate combo, then mini-chocolate chips and some dried cherries. Pleased with the result.
I recently purchased the Huckleberry cookbook (yes, I am a cookbook junkie) and while I rarely make recipes in their entirety without modifications, I am trying out some of the recipes for the first time. Up first from Huckleberry was this Maple Bacon Biscuit recipe. It happens to also be on the theme of maple syrup (see previous post) and … well, bacon is bacon, and bacon is good. While I these were spectacular straight out of the oven (with a bit of butter) and I m sure that they would also pair well with soup or bisque, I decided to make an egg and bacon breakfast sandwich which was fantastic.