A pancake fanatic, a dutch baby, and homemade applesauce.

These food pics are actually quite old.  I made them a long time ago but haven't put them up because of a number of reasons:

1) Picnik is apparently joining Google+, so the normal features I use to make these picture collages aren't available - and it didn't occur to me to find another free photo editing website until now.

2) I've been busy/trying to scale down my food budget or at least be more conscious of it and so I've been baking less - and when I do I try to keep it super simple with things I have on hand in the kitchen that I don't have to go out and buy special ingredients.

But thanks to FotoFlexer, I'm back, and here are some finished products from the last few months.  Lately I've been trying to use my new low-fat/low-cholesterol cooking and low cholesterol cookbooks (because really, those are the only cookbooks I currently own - I used to use my mom & family's cookbooks and recipes), and decided to try out one of the baking recipes.  

That's when I came across this strange thing called a dutch baby.

I think it really was the intrigue of the name rather than the simplicity of the recipe that inspired me to try this out.

Modified dutch baby

It's actually super easy and is pretty much a giant pancake.  Maybe a pancake fruit tart wannabe.  It's nice because you can put whatever fruit or stuff you want on top - just like you would with crepes.  The recipe called for strawberries and kiwis but I didn't have either of those so I used what I had on hand - bananas and clementines.

Yum.  I'd make it again.  It calls for a bit of a confectioner's sugar, but there are other recipes that don't use that much sugar.  Plus, I'm sure it would taste just as great with syrup or honey.  But the citrus juice and sugar are what makes it a dutch baby pancake, though. 

So along the lines of pancakes, I've been making pancakes pretty frequently ever since I've moved to Binghamton, as you've seen some of my experiments in previous posts.  They have so many variations that they're just fun to make and experiment with.  For these I found a banana pancake recipe from my low-cholesterol cookbook and decided they were boring banana pancakes so I threw in some cinnamon, honey and shredded coconut with the banana slices.

Banana coconut cinnamon pancakes

Now, I'm not a big muffin fan who knows the muffin man, but I'm always looking for new things to eat for breakfast.  And since I came across a streusel muffin recipe (which I've never heard of before) that seemed simple from my low-fat/low-cholesterol cookbook, I decided to give it a whirl.  Plus, I think Kenzie was staying over at my house at the time and I wanted to have something nice for her to eat.

I always get confused about what the difference between streusel and strudel was, but I looked it up and it turns out that strudel is that flaky pastry while streusel is the crumbly cinnamon sugar topping you put on cakes and pies and such.  You typically see it on coffee cakes, you know what I'm talking about.  Now you know.

I guess these were pretty delicious - Kenzie and I ended up eating like 3 1/2 of them for breakfast one day.

Streusel muffins

So I'm trying to remember where I found the recipe for these gingerbread pancakes, but I think I used the one from my low-fat, low-cholesterol cookbook and excluded the syrup topping the recipe called for and substituted the molasses for honey (not the greatest substitute, but hey, it's all I can do).

Gingerbread pancakes

They actually turned out okay, but the fun part was adding my own little pizzazz to them.  I knew we had a lot of peppermint candy canes leftover from Christmas, so I crushed some up (quite a stress reliever, I must say) and sprinkled them on top to complement the gingerbread taste of the pancakes and give them a little extra crunch.  I would definitely do that again.

Sweet homemade applesauce

As I've been looking through a bunch of low-fat and low-cholesterol baking recipes (and even before I was searching), I've been noticing that some recipes use applesauce to substitute for sugar.  I've sometimes read reviews of recipes from allrecipes.com where people did that as well and said it turned out nicely.  But I've never actually tried it, so I decided to try and make my own.

Now, brace yourselves, because I'm about to tell you a secret:  the only kind of applesauce I've ever known in my entire life was Mott's.  And it's not that great.  I never knew there was such a thing as applesauce from real apples.  I know.  My naivete sometimes deprives me of good things.  But don't worry, ever since Nathan introduced the concept to me last year, I have crossed over to the land of "Experienced" who know that homemade applesauce is pretty awesome.

The process of making applesauce is SO simple (at least, from the recipe I followed) that I don't think I'll need to buy applesauce ever again.  But even though it was simple, it wasn't the easiest thing for me to actually do when it came to mashing the cooked apples.  I didn't have the proper tools so I ended up using a puny fork to mash the cooked apples which made for a lot of work.

The moral of the story:  use a potato masher or something of equal capability to mash cooked apples or else the time and effort to make applesauce may not be worth it.

The end.

Till next time :]