Bread – Page 4 – Rosemary and the Goat

Chocolate Toffee Scones

You will fall in love with this scone recipe!

Who doesn’t love scones of any type, slathered with Devonshire or clotted cream or lemon curd or strawberry jam.

For some reason I just love baking. I think maybe it is the aroma that fills the kitchen and I’m off in my imaginary world sitting in some English garden with teacup in hand sipping my tea munching on one of these scones and taking in the view of my beautiful garden (one that is not fried from the Texas heat).

We had company coming this past weekend for a bridal shower being held for my daughter and I just happened to have a half bag of toffee bits and some chocolate chips in my pantry and decided it would be a good time to try out this scone recipe. And, since I still had some Devonshire cream in my refrigerator, it was just begging for something to be eaten on.

I love having any kind of homemade baked goods in my freezer ready to bake when I have company or as a special treat for my husband.

Make yourself a pot of tea and either make some Devonshire cream or go out and buy some clotted cream to go with these scones and sit back and enjoy.

August 23, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods

Lemon-Scented Pull-Apart Bread

Pucker up for this Lemon Bread!

With my daughter’s wedding coming up in October, I’ve been really watching what goes into my mouth. At this time of the game, any weight lost would be appreciated. Well, let me tell you this past two weeks has been a challenge and I think I made it through with flying colors.

It started a couple of weekends ago with my daughter’s dress fitting followed by two days of some great food. That was the end (at least for a while) of me over indulging myself. Then that weekend was followed by me preparing dinner twice for visiting friends and then four days with our niece and her family visiting. Those four days consisted of making ice cream 4 times, grilled pizza, potato breakfast casserole, cheese grits and I have to say not a crumb touched these lips.

My husband is my best critic because he tells it like it is when I ask for his opinion. And, his opinion on this lemon bread is that it is the BEST. My nieces’ family agreed that it was a wonderful bread.

I love Flo Braker’s Sweet Miniature cookbook and when I came across this recipe from her book “Baking for All Occasions” I knew I was going to have to try it. She calls it a cake but to me it is more like a sweet breakfast bread.

July 31, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods

Raspberry Chocolate Muffins

Raspberries and Chocolate a match made in Heaven.

What is it we crave when we are happy, sad, tired, excited or just about any emotional state we may find ourselves in — CHOCOLATE.

Why do we have chocolate up on a pedestal and why is chocolate (besides roses) is probably the number one seller on Valentine’s Day. I think chocolate does something to our brain chemistry that gives us an euphoric high. So, I say, let’s keep eating it.

Chocolate can be molded into a lot of different shapes like rabbits, eggs, Santas, hearts, chocolate coins and just about anything you can think of can be made into a chocolate shape.

Chocolate does have some health benefits after all. They are full of flavonoids which act as antioxidants. Did you know that dark chocolate contains 8 times the number of antioxidants as strawberries have. Flavonoids also relaxes the blood pressure and helps to balance certain hormones in our bodies. Now if that isn’t enough reason to have a few pieces today, I don’t know what is.

I think we crave chocolate because our bodies are telling us to have fun, relax and enjoy life. Are are last words going to be “I’m glad I didn’t have that bite of double chocolate cheesecake today?” I don’t think so.

I love having treats in my freeze so when my kids are home or someone drops in I have something sweet and delicious to offer them. These muffins are great for breakfast/brunch, a snack, dessert, or for a husband with a sweet tooth looking through the freezer for something he can eat. This muffin is so good, I think you could frost it and call it a cupcake.

July 23, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Breads/Biscuits/ Morning Foods

Cheesy Bacon Biscuits

Who doesn’t like bacon? No one!

It is hard to imagine anyone not liking bacon or the smell of bacon. The smell of bacon cooking and sizzling in the morning is awesome and makes you want to jump out of bed and get on with your day.

I know bacon is full of fat but would you honestly turn down a BLT on toast with garden ripe tomatoes and freshly picked lettuce. NEVER. This recipe is a different take on bacon/cheese biscuits like you might get from one of those fast food places that we don’t like to talk about.

I read recently that men prefer the smell of bacon to babies. Ya know, my husband never seemed to be able to smell a dirty diaper on any of our kids and now the grandkids. But, for some reason, he seems to know when I’m cooking bacon. Maybe it is the sizzling sounds coming from the kitchen or me yelling when I get popped in the face with grease splatters.

Bacon can be eaten by itself, put on a cheeseburger, goes wonderfully with eggs (any way), great on salads, wrapped around a stuffed jalapeno and grilled or my FAMOUS Parmesan Bacon Wraps which I have catered for 20 years and they are still a favorite with guest.

July 5, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods/ Pastries

Sweet Cheese Puffs

I love making sweet miniatures and these are sweetious!

There is nothing that makes me feel better on a gloomy day than to get in the kitchen and start baking. We have had a couple of days like that lately that made me want to do just that. I’m off the 21 day diet challenge that I did with my daughter so I actually tasted one of these before taking them to Garden Club last week.

Several years ago I was looking for a cookbook on miniature desserts and came across Flo Braker’s “Sweet Miniatures” and I ordered it from my local library. I always do that with new cookbooks and then I usually just copy out the recipes I want and then return the book. Your library can get any book you request, it may just take a few weeks to receive it from another branch or even state, but you will eventually get it. After flipping through Sweet Miniatures, I knew I needed that book. So I ordered it off the Internet and when it arrived it did not have all the pictures that the library’s hardback version had. So, I got the book back from the library, copied the pictures from each page and taped them into my new book. NOW, I had a book filled with wonderful pictures of baked sweets.

March 8, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods/ Sauces/ Scones

Chocolate Cherry Scones

Chocolate and Cherries a perfect match!

Once upon a time I wanted to open a tea room but I gave up on that idea and realized I could still do the same types of foods that I loved to make for parties I catered. I love doing baby showers, and showers of all sorts because it gives me a chance to try new scone recipes and all sorts of finger sandwiches and little foods. Check out the Baby Button Cookies I made for a shower a few weeks ago. They were delicious and oh, so cute.

I love scones that are buttery, flaky and filled with either lemon curd or Devonshire cream. I usually make a mock Devonshire cream for parties and on occasion will buy the real thing from the grocery even though it is about $5-$6 a jar. I get very disappoint when I have a scone that is nothing more than a biscuit with a little sugar added in and not really a scone at all.

February 28, 2011 By Sherry

Bread

No Knead Bread

Who doesn’t like homemade bread!

AND who wants to knead bread if they don’t have to?

My oldest son Scott turned me on to this recipe a couple of years ago. He had seen this recipe in the New York Times and emailed me about it.

Ahhh, email. What would we do without it? Just think, we use to sit down with paper and pen and actually write down our thoughts, put them in an envelope, lick it, add a stamp and wait at least a week for the letter to get to it’s destination. Now, with a click of a key we can send and receive information in a matter of seconds.

People have all sorts of criteria of what makes a good restaurant. Some people judge a restaurant on it’s ambiance, some on the length of the menu or the amount of draft beers they have on tap. I personally size up a restaurant on whether their bread is homemade (and good) or something that is purchased and thrown in the oven. We had dinner at Babbo (Mario Batali’s restaurant) in New York a few years ago. I called about a month before to get reservations and the only time slot we could get was around 9:30 that evening. So, we get there, have a table right next to the bar and front door (not good) and then they bring out the bread. BURNED. You could smell it long before it even made it to the table. I started looking around at other people’s tables and they also had burned bread. I wondered how in the world they could served bread that looked like that. Needless to say, it ruined the rest of the meal which turned out to be only so/so anyway. Bread is the first thing a person usually taste in a restaurant and I think it should be memorable.

February 20, 2011 By Sherry

Bread/ Breads/Biscuits/ Morning Foods

Chocolate Gravy with Homemade Biscuits

My first thought on this recipe was YUCK! But wait until you try it!

I would like to say that I had chocolate gravy growing up, but I didn’t. My mother made wonderful milk gravy or sausage gravy which is milk gravy with crumbled pork sausage added. We had red-eye gravy with our country ham, we had roast beef gravy with our roast, but no chocolate gravy. Chocolate gravy is a southern thing and I grew up in extreme southeast Missouri and we always considered ourselves Southerners, but I guess we weren’t southern enough to have ever tasted chocolate gravy.

Now that Christmas is over and everyone is tired of cooking, this simple recipe is just what you need for your last indulgence before the new year rolls around and you go on a diet and give up sweets (me). Have this for New Year Eve breakfast, then store the recipe away until you need another breakfast chocolate fix.

What is gravy anyway but some kind of stock or broth thickened to pour over some type of food we have prepared. So, why not a sweet gravy that will satisfy some of us that crave chocolate in the morning.

This gravy can be used on biscuits, scones, pancakes or waffles. When we were in Brugge back in September we had to try a Belgium waffle and they poured chocolate all over it. It was the richest, gooiest, most delicious thing I have ever put in my mouth. I love chocolate in any form, so why shouldn’t I give this recipe a try.

December 26, 2010 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods/ Scones

Almond Coconut Chocolate Scones

I love scones and this Glueten-free recipe does not disappoint.

Somewhere around Mardi Gras this year, my daughter Alexis challenged me to go Grain-free and gluten free until Easter. I did really well adapting recipes using almond flour and as I always like a challenge, I ordered a 5-lb. bag of almond meal online and set about trying crackers and scone recipes from Elana Amsterdam’s book “Almond Free Gluten free cookbook”.

I started with Elana’s Chocolate Chip Scone and added sliced, crushed toasted almonds and some unsweetened coconut to the mixture. These are so easy and healthy you just feel like “hey, I can have that second one if I want”. Although, I don’t have to eat Gluten-free, it was fun trying different things with the almond flour. The cheese crackers and these scones I will definitely keep making even though our challenge has ended.

If you ate way tooooo much to eat over the Thanksgiving holidays, try making these little scones for a sweet treat and not feel guilty afterwards.

November 28, 2010 By Sherry

Bread

Double Quick Dinner Rolls

Can a dinner roll tell a story?

I recently saw this question in an ad for King Arthur Flour. Of course, I had a story about a dinner roll.

Who doesn’t have some kind of story about a beloved food favorite. Even as a teenager in high school, I loved smelling the aroma of freshly baked rolls waifing from the cafeteria. We could hardly wait until lunch in the cafeteria to have a couple of these rolls and they were not out of the freezer but where freshly made each day by these wonderful ladies in the cafeteria’s kitchen.

Back in the early 70’s we lived in Louisville, Kentucky for six great years. We had friends (Judy and Boots) who took us to our first Kentucky Derby and I was photographed by one of the local newspapers standing on a ladder in the infield at Churchill Downs (see photo below) trying desperately to see a horse. If you go to the infield on Derby day you know you are going to be sitting on the ground (or on a ladder or sitting on someone’s shoulders), drinking mint juleps and enjoying lots of food.

My old friend Judy and her husband Boots (isn’t that a cool name) had us over for dinner one night. I can’t remember what the dinner was but I will never forget her homemade dinner rolls because her daughter, Stephanie, loved the rolls, and they would never let her eat them until she finished her meal. That was her dessert! She said her daughter still loves the rolls, and I wonder if she makes them as often as I do. Thank you Judy for this favorite recipe from years ago.

November 3, 2010 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods

Pumpkin Muffins with Chocolate Chips

A can of pumpkin met a bag of chocolate chips and fell in love.

I love seeing pumpkins growing in a field and it always reminds me of school field trips with my kids when they were in kindergarten and everyone got to pick out a pumpkin to take home for carving.

Pumpkin pie has never been one of my favorite fall desserts. Seems like I always make one at Thanksgiving and 3/4 of the pie is still left by the time we are throwing out left overs. I do love pumpkin bread and pumpkin bread pudding with caramel sauce and when I found this recipe for the Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins years ago, my initial thoughts were that chocolate and pumpkin was a weird combination. But, I was wrong, and found out they are delicious together.

I hope you will pick up a pumpkin or even a can of pumpkin and do something exciting with it this weekend.

Another strange pumpkin recipe I ran across years ago from a little restaurant in Mendocina, CA is a Pumpkin Tomato Soup. If you love tomato soup, you will really enjoy this version that has pumpkin added. The pumpkin adds a little sweetness and cuts some of the acidity of the tomatoes. Topped with some creme fraiche and it is a great little soup to have in the fall. If you decide to try the soup, don’t make the mistake I did once and buy pumpkin PIE FILLING instead of canned pumpkin.

Back to the muffins. They freeze beautifully, so you can make these before thanksgiving and have them ready when your company comes for the holidays. A few seconds in the microwave and you have melting chocolate chips and pumpkin ready to be devoured by your guests.

October 22, 2010 By Sherry

Bread/ Morning Foods

Banana Rum Muffins

Tipsy Banana muffins make a great little breakfast bread.

I’m always looking for a muffin to do for breakfast and brunches (for myself or someone I’m catering for) that isn’t overly sweet. If a muffin gets too sweet it seems more like a cupcake than a muffin. A muffin is typically a quick bread recipe that you portion it out into muffin cups whereas a cupcake is a cake batter make into individual portions.

I use to cater a lot of business breakfasts and this was one of the muffin recipes I frequently used. I normally use a dark rum but on this day someone had drank all my dark rum and I had to use an orange flavored. It was good but I like the dark or even light rum better than flavored rum.

September 26, 2010 By Sherry

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