Baking New Year

I don’t bake much in January or February.  I think it’s because we’re coming off Christmas and an overdose of baked sweet treats.  Cookies, candies, Yule Logs, and more cookies!

Also, it's the new year and you think you want to start anew and be healthier.  Resolution city.

By late January, weeks had gone by without bakes.  Watching the Australian Open early one morning, I craved something sweet to accompany my coffee.  That craving me led to something that’s been on my to do list in the kitchen:  go to bakes.  

Planning my bakes is my usual operating procedure.  I bake on the weekends so during the week I plan, check my ingredients, get some groceries if I need them.  Weekend bakes give me something to look forward to and if I want to make something involved, I have the time.

But hey, I might wake up on a Saturday and think, I want something sweet today!  Right now!  And then I get all twisted up because I haven’t a clue what to bake.  So here’s a resolution.  Make a list of bakes I can whip up on the spot!  Commit!

I feel like my mom would always have something up her sleeve if she wanted a quick sweet snack.  I think she was always whipping up something sweet because she had a box mix or a tube of something in the fridge.  Voila!  Muffins in twenty minutes.  “You want some orange danish?  I can make that happen in ten minutes.”

I haven’t had a box mix in my pantry for years, for health reasons as well as snobby chef reasons.  So impromptu bakes haven’t had solid representation in my repertoire.

Options?

Muffins.  I don’t always have berries depending on the time of year.  G isn’t a fan of nuts or coconut or zucchini or pumpkin or poppyseed or carrot or raisins.  Our fave is apple cranberry but I don't always have that either.  Also, filling Individual tins takes longer than just scooping dough into one pan.  This is all about finding the quickest route to baked goodness.

Scones.  See:  muffins.

Quick breads.  These have historically led to bananas.  Oh, bananas.  You’re always on the counter slowly turning brown as I walk by you everyday.  I used to use bananas as my go to bake item.  Banana muffins, banana bread.  But at a certain point, enough was enough.  I was never truly in love with a banana bake, but it was an easy thing to do.  I’ve become blasé about bakes with bananas.  If I never have a piece of banana bread again, I’ll be fine.

Coffee cakes.  A lot of coffee cakes are labor or time intensive.  Some are yeast based, so a quick breakfast treat is out of the question.  Some are bundt cakes, which take a at least 45 minutes to an hour to bake and then longer to cool.  I’ve always been a sucker for coffee cake, even when I wasn’t drinking coffee yet.

I found a promising coffee cake recipe in one of my ace breakfast cookbooks, Big Bad Breakfast.  It called for an 8” cake pan, and it was quick to throw together.  It didn't have a long cooling time either.

And wouldn’t you know it, I had bananas that were ignored all week so I smashed up two for the cake. But this recipe included sour cream, nutmeg, cinnamon and a crunchy topping so I had a hunch that banana flavor wasn’t the leading character.  Usually I would leave out the nuts, but I toasted the pecans and chopped them as finely as possible.  It was a gamble, but my sweet craving made me go for it.

Author says, “glaze is optional, but you’d be an idiot not to.”  How could I not take that bait?  Again, I had all I needed to whisk up the glaze so I did.  And G loves a glaze.

For a treat that’s not chocolate nor a donut, this coffee cake was a big hit.  G even went back for seconds.  

This is definitely going into the spontaneous weekend bake rotation.