Victory is Sweet (but this bread is bad)

Last week, in honor of election day, I decided to celebrate by baking a recipe for sweet potato bread out of Michelle Obama's book "American Grown", a lovely coffee table book we received in celebration of our wedding. I am a huge fan of our First Lady. Her "Let's Move!" initiative aimed at promoting healthful and active lifestyles for children is inspiring, and her transformation of the White House garden into a cornucopia of vegetables planted by Washington, D.C. schoolchildren is truly wonderful.

That being said, while the Obama family may have secured a victory on Tuesday, the First Lady's recipe for sweet potato bread was not so victorious. I will take the credit for part of this recipe's semi-epic failure, as I am still slightly domestically challenged. This blog is not just about posting delicious recipes for all to try. In pursuing such adventures in baking, I am bound to make some chuckle-worthy mistakes for all to learn from. Since this recipe did not get my seal of delicious approval, we'll focus on how to avoid baking blunders.

Baking Blunder #1: If something calls for this much ginger, you should probably use less ginger!

On the bright side, during the baking of this recipe, I learned a lot about ginger. Pictured is crystallized ginger (which is kind of like ginger flavored gummy bears without the delightful bear shape), fresh grated ginger, and ground ginger. I remember looking at this bowl full of ginger and thinking to myself: Hey, this seems like a lot of ginger. That was a good instinct, and instead of dumping it all into the mix, I probably should have added a little at a time to make sure the ginger was not overwhelming the delicious sweet potato puree I had just made. This leads me to baking blunder #2.

Baking Blunder #2: Taste as you go! Sometimes, following a recipe to a tee is not such a great idea. Firstly, we all have our own palettes, so while the author of a particular cookbook might prefer a sweeter muffin or saltier salted chocolate chip cookie, you may not. In this instance, the First Lady has some sort of strange ginger obsession that I am betting the rest of America does not share.

Baking Blunder #3: When a recipe says it will take a half-an-hour to an hour to prep, unless you are Martha Stewart, it probably won't. This particular recipe took me about two and a half hours to prep and bake, and I was rushing. By the time the bread made it out of the oven, it was almost one in the morning, and I was ready for bed. This leads me to blunder number four...

Baking Blunder #4: Do not take your bread out of the oven even a minute earlier than you are supposed to! This will lead to your bread tasting doughy and sad. There was nothing light and fluffy about this "great" American bread. In my haste, I made epic baking blunder number five. This one is embarrassing...

Baking Blunder #5: If a recipe says to let the baked good cool for an hour...let it cool for an hour. Feeling sleepy and unwilling to leave the bread sitting out on my counter all night long, my husband (yes, I will blame him), and I decided that it was a perfectly reasonable idea to wrap some aluminum foil over the bread while it was sitting on the wire rack.

When I awoke the next morning, I was still obliviously optimistic about my final product.

  

Look at how happy I am! 

Then I took a bite. Not only was the ginger incredibly overwhelming, but leaving the bread in an aluminum foil camping tent all night made it dense, moist, and very non-delicious. I was hesitant to blog about this baking disaster, but when one goes on adventures in baking, one is bound to make a few wrong turns. Here's to hoping that you learned from, or at least got a good laugh at, this particular failure in baking.

On a final note, let's play the blame game! Here is where I place the blame.

Michelle Obama (great first lady/ possesses a strange ginger obsession): 65%

Me (too tired to bake/hopelessly optimistic): 30%

My Husband (came up with the aluminum tent idea): 5%

Power-Packed Muffins

Hello there, and welcome to The Sweetest Years' first official baking post!

This evening's recipe comes in modified form from"The High-Energy Cookbook" by Rachael Anne Hill. After an eventful Thursday night in Atlantic City, my husband and I left the land of five-dollar black-jack tables, stretchy pants and very big hair, and spent a relaxing Friday evening in to make some of my favorite power-packed muffins. They are good for week-day mornings when breakfast is a "grab and go" event, or even healthy enough to snack on during the day.

Here are the ingredients you will need for 12 muffins:

1/2 cup dried apricots, coarsely chopped
1/4 cup dried cherries
1 cup unsweetened muesli
1 cup all-purpose white flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon of baking powder
1 pinch of salt
1 cup unsweetened apple juice
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/3 cup of honey
1 large egg

 When I first came across this recipe, I thought to myself: This looks delicious! What is muesli?

So, I went to the source any savvy law school student frequents when confused...Wikipedia, of course. Here, I learned that muesli has quite an interesting history. It is a popular breakfast dish made from uncooked oats, cornflakes and dried fruits, and was first introduced by a Swiss physician in the early 1900's who served it to his patients for its healthy qualities. It's the star ingredient of this evening's muffins.

Preparation time: The cookbook states that the preparation time is 12 minutes, but for the domestically challenged, give yourself at least 20.

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
2. Gather the dry ingredients, including the dried fruit, muesli, flour,  baking powder and salt, and combine them in a large mixing bowl.

 3. Combine the wet ingredients, including the unsweetened apple juice, vegetable oil, honey and egg  and combine them in a medium sized mixing bowl.

4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, and be sure not to overmix.
5. Scoop the mixture into a lined muffin pan and, pop into the oven & bake for 20 minutes, until   golden brown and risen.

6. Remove from the oven and cool on a wire rack.

 

7. Cut in half and share with your baker's helper!

The Sweetest Year Begins

Hello, all!

Firstly, thank you for visiting. Blogging is a new endeavor for me, an experiment in sharing my experiences with all of you through pictures, recipes and musings on how to wear your leather jacket outside and your favorite color block apron inside.

After days of rumination, I decided to call this blog "The Sweetest Years". I married my best friend just a month and half ago and know that I am in the midst of the sweetest years of my life thus far. The title is also a play on words as I have been teaching myself how to bake savory, scrumptious and sweet treats for family and friends. Be forewarned that until quite recently, I was lacking in any sort of traditional domestic ability. My husband still tells the story of the first time he watched me make spaghetti. I was the only person he had ever seen actually burn pasta, literally igniting the straw like strands on the rickety gas stove of my old Greenpoint, Brooklyn apartment. I have since learned how to keep the pasta in the pot and have committed myself to becoming a well-adored baker of all things delicious.

Follow my trials and tribulations here, and join me on a journey in which I lean to use all of the things I so optimistically placed on my registry...and received. Here goes!

Cheers,

A.