This week I kind of went a little overboard. Let me tell you why we have 2 recipes this week…. So I am on my university’s Stock Horse Team and we had our spring show this Saturday. I figured the only night I would be able to bake anything would be Thursday night and I decided to rid myself of the sugary baked goods, I would make something to take to the barn with me on Saturday morning to feed the team and the students planning on showing and participating on Saturday.
I have this awesome recipe for coffee cake and I have made it more times than I can remember and it is always awesome. I have experimented with this recipe as well-making double the topping and putting half in the middle and half on top of the coffee cake (which was AAAAAMAZING!!). So I decided to make the coffee cake in a way that it could be had by more people than what an 8x8 pan would normally allow. I decided to go with coffee cake muffins.
Coffee Cake:
Preheat oven to 375 degrees
1 ½ cup flour
¾ cup sugar
2 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ teaspoon salt
¼ cup oil
¾ cup milk
1 egg
You are supposed to mix the dry ingredients and then the wet ingredients separately. I have done this and honestly, with this recipe, I do not think it makes much of a difference if you just throw everything in a bowl and mix until combined. The batter will be mildly thick (if that makes any sense). Make sure the mixture is smooth, you can use an electric mixer if you desire, I just normally use a rubber spatula and keep stirring and folding until everything is mixed smoothly together.
Now normally, you would grease an 8x8 pan and pour in the batter (don’t worry if it does not seem like it is thick, this batter will rise!). But, since I was doing muffins, I lined a muffin tin with paper muffin cups and filled each cup half way. The halfway thing is very important because these do rise up to a full muffin size. (My mixture made 15 muffins)
Then you top each with the topping:
1/3 cup brown sugar
¼ cup flour
½ teaspoon cinnamon
2 Tablespoons butter or margarine
With the topping, you want to mix the brown sugar, flour and cinnamon all together until everything is well blended, then add the butter and using a pastry blender (or a fork if you don’t have a pastry blender) mix this up until it is crumbly. The butter should be in relatively small chunks (like the size of mini chocolate chips) and spread evenly throughout the mixture.
You want to evenly spread the topping over the cake or muffins. If you are making the cake, you want to bake it for about 25 minutes. If you are making the muffins, 18 minutes was the timing I found that worked out, but you always want to check the center with a toothpick.
This coffee cake is one of my favorite recipes, so enjoy!
I know I said I did two recipes this week, and so here is the second recipe. I got this sweet and simple cookbook for my birthday last year and all of the recipes I have made from it are awesome. It is a Gooseberry Patch cookbook. I highly recommend it.
Meme’s Molasses Cookies
¾ cup shortening
1 ½ cup sugar, divided
1 egg
4 Tablespoons molasses
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon ground ginger
In a mixing bowl, blend the shortening, 1 cup of the sugar, egg and molasses “until fluffy.” I used a hand mixer to do this and it worked out just fine. I had to guess where the “fluffy” point was, I just kept mixing until everything was blended and the cookies still turned out awesome.
In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger together. Slowly add the dry mixture into the molasses mixture. After you get about half of the flour mix into the molasses mixture, the dough starts to really form and get thick, I had to up my mixer to the next speed so it could power through the mixture. Then you want to cover the dough and put it in the refrigerator to cool for a half an hour.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
After your dough is cooled, put the ½ cup of sugar you haven’t used yet into a bowl. You are going to roll the dough into little walnut sized balls and roll that in the sugar. Place the rolled dough on an ungreased cookie sheet. Repeat this process until you have filled up the cookie sheet. Make sure you keep enough space between the dough so that the cookies have space to spread out as they cook.
Place the cookie sheet in the oven for 10 minutes and then cool on the sheet for a minute or two before transferring them to a cooling rack or just a sheet of paper towel laid out on your table.
The recipe says it makes about 4 dozen cookies, I think I made mine a little larger and came out with exactly 3 ½ dozen. This was my first time making these cookies and they came out very good. My roommate said that they taste more like ginger-snaps. I do not know because I have not ever had molasses cookies or ginger-snaps. I know, craziness.
Well, that is all for this week, hopefully 2 recipes will hold me over til next week.
Enjoy!
~Jenn
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