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As a Food­buzz Fea­tured Pub­lisher I had received a great coupon from Pep­peridge Farms and wanted to make a meal around their pas­try.  Easy!  Chicken Pot Pie.  I used my coupon to buy the frozen sheets of pas­try and lined two pie plates, made my fill­ing and topped with two puff pas­try lids.  Deli­cious, quick and very affordable!

Ingre­di­ents:

1.5 T olive oil
2 cups diced onion
1 cup cel­ery
1 tsp. minced gar­lic
4T all-purpose flour
1 ea. 10 oz bag  frozen peas and car­rots
2 cups chicken stock or strong veg­etable broth
2 cups diced chicken

1 pack­age Pep­peridge Farms puff pas­try
Melted but­ter as needed

Method:

Using a small stock pot, heat oil and sauté onion and cel­ery until translu­cent.
Add the diced chicken and cook until done.
Add gar­lic and sauté two min­utes more.
Add flour and stir with a wooden spoon until well incor­po­rated.
Pour in stock and stir.
Sim­mer until fill­ing has thick­ened.
Sea­son with salt and pep­per to taste.
Add remain­ing veg­eta­bles and stir until all is cooked thru.

Roll out pie crust and cut it about 1/2 an inch larger than the pie plate  you are using.  Add some of the fill­ing.  I usu­ally fill it almost to the edge.  I do brush the edge of the bot­tom pie shell with egg wash and then add the top crust, also rolled out to be a bit larger than the plate.  Secure the top crust to the bot­tom with a fork or by a fold­ing method whichever you are used to.

Bake in pre-heated 400° oven until the crust is nice and golden as you want to make sure the bot­tom crust is cook­ing also.  The fill­ing is already cooked so you just have to ensure that it is warmed through espe­cially if you had pre-made it and it was refrigerated.

When you have a nice dark golden colour on your pas­try you can remove it and serve it up!

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My fam­ily love Chi­nese style bbq pork buns (char siu bao).  I had made a roast pork the night before last and wanted to use up some of the left­overs.  Of course my pork wasn’t roasted in the tra­di­tional Chi­nese bbq style, but with the addi­tion of a sauce mixed into my roast pork, I felt I could get away with it. For the bun dough I used the mas­ter recipe from my copy of Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.

Ingre­di­ents:

Bun dough:

Mas­ter Recipe here.

Roast Pork:

2 cups of roast pork diced (I used left­overs remember)

Sauce:

(Adapted from The Chi­nese Kitchen by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo)

For the Fill­ing (make while the dough is ris­ing):
5 table­spoons low-sodium chicken stock
1 tbsp oys­ter sauce
2  1/2 tsp sugar
2  1/4 tsp tapi­oca or corn starch
2 tsp ketchup
1  1/2 tsp dark soy sauce
Pinch ground white pep­per
1 tbsp oil
1 small onion, cut into 1/4-inch pieces
3/4 cup bar­be­cued pork, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
1 1/2 tsp Shao Xing rice wine or gin
1 tsp toasted sesame oil

In a small bowl, com­bine chicken stock, oys­ter sauce, sugar, tapi­oca starch, ketchup, soy sauce, and white pep­per; set aside.

Heat a wok or pan over high heat for 40 sec­onds and add oil. Coat wok with oil using a spat­ula then add onion. Lower heat to medium, and cook until onion turns light brown, about 2 min­utes. Raise heat to high, add pork, and cook, stir­ring, for 2 min­utes. Add wine, and stir to combine.

Stir the reserved stock mix­ture and add it to the pan. Cook, stir­ring, until the sauce thick­ens and turns brown, 1 to 1 1/2 min­utes. Add sesame oil, and stir to com­bine. Trans­fer to a shal­low dish. Cool to room temperature.

Assem­bly:

Pre­heat oven to 375F.

Once the dough has risen for the first time I took small pieces of it and flat­tened it to the size of a small saucer using floured hands so it didn’t stick.

Then take about one heaped table­spoon of the pork fill­ing and place in the cen­ter of the dough disc.

Gather up the sides of the dough disc to form a ball shape enclos­ing the fill­ing.  Be sure to seal the fill­ing inside of the dough or it will leak out.   I placed my buns with the gath­ered seam side down and brushed with a beaten egg to give them a glossy finish.

Place buns on a sheet pan dusted with some flour and bake in the oven for approx­i­mately 15–20 mins depend­ing on your oven.

I served mine with a plum sauce for dip­ping which was a great compliment.

***As I said before, these are a quick cheats way to make pork buns, so if you are look­ing for the tra­di­tional char siu bao, then this recipe prob­a­bly isn’t for you.  It was really a way of using up our left­overs and enjoy­ing the pork in a dif­fer­ent way to how it was first served up.

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There is noth­ing quite like the smell of bread bak­ing.  Unless of course it’s cake or cook­ies bak­ing.  But bread fills the house with that mor­eish, yeasty fra­grance you just can’t get enough of.  Recently I pur­chased a fab­u­lous book titled “Arti­san Bread in Five Min­utes a Day.”  You start with a basic dough from the mas­ter recipe that can be kept in the fridge until you want to bake some­thing.   At which point you take some of the dough and add your flavours, shape, bake and eat!  This week I have really been hun­gry for Tan­doori Chicken so decided to make that and what bet­ter to accom­pany this meal than some tasty gar­lic naan bread.

Mas­ter Recipe

3 cups of luke­warm water
1 1/2 table­spoons gran­u­lated yeast (1 1/2 pack­ets)
1 1/2 table­spoons kosher or other coarse salt
6 1/2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all pur­pose white  flour, mea­sured with the scook and sweep method.

Mix­ing and Stor­ing Dough

1.   Warm the water slightly:  It should feel just a lit­tle warmer than body tem­per­a­ture, about 100 degrees F.  Warm water will rise the dough to the right point for stor­age in about 2 hours.  You can use cold tap water and get an iden­ti­cal final result;  then the first ris­ing will take 3 or even 4 hours.  That won’t be too great a dif­fer­ence, as you will only be doing this once per stored batch.

2.  Add yeast and salt to the water in a 5 quart bowl or prefer­able, in a reseal­able, lid­ded (not air­tight)  plas­tic food con­tainer or food grade bucket.  Don’t worry about get­ting it all to dissolve.

3.  Mix in the flour — knead­ing is unnec­es­sary.  Add all of the flour at once, mea­sur­ing it in with dry ingre­di­ent mea­sur­ing cups, by gen­tly scoop­ing up the flour and lev­el­ing it off with a knife.  Mix this in with a wooden spoon, or high capac­ity food proces­sor (14 cups or larger) or mixer fit­ted with a dough hook attach­ment.   If it get’s too dry you can reach into the dough with very wet hands and press the mix together but don’t knead.  You are fin­ished when every­thing is uni­formly moist.  This will yeild a dough that is wet  and loose which will prob­a­bly con­form to the shape of the container.

4.  Allow to rise.  cover with a lid but not air­tight.  Do not use screw top jars as the gasses will not be able to escape and the jars could explode.  Allow the mix to rise at room tem­per­a­ture for approx­i­mately 2 hours.  The top may begin to col­lapse in on itself, this is ok.  Longer ris­ing times up to 5 hours will not harm the result.  You can begin using any por­tion of the dough after this time to make your breads.

When you wish to bake some bread, DO NOT KNEAD.  Just shape your loaf in 30 to 60 sec­onds and you are ready to bake.  It is best baked on a pizza stone with some corn­meal sprin­kled on it to pre­vent your loaf from sticking.

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We so loved yesterday’s batch of Upside-down Caramel Apple Cup­cakes that I decided to make some more but this time right way up. I had a dozen plain spice cup­cakes left over to use.

This time around I peeled and chopped 2 large Pink Lady apples which are excel­lent for cook­ing with. They held their shape won­der­fully and didn’t break down when stirred into the caramel even once they were tender.

Caramel Sauce

10 oz unsalted but­ter
2/3 cup brown sugar
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
1/2 tea­spoon of nut­meg
1 table­spoon of cin­na­mon
pinch salt

Melt the but­ter over medium heat in a pan. Add the sug­ars and spices. I cooked this reduc­ing the heat a lit­tle until it bub­bled and didn’t look so watery on top. To test my caramel I place a tea­spoon full of the sauce on a glass plate and pop it in the freezer for a few min­utes to see how it’s set­ting up. You don’t want a hard tof­fee like caramel in your cup­cakes. When you get a nice soft but not runny con­sis­tency add the chopped apples and con­tinue to cook until the apples are ten­der… I wasn’t adding them to the oven this time since I was using cup­cakes I had made pre­vi­ously, so I needed to cook them a lit­tle longer.

Cut a small cap from the top of the cup­cakes by diag­o­nally insert­ing a sharp knife into the cup­cakes  from the edge towards the cen­ter about one inch.  Cut around until a small cap pops out.  You can see the shape of the well in the image below.  I trim off the point on these caps so they sit flat when I put them back on top of the caramel apple filling.

Add a heaped tea­spoon of the caramel apple fill­ing to the cup­cakes.  Replace the trimmed caps and sprin­kle with pow­dered sugar.  I think these looks so fes­tive and use col­ored cup­cake papers to suit the sea­son.  Great for those Fall par­ties, Thanks­giv­ing and other Hol­i­day festivities.

As always, if you have any ques­tions be sure and drop me a line.  I love hear­ing from you all and will do my best to answer in a clear man­ner…  Often I think my instruc­tions are clear but then again…

Cheers for now,

Colleen

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You might think I’m a lit­tle pre­ma­ture in bak­ing an item so suited to Fall weather, but there is some­thing won­der­ful about the fra­grance of cooked apple and cin­na­mon that I just couldn’t resist.

When the air con­di­tioner is on and it’s over­cast it’s easy to over­look the fact that the tem­per­a­ture out­side is actu­ally in the upper 90s.

I saw a photo of an upside-down caramel apple cup­cake on Flickr made by 4GoodnessCake and thought they looked easy enough to make, which they were.  For some rea­son I decided to chop up my apples when the ones I saw online had used a ring of apple.  The ring would have been far eas­ier to get out of the pan I’m sure and prob­a­bly would have made a more tra­di­tional flat bot­tom shape.  I had to scoop out some of the apple chunks and repo­si­tion them on the cup­cakes.  But as they cooled they set up well and stayed where they were put.

I used a recipe for Applesauce-Spice Cake from my Betty Crocker Best of Bak­ing book.  The spicy cake with added apple­sauce was great cou­pled with the cooked apple I placed into the pan before the cake mix. Step 1 — Cook the Apples This recipe test yielded enough bat­ter for two dozen cup­cakes but I only had enough cooked apples for one dozen so the remain­der are just plain old spice cakes.

• Peel and chop into small chunks two apples of your choice.  I used Granny Smith because they hold together well when cooked and that is what hubby bought back with him from the store so lit­tle choice really!
• In a skil­let I melted 1 cup of unsalted but­ter, to which I added 1 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 tea­spoon of cin­na­mon and 1/4 tea­spoon of nut­meg and just a pinch of salt to bring out the flavours.
• Add the chopped apples (or rings if you pre­fer) and cook just until they begin to get tender.
• Scoop about 1  table­spoon of this mix­ture into the bot­tom of a greased cup­cake pan.

Step 2 — The Cake Bat­ter
Seri­ously peo­ple, if you want to use a box spice cake mix — DO IT! I’m all about con­ve­nience and some­times we just don’t have the time to do it from scratch. Yeah, yeah, I know purist bak­ers are rolling their eyes…

2  1/2 cups of all pur­pose flour
2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of but­ter
1  1/2 cups of apple sauce (I pre­fer the unsweet­ened nat­ural)
1/2 cup of water
1  1/2 tsp of bak­ing soda
1  1/2 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground cin­na­mon
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp ground all­spice
1/4 tsp bak­ing pow­der
3 eggs

Pre­heat oven to 350F (180C) degrees.  Beat all the ingre­di­ents together in your mixer on low speed, scrape the bot­tom to ensure no dry ingre­di­ents are sit­ting down there for about 30 sec­onds.  Then beat on medium high for around 3 mins until bat­ter looks rel­a­tively smooth.

You can now add this bat­ter on top of your cooked apples in the cup­cake pans, fill­ing each hole to about 2/3 full.  I use a quar­ter cup mea­sure to try and get some uni­for­mity in my cup­cake size.

Bake for around 20 min­utes or until the cake springs back when touched with a fin­ger­tip.   They will look brown due to the spice cake mix but don’t let them get too dark.   When cooked, cool in the pan for approx­i­mately ten to fif­teen min­utes.  I used a large spoon to remove mine from the pan, scoop­ing up the apple and sauce that stayed in the pan.

Have your cup­cake papers sit­ting on the cool­ing rack and place each cup­cake apple side up in the papers.  I driz­zled on any syrup and apple left in the bot­tom of the pan.  Let cool.  You can dec­o­rate any way you wish.  These were good the next day cold out of the refrig­er­a­tor or heated in the microwave with a scoop of vanilla ice­cream and some caramel sauce.

If you have any ques­tions do not hes­i­tate to com­ment here or email me.

Happy happy baking!

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I’ve always wanted to try mak­ing cake balls.  The whole idea just looks like fun.  I’ve seen them on other sites and thought I would def­i­nitely have to give them a go some day.

Well hubby got pro­moted recently so why not use that as an excuse to make some for him to take into the office right?  Easy as can be.

The recipe below uses a boxed cake mix but if you can’t get your hands on one or would just pre­fer to make it your red vel­vet cake from scratch here is the recipe.

Red Vel­vet & Cream Cheese Cake Balls

Ingre­di­ents: 1 box red vel­vet cake mix (I used Dun­can Hines — cook as directed on box for 13 X 9 cake) 1 1/2 cups of my cream cheese frost­ing or you can use the can cream cheese frost­ing (16 oz.) 1 pack­age choco­late bark (reg­u­lar or white chocolate) Parch­ment or wax paper.

Red Vel­vet & Cream Cheese Cake Balls

Method:

1. After cake is cooked and cooled com­pletely, crum­ble into large bowl.
2. Mix thor­oughly with the cream cheese frost­ing.  I used a wooden spoon to mix it around.
3. Using a melon baller or tea­spoon roll mix­ture into quar­ter size balls and lay on cookie sheet cov­ered with parch­ment.   You can also use a mini ice-cream scoop but I’m a hands on kinda gal.
4. Chill for sev­eral hours. I froze mine for two hours.
5. Melt choco­late in microwave per direc­tions on pack­age.
6. Roll balls in choco­late and lay on parch­ment until firm.  (I dropped the balls into the choco­late, com­pletely cov­ered them and then scooped them up with a fork and tapped on the side of the bowl until most of the excess choco­late came off.)

I also only melt a few pieces of choco­late bark at a time because it starts to cool and thicken. It’s eas­ier to work with when it’s hot.

I refrig­er­ated mine again until ready to pack up and send to the office.