Hot Cross Buns for Easter: In Partnership with Red Star Yeast

So suddenly the winter’s gone and the salt-stained boots lying in the mudroom are the only indication it ever stopped by at all. Without invitation, Spring trespassed on the cold mornings, stretched her arms and I kept my windows open to greet her. A lot has happened in six months and this persephonic heat wave doesn’t remember any of it. And I thank her for that.

I’m drinking my coffee on the porch these days, a blanket and a dog on my lap. I take my time. I don’t wear cologne these days, all my clothes smell like the breeze. A finch sat on the porch swing last night and didn’t seem to notice me. I’m enjoying the times I get to be invisible. A truck broke down a mile from my house; but I just kept driving.

This week is almost Easter and that, too, crept up on me. I haven’t celebrated in a few years—I let life get the best of me and was too busy trying to forget about others. We’re celebrating early, my parents are driving to their house in North Carolina and my sister works the weekend shift now. We’re meeting at a truck stop and eating at a diner. My dad says I can order anything I want on the menu, he’s just happy to have me home now. My mom apologizes for the last-minute choice, but the candy store’s busy and she’s too tired to cook when she gets home. I say it’s all fine because it really is. As long as I’m with them, I’m happy.

But I kept one tradition going this year, to keep the memories of cellophane grass and hollow chocolate bunnies alive. I made hot cross buns for tomorrow, for Good Friday. I made these for every tradition I thought I forgot, for every year I thought I could leave them all behind. I’ll give a few to my sister and her husband and pack the rest in a basket for my mom and dad. It may not be much, but it’s all I can give. It’s been a long six months of winter for me.

Coconut-Roasted Carrot Hot Cross Buns with Pineapple Ginger Icing

Yields 12-18 buns

Ingredients for the Roasted Carrot Puree:

• 5-8 carrots, cleaned
• 3 tablespoon coconut oil, melted
• 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
• 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions for the Roasted Carrot Puree

1. Preheat oven to 425*F and prepare a pan with aluminum foil
2. Lay carrots on foiled pan, spread out
3. In a small measuring cup, whisk coconut oil, sugar, olive oil, pepper, and salt
4. Pour mixture over carrots and stir with a wooden spoon to coat
5. Roast for 25-35 minutes or until browned, tender, and a little caramelized
6. Let cool and puree in a food processor

Ingredients for Coconut-Roasted Carrot Hot Cross Buns:

• 2 cups water, warm to the touch
• 5 teaspoons Red Star Active Dry Yeast
• 1/2 cup white sugar, packed
• 1 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup roasted carrot puree (above)
• 1 egg
• 2 tablespoons softened butter
• ½ tablespoon of orange zest
• 4 1/2-6 cup AP flour 

Directions for Coconut-Roasted Carrot Hot Cross Buns:

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, add water, sugar, salt, and yeast. Let sit for five minutes until foamy
2. Add egg, puree, orange zest, and butter. Turn mixer on low to mix all ingredients together
3. Keeping the mixer on, begin adding flour, one cup at a time. Keep adding flour until dough begins to stick away from sides of bowl (if you add too much flour and dough becomes "sandy", add a small amount of water or milk to reconstitute)
4. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead for 3-5 minutes until springy
5. Place in a well-oiled bowl, turning once. Cover with a towel and let sit for an hour in a warm, dry place until doubled in size. 
6. Turn back out onto floured surface and punch down slightly. Cut into 12 or 18 equal pieces and place well-oiled pan
7. Cover with a towel and allow to rise for 20 minutes
8. While rising, preheat oven to 350*F
9. Bake for 25-32 minutes or until golden brown on top.
10. Allow to cool slightly before icing tops of crosses

Ingredients for Pineapple Ginger Icing:

• 4 oz cream cheese, softened
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• 2 tablespoon pineapple juice
• 2 cups confectioner’s sugar

Directions for Pineapple Ginger Icing:

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment, mix cream cheese, ginger, and pineapple juice on medium-high until well incorporated
2. With mixer reduced to a medium-low speed, begin adding confectioner’s sugar, a half-cup at a time until icing is a desired viscosity with no lumps
3. Spoon icing into a piping bag and pipe crosses onto buns
4. Allow to sit for two minutes
5. Enjoy!

Thank you to Red Star Yeast for sponsoring this post. I believe in using quality products when it comes to baking and I am always confident my dough will rise beautifully with Red Star! Check out the active dry yeast I used for this recipe and others on their website, follow them on instagram and like their Facebook!

And while you're at it...like my Facebook and Instagram too!

Home + Cake

I live just west of two creeks now, just shy of the intersection between Dunnings Creek and Bob’s Creek. In a house too big for us. In a town I used to think was too small for me. There’s a store here run by a Mennonite family. They’ll sing to you if you buy bread in the morning. Hymns about salvation, the ascension, peace on earth. I just wanted a loaf of rye.

I’m tempted to start smoking again, to fiddle with a cigarette between my lips. Breaking promises I never thought I could keep. I’m busy now, watching the houses turn from wood to vinyl to brick on my drive to the gas station. I see a horse swat aimlessly at flies with its long, shaggy tail. I look a little closer and see it’s matted in horse shit. I get angry and then get over it. I keep driving, still craving a cigarette.

I don’t buy a pack, though. Not yet at least. I think of an uncle my mother had. She called him Old Relic. He was ancient and his nails were bitten to the quick; he left small drops of blood on napkins when he’d twist them too tight in his hands. His voice wheezed and grated, his windpipe as fragile as china. At night I’d hear him snoring from the hallway, his breathing a constant moan, a motel air conditioner that’s only half-assing it.

I didn’t buy a pack and I turned around. The filthy horse didn’t even move an inch. I go back to a home that I craved for years while I lived in California. A home where the chipped paint of the back deck breaks off in large strips. The paint was called terra cotta when my mom bought it. It’s hardly blushing anymore.

It’s a home where six cats live and two dogs. Three Midwesterners still sometimes feel out of place in rural Pennsylvania, too. Cats that step in my mother’s Gold Bond powder dusting the bathroom floor. Small footprints and nothing but whispered running on the floorboards while I’m upstairs working. Cats with sleepy, glaucoma eyes that stare and blink and still trust me in their fog. A bucket of screws fell when the wind swung the door open too fast. The bath sometimes takes a half hour to drain completely.

This is the world I live in now, not the one of wanting and remembering. I see it for its beauty now, the uneasiness and the imperfections that lie just beyond the quick when I bite the nail too low, when I drive too fast on the windy roads. When I think of Old Relic and the cats that can’t see and the horse that seems to have given up on life. It’s all beautiful in its own way, because I’m letting life happen around me these days.

Orange Marmalade Cake with Tahini Frosting

Makes two 6-inch cakes

Ingredients for the cake:

• 2 cups AP flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoons baking soda
• ½ tablespoon white vinegar
• 1 cup whole milk
• ½ cup orange marmalade
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• Zest of half an orange
• 2 tablespoons butter, room temperature
• 3 tablespoons shortening, room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 eggs

Directions for cake:

1. Prep two six-inch pans with butter and parchment paper
2. Preheat oven to 350*F
3. In a medium-sized bowl, sift together flour, baking powder, and baking soda. Set aside
4. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk together vinegar, milk, marmalade, vanilla, and orange zest. Set aside.
5. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, beat fats and sugar on medium-high until light and ribbons form
6. Add eggs, one at a time
7. With mixer on low, alternate between adding the flour mixture and the milk mixture in thirds. When both are mixed in, turn mixer off and scrape bowl with rubber spatula to ensure batter is fully incorporated
8. Divide batter between prepared pans
9. Bake for 34-40 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Check at 30 minutes for excessive browning on top, due to the sugar content in this recipe (with the marmalade). If so, tent foil on tops of cakes
10. Allow to cool before icing cake

Ingredients for Tahini frosting:

• ½ cup tahini
• 2 cup confectioner’s sugar
• 2-4 tablespoons whole milk

Directions for tahini frosting:

1. In the bowl of a stand mixer, fitted with a whisk attachment, beat tahini and sugar together. If dry and crumbly, add a thin stream of milk until you yield your desired consistency

Turnpike Days and Mini Orange Cornmeal Cakes

I drove the Turnpike twice this week. I twisted and turned. The knots in my stomach after saying goodbye folding over themselves like the Laurel Highlands that my car cuts through. A sign marks the end of the Cheseapeake Bay Watershed. Another two signs beyond that quote John the Apostle. Land like this needs a reminder of grace. The Somerset valley, a tundra in the waning March winter, feels more like purgatory than paradise. Most of my friends were baptized in school. I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess.

For twelve dollars I can leave town and go back to my old college. Back to a city of bridges and boys who stopped answering my calls when I said, "I love you" one too many times. I went to a bookstore once in Pittsburgh. It had a spiral staircase cut in the middle of the floor. I asked for a book that would help me find myself, said I was lost. Explained I was lonely and looking for meaning. The woman handed me a business card to her palm reader instead of selling me anything. I kept the card in my wallet for three years until I didn't have enough money in my bank account to necessitate a wallet anymore. After law school, when California still seemed like a dream world. When love still seemed possible. When I would stay up at night, high on downers and sleeping pills, and wonder when the state would break off. I felt the fault lines in my palms and scratched them when I was distracted. Cat on windowsills and rabbits eat their young for the same reasons.

Now I drive the Turnpike and dump empty coffee cups in the gas station trash cans. Coffee cups stained maroon from my mother's lipstick. A napkin shoved into the cup holder, too. She ate a hot dog from a gas station when we stopped outside West Virginia on a road trip last week. I got a speeding ticket twenty minutes later. She called both those things mistakes. 

I don't think I'll ever leave her side for long. She fed my dog a jelly bean when she though I wasn't looking in the rearview mirror. She held my hand when we talked about how sorry she was she had to work so many hours when I was growing up. We shared a Kit-Kat somewhere outside of Raleigh and she said, "Fuck" when she dropped her nail file between the seat and the door. I don't think i'll leave her side for long anymore, seven years was long enough. I'll use the Turnpike as a tether to remind me of home now. Think of it as more of an umbilicus rather than leash. A reason to stay rather than a reason to scream, kick the walls of my good fortune. I know it's all made of drywall. I'm okay with that now. I understand it all now.

I understand that the wrinkles around my mother's knuckles mean. What it means to drink coffee with her at a diner at ten o'clock one night. How it feels to know she's proud of me and how proud I am of her. How she shows me pictures of haircuts and asks my opinions. How she never comes out and says she loves me, but she told me four times to be careful this morning when I called her on my way to the airport.

Twelve dollars to leave on the turnpike to anywhere I want to go in the world. I'm happy to stay here for a bit. If only for a month or two.

Orange Cornmeal Cakes

Using either a Lodge mini cake pan or a 6" cake pan, make these beautiful and sweet cornmeal cakes, made with orange marmalade and covered in marzipan rounds.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cup cornmeal
• ½ cup AP flour
• ¼ cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 cup whole milk
• 2 eggs
• 4 TB butter, melted
• ½ cup orange marmalade
• 8 oz marzipa

Directions:

1. Prepare either a 6-inch pan or a Lodge mini cake pan with butter and parchment
2. Preheat oven to 415*F
3. In a large mixing bowl, sift all dry ingredients (except marzipan) together. Mix a few times with a fork
4. In a measuring cup, measure all wet ingredients until fully combined
5. Create a well in the dry ingredients and slowly pour wet ingredients into the middle of the well. Stir gently with a rubber spatula and mix gently
6. Pour into your prepared pan and bake for 20 minutes. Due to the higher sugar content in the marmalade, it may brown at such a high temperature and you can cover with foil to prevent further browning. Cakes are done with a toothpick comes out clean
7. While cakes are cooling, roll out marzipan to ¼” and cut out seven small circles or one large one (depending on pan used). Place on top of cake when still slightly warmed to soften marzipan in lieu of icing
8. Enjoy!

This is a preview of an upcoming and exciting partnership with Lodge. Rolling pin from my favorite artist, Aron over at Facture Goods.

Graham Crackers and Milk Waffles: For a Time When I Could Still Say I Was Innocent

I take the back roads now. I don’t meet many other people. I thought I passed a deer once, but it was my own headlights reflecting on a broken down tractor. I thought I heard an owl once, but it was my own heart beating in my ears when I was falling asleep last week. I mistake a lot of things these days. Promises for hope. Lies for truth. Curse words for pet names.

I thought a boy would love me if I kissed him on the first date. I spent my teen years trying to prove this. I thought death could only happen to the old and the dangerous. I spent a few Sundays dressed in black proving myself wrong time and again. I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong; but sometimes it’s not too good to be right either.  When it hurts the most. When it feels too good to be true. When you start hoping. Start trusting. Start answering to the pet names that were spiked and jagged like wood nettles on my tongue.

I take the back roads now and think of how I road the same school but that I get stuck behind sometimes. Always at three o’clock sharp. How naïve I was with my gnawed colored pencils and freckles on my knuckles where hair grows now. I used to mistake the world for a lot of things, but good wasn’t one of them. We still don’t lock our doors in this old farmhouse of ours. We haven’t since I can remember. I’d run inside to stay naïve, to stay as oblivious as possible. I’d run inside and keep my shoes on. Two Labradors would jump on me and we’d share the hour before my mother came home, wrapped up in a blanket and staying young together. We’d share a snack and sometimes fall asleep. These waffles are for a time before things got too real. Before I grew up too fast. Before I started kissing boys and believing lies. When I’d dip a soggy broken piece of generic-brand graham cracker in milk we bought at a discount store. If I could have it all back, I’m not sure I would take it. But it’s fun to remember how life used to be once in a while.  

Graham Crackers and Milk Waffles

Inspired by tres leches and my favorite childhood snack. Yields four 8-inch waffles.

Ingredients:

·       ½ cup heavy whipping cream

·       1 cup white sugar, separated

·       1 ½ TB vanilla extract

·       2 eggs, separated

·       1 ¾ cup all-purpose flour

·       1 cup graham flour (I used Bob's Red Mill's)

·       3 TB cornstarch

·       1 TB baking powder

·       ½ teaspoon salt

·       1/3 cup quality molasses

·       1 ½ cup whole milk

·       ¼ cup vegetable oil

·       ¼ cup honey

·       ½ cup condensed milk

·       ½ cup evaporated milk

·       ½ teaspoon cinnamon

Directions:

1.     With a stand mixer, fitted with the whisk attachment, whip egg whites on high for 3-5 minutes until stiff peaks form. Spoon into a mixing bowl and set aside

2.     Rinse bowl and attachment. Dry completely. Beat heavy whipping cream on high for 5 minutes until thick and peaks form. Add ½ tablesooon of vanilla and 1/4 cup of white sugar. Spoon into a bowl and set aside

3.     In a separate mixing bowl, sift flour, graham flour, cornstarch, and baking powder and set aside

4.     In a measuring cup, measure milk, oil, and honey Whisk to combine. Set aside.

5.     Clean stand mixer bowl once more and fix mixer with paddle attachment. Beat egg yolks with remaining sugar on medium-high until pale ribbons form.

6.     Add remaining vanilla and mix to incorporate.

7.     Reduce mixer speed to medium-low. Alternate in thirds between milk mixture and flour mixture, taking pauses after each to allow to fully incorporate.

8.     Turn mixer off and mix a couple times by hand with a rubber spatula, making sure to scrape the bottom of the mixing bowl.

9.     Take a small amount of the egg whites and mix directly into the batter. Take a little of the batter and fold back into the egg whites.

10.  Now, fold egg whites directly into batter and, while turning the bowl, mix with a rubber spatula until fully combined. Batter should be slightly lighter, but with no egg white clumps.

11.  Grease your waffle iron and make waffles to manufacturer specifications. This recipe yields four 8-inch waffles.

12.  In a measuring cup, whisk together evaporated milk, condensed milk, and cinnamon. Pour over still-warmed waffles.

13.  Top with whipped cream and serve immediately

Happy Valentine's Day! Molten Nutella Handpies with Bob's Red Mill

We used to decorate brown lunch bags and hang them from our desk. Write our names in felt-tipped pens. We passed around stickered love notes, miniature candy bars. We all left feeling loved in those winter school days. It made us feel good to get a card from the pretty girls, even if they were obligatory. A week later, they’d all be in the trash. A month later, my mother would buy the remaining Valentine’s Day candy in the clearance aisle and we’d have it in our baskets by Easter. Love like that was budgeted. Obligatory, too.

I was 18 when I first celebrated a Valentine’s Day. I bought him gloves at a Macy’s in downtown so his hands weren’t so cold when he held mine. He bought my dinner—a Big Mac—and I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world.  A week later, he proposed to me at a park where three rivers intersected. A month later we never talked again and I was relieved the day he told me he wanted to leave me. We were in a pizza place down the road from my dorm.  I think he’s a waiter now somewhere out West. I don’t think of him much. Not at all, actually. But for a month I was sure I’d marry him. If for no other reason than because I was bored.

I lived for years thinking love was an obligation, a chore others had to do that I was too lazy or too unwilling to do myself. I spend even more years thinking it was an all-or-nothing bargain. I spent weekends in November thinking of how to end my relationships; I spent hours in February wrapping presents instead. Love for me came in waves, crashing and then disappearing for complete lunar cycles. Love for me came in soft like crickets and then fast like an EKG. Cicadas when it was good, loud and cacophonous in the summertime, then it’d die back down into molted skins—dry, brittle, blurred shapes of what it used to hold for us.

From Indian fast food where we shared our plates to an underground lake in Cancun where we fought about sex, from a weekday we forgot to go out to a five minute phone call, I have shared Valentine’s with boys who felt obligated to care for me. I was so desperate for anything they could give. I know now that I wasn’t the heart or the hand glove. Not the paper bag or the cavities. I was desperate and lonely, but I was young, too. This year I’m spending Valentine’s Day alone for the first time in six years. I’ll wake up like it’s any other day, but take time for myself. Drink coffee, stay in bed until I have to wash my face and start my day. Eat a bowl of cereal and a couple of these hand pies. I have years of celebrating ahead of me, but it’s good to be alone this year. 

Molten Nutella Handpies

With Bob’s Red Mill’s coconut flour and a spoonful of Nutella to come spilling out of these bad boys, you can share these with that special someone or have them all for yourself. Makes 24 4-inch handpies (go crazy)

Ingredients:

• 2 cup AP flour
• 1 cup coconut flour
• ½ cocoa powder
• 2 teaspoons instant espresso
• 1 ½ cup white sugar
• 8 tablespoons butter, cold
• ½ cup shortening, cold
• 2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 8-9 tablespoon ice water
• 2 jars Nutella hazelnut spread (if you want them really molten and gooey)
• 1/3 cup of flaked sea salt (a pinch per handpie)
• 1 egg, mixed with a little water for an egg was

Directions:

1.     Sift flours, cocoa powder, espresso, and sugar into the bowl of your food processor. Pulse twice to incorporate

2.     Pulse in your fats, running motor until flour-fat mixture is the size of peas

3.     With the motor running, add vanilla and then ice water, a tablespoon at a time

4.     When dough begins to clump, turn motor off and turn onto a heavily floured work surface

5.     Knead only a couple times to form into a disc and cut dough in half. Shape both halves into discs and refrigerate for an hour

6.     While dough is resting, prep your station. You will need your Nutella, a couple spoons or a mini ice cream scoop, extra flour (this dough can handle it), your egg wash, a pastry brush, and 2 parchment-lined baking sheets

7.     Take dough out of fridge when finished resting and you can preheat oven to 350*F now (assembling the handpies can take a bit of time, if you’re doing the whole 24)

8.     Roll one disc out to be about a quarter inch thick and using either a floured 4-inch cookie cutter or even a glass and begin cutting out your rounds. One half your yield 24 rounds

9.     Evenly space your rounds onto the parchment lined baking sheets and spoon some Nutella into each one, add a pinch of salt

10. Roll out second disc of dough and repeat steps of cutting out your rounds

11. For each round out of this disc, you will be placing on top of the prepared rounds that have Nutella on them

12. Lightly dip your pastry brush into your egg wash and go around the rim of the prepared Nutella-topped round. Place second round on top. Crimp with a fork to seal. Cut a small X on each one with a paring knife to vent the handpies while baking.

13. Repeat steps 11 and 12 for remaining 23 handpies

14. Brush each with an additional little egg wash for a nice crust while baking

15. Bake at 350* for 33-36 minutes.  Enjoy immediately as the hazelnut spread oozes out like a molten chocolate cake

16. Enjoy and kiss someone cute for me!

Note: I am fortunate enough to be a Bob's Red Mill brand ambassador this year and will be partnering with them more and more throughout the year. While Bob's Red Mill supplied the ingredient, coconut flour, for this post, all opinions are my own. Check out their website for more information on all the amazing products they have to offer!