Almond Cookies

Almond Cookies.

Chinese New Year is coming just around the corner so Valentine’s Day baking will be put aside.  This weekend will be exploring and sharing the world of Chinese cuisine, kicking off the A Bite of China project and of course, Chinese desserts to bring in the Year of the Snake!

Its the perfect time to reboot this wonderful recipe that I tried out last year! These were some popular Almond cookies, even my mom’s friends, who are fantastic cooks asked me to print them a copy of the recipe 🙂 No one here has actually seen as when I first posted it, I probably had 3 followers.

Hopefully, you will like it 🙂 I have a batch of this in the oven as we speak.  I’ll share pictures of it in another post later on! I need to run off and do some more Chinese New Year preparation errands but just wanted to this first 🙂

Happy Saturday!

Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake

VOILA! I promised you baking and I got right down to business on Friday night! Still working on my Valentine’s lineup of treats so hopefully by next weekend, I will have something up. For now, here is one that I have been meaning to do: Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake.  I haven’t made coffee cake since I was 15 probably.  So that’s over 10 years now and I seriously forgot how simple it was. Although, this one was a bit layering so it took a bit more time.

Recipe: Cherry Swirl Coffee Cake (from Betty Crocker’s Christmas Cookbook)

Makes 18 servings

Ingredients

Coffee cake:

1 1/2 cups granulated sugar

1/2 cup butter, softened

1/2 cup shortening

1 1/2 tsps baking powder

1 tsp vanilla

1 tsp almond extract

4 eggs

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 can (21 oz) cherry pie filling

Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar

2 tbsps water

1. Heat oven to 350F.  Generously grease 15x10x1 inch pan with shortening or cooking spray (Oops…forgot to do that!) . In large bowl, beat granulated sugar, butter, shortening, baking powder, vanilla, almond extract and eggs with electric mixer on low speed, scraping bowl constantly.  Beat on high speed 3 minutes, scraping bowl occasionally.  Stir in flour.

2. Spread two-thirds of the batter in pan.  Spread pie filling over batter.  Drop remaining batter by tablespoons onto pie filling.

3. Bake about 45 mins or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

4. In small bowl, mix glaze ingredients with spoon until smooth and thin enough to drizzle.  Drizzle glaze over warm coffee cake.  Serve warm or let stand until cool.

I love recipes that go straight to just mixing almost all the ingredients in then adding flour at the end.  Most of the recipes actually would work like that too.  I have a hand mixer so the whole standing around holding it for 3 minutes was testing my strength a bit, but it did work like a miracle to turn up the speed.  There was one slight change that I made for this recipe and it was lowering the sugar to 1 cup.  My mom is into healthy living so I lowered it so that she could enjoy it more.  Also, I modified the glaze to 1/2 cup powdered sugar so that I could just put glaze on one half and the other half was made to not have glaze so it was also less sweet.  It tasted fruity and had a crispy crust on the top.  The texture was moist around the middle fruity layer and more crumbly at the bottom.  I love this type of  texture in any sorts of desserts so I loved it. My mom thought that it was perfect (without the glaze).  As for my boyfriend who isn’t a huge fan of cherries, he still really enjoyed it.  This recipe tends to taste better when warm so keep that in mind before you serve it or eat it.

What do you all think about coffee cakes?  Fans? Any other flavors you’d recommend to me?

Sunday Baking:Coconut-Almond Bread!

Baking on Sundays is starting to become a routine.  This Sunday, I used baking to get rid of a terrible migraine.  You know what though, it worked (weird as it may sound).  I bought a new loaf pan as an addition to my bakeware so I’ve been wanting to try it out, just never figured out what type of bread to bake.  I flipped through recipe books and stuff but I was missing ingredients for everything so I just ended up winging it with a little inspiration from Looneyspoons Collection called “A Grateful Bread”.

“A Grateful Bread” is supposed to have grated apples and grated carrots and grated coconuts (aka coconut shreds) but I didn’t have any apples left at home.  I really didn’t think coconuts and carrots would’ve been a very awesome match without apples to balance things out.  Thats just a feeling I get, if you’ve done it and it turned out tasting good, I’d love to hear about it.

So with that being said, I changed some ingredients around and made a Coconut-Almond Bread instead.

Here’s the recipe (modified from original recipe in The Looneyspoons Collection by Janet & Greta Podleski):

COCONUT ALMOND BREAD

Makes 1 Loaf, 12 slices

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 cup quick-cooking rolled oats

1 cup granulated sugar

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1 cup sweetened shredded coconut

1/3 cup chopped almonds

1/2 cup water

2 eggs

2 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla

DIRECTIONS:

1. Preheat oven to 350F.  Spray a 9×5 inch loaf pan with cooking spray and set aside.

2. In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg.  Add coconut and almonds. Mix well.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together water, eggs, oil and vanilla.

4.  Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients.  Mix just until dry ingredients are moistened.  Pour batter into pan.  Spread evenly.  Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, or until wooden pick inserted in center of loaf comes out clean.  Cool for 10 minutes in pan.  Remove bread from pan and let cool completely on a wire rack.  Cover with plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator.

I gave you the modified version as I had changed so many of the ingredients and eliminated.  The only issue I had was why the bread didn’t become fluffier.  I’m guessing its because I took away some of the other grated ingredients but didn’t change the quantity other than the chopped almonds and grated coconut.  All in all though, it did taste pretty good.  I might have changed the balance of the coconut shreds and chopped almonds.  This bread is perfect as a dessert as it has a nice sweet coconut taste.  On the other hand, the almonds helped it give it the chewy crunchy taste.

I’ll definitely be doing more bread! Hopefully next weekend I”ll do another one!

Any suggestions for what bread to make? Any suggestions to make it fluffier? Will you try this out?

Almond Cookies

Chinese New Year is one of the biggest celebrations for us.  With lack of family living near us, its quieted down a lot.  My mom has never stopped her traditions though. A week of celebrations is what it seems like.  We have plenty of food all the time: Chicken, Duck, Shrimps, Veggies, Fish, etc.  Also, my mom makes turnip, taro and chestnut cakes (which to me, are the best in the world).  No restaurant has ever compared.  My mom usually does everything for the celebrations every year.  This year my mom made New Year Cake and it was delicious

This year, I decided to contribute a bit on my own.  I made some pretty good almond cookies. I found the recipe at here: http://chinesefood.about.com/od/dessertcookies/r/almondcookies.htm   The only ingredient that I didn’t have was the actual almond to put on the top of each cookie.  I believe it was still a decent cookie.  Everyone who tried it liked it.

This is how it turned out:

There will definitely be a second batch where I will add the almond on top.  It would probably made the overall appearance look nicer and at the same time, it would probably not only smell like almonds but rather taste a bit of the almond flavor as well.