She bakes :)

She’s baking again. 

This time, she’s made some preparations the night before – shredded the zucchinis, grated the cheddar cheese – she’s making Zucchini Cheddar Bread! 😀

It takes 45-55 minutes to bake this bread, so she thinks, in order to maximize the oven, since she’s baking and the house is gonna get heated up anyway, she’s gonna bake another batch of muffins as well. So she made a savoury bread, and a light Apple, walnuts & cheese muffins. Recipes as below: 

Zucchini Cheddar Bread  (One 9 x 5 inch loaf) – recipe adapted from Weelicious.com

• Prep Time:10 minutes
• Cook Time: 55 minutes
• Total Time: 1 hours, 5 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 cup walnut & buckwheat meal (original recipe called for wholemeal flour)
• 1 cup all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups grated zucchini
• 1 1/2 cups grated cheddar cheese
• 1/4 cup chopped scallions
• 3/4 cup plain yogurt
• 1 large egg

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
2. In a bowl, whisk together the flours, baking soda, baking powder, and salt.
3. Add in the zucchini, cheese, and scallions and toss to coat.
4. In a small bowl, whisk together the buttermilk and eggs. Add to the flour mixture and stir until just combined. Do not over mix. Pour the batter into a greased loaf pan and bake for 55-60 minutes, or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
5. Cool and serve.(* Loaves can be cooled, wrapped in plastic wrap or foil, placed in freezer bags, labeled and frozen for up to 3 months. Place in refrigerator overnight to defrost.)

One of the reasons I’m baking is because I’ve been making homemade milk and I have leftover pulp (cashew nuts, oatmeal, buckwheat meal etc) to use up, hoping not to waste them. So today when I made this bread, instead of using wholemeal flour, I used the leftover meal I had. I also used plain yogurt instead of buttermilk. Oh, and I accidentally incorporated only ONE egg instead of two as called for in the recipe. Baked it for 55minutes, inserted a plastic fork, thought the bread was OK so I took it out of the oven. It looks like this: 

Looks good right? It smelled so good! Was so eager for it to cool so that I can try it 😛 

However, when I removed it from the loaf five minutes later, the bread somehow felt very wobbly – it felt more like a piece of frittata than a loaf of bread! Oh no, but what went wrong? So I have now returned it to the oven, trying to bake it for perhaps another 20minutes *keep fingers crossed*. Let’s hope it turns out more solid. Otherwise, we’ll really have to eat it as frittatta for breakfast this Sunday 😛 

OK, as to the second recipe:

Apples, Walnuts & Mascarpone Muffins – recipe adapted from Tutti Dolci’s All Sweet’s Blueberry-Mascarpone Muffins

Yields 12 standard size muffins

3/4 cups all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/4 cup honey
3 Tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Zest of 1 orange

1 tbsp lemon juice
1 1/2 cups diced apples
1/4 cup Mascarpone, divided

Preheat oven to 350°F and line a 12-cup standard muffin pan with baking cups; coat baking cups with cooking spray. Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl. Make a well in the center of the mixture. Combine buttermilk, egg, honey, oil, vanilla, and orange zest in a medium bowl; add to flour mixture and stir just until combined. Gently fold in blueberries.

Fill each baking cup with a rounded tablespoon of batter, then add 1 teaspoon Mascarpone. Top with another rounded tablespoon of batter (each baking cup will be 2/3 full). Bake for 15 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Let muffins cool in pan on a wire rack for 2 minutes before removing from pan to serve warm or cool completely. Store leftover muffins in an airtight container in the refrigerator up to 2 days.

Nutritional value:
Calories – 150
Carbs – 21

Again, I made only two variations to the original recipe from Tutti Dolci’s: I used diced apples instead of blueberries (since they are so expensive!); and I used half cashew meal and half plain flour instead of all plain flour as the recipe called for. Then I basically followed the recipe to a T. However, as I mixed the dry and wet ingredients together, I realized that the batter was somewhat runny. And in my bigger heat-proof muffin cups, it only yielded 7 muffins instead of 12! Then I baked them for 25 minutes and they came out like this: 

Look at the cheese that we had put in the middle 🙂

Verdict? The muffin was a little too moist and not sweet enough. Then I realised that I had left out some sugar toppings for the muffins! I guess the next time around, I will need to up the honey to half a cup or even 3/4 cup instead of 1/4 cup. And I REALLY need to go get some standard muffin cups as using these MEGA-sized heatproof cups are really making life very difficult for me to know how long exactly to bake ’em muffins. Then I shall reserve the mega-sized cups for parties – like upcoming our cell group outreach on the 21st this month! Let ’em eat muffins! 😀 I shall conclude this post with a picture of how I ultimately had to eat my Apple, Walnut & Mascarpone muffins. Have a good weekend! 🙂