Episode 5 Your sweetness is my weakness!

Sorry for the delay, my HP computer turned out to be defective. HP is selling bad juju. Anyway we are here to celebrate the love and the food.
I have been experementing with different flavors of biscuits. A friend suggested I try Sweet Potato flavored biscuits. Well I did not get to make them for an ONYX meeting I was going to but the day I got home, armed with my new rollling pin, I went at it.

First you buy a couple of nice sized Sweet Potatoes for mashing. now for the record I had never made mashed potatoes from scratch before. Any mashed I made before came from a box or premade ( which I am quickly taking a dislike to when it comes to everything). So for those who like me are new to this, DO NOT THROW THE WHOLE POTATO INTO THE POT!!!! Which I did before deciding to check a few recipes. First wash the potato off then peel it then cut it into small pieces. Throw the pieces into a pot and let boil for 20 minutes.

After 20 minutes drain the pot and put it back on the stove. Then you add one whole stick of butter (YES!!!) and you take a spoon and you mash! MASH like you have never mashed before. In about 5 minutes you wil have a good sweet potato mash going.

When you taste it you will get a hint of sweetness but if you need a little more you can add honey or syrup. Then give it about a hour to cool off. I know I know it smells great and you want to dive in but sometimes the main ingredient of alchemy is patience.

Set your oven to 350 and let it heat up. Mix 1 cup of flour with 1/4 tsp of salt and 11/2 tsp of baking powder. As always when I am working with flour I like to run a wire whisk thru it a few times. Get a little air in there and it combines all the dry ingredients a lot better. Then add 3 tbsp of vegetable oil, 1/3 cup of milk. I like to use buttermilk when making biscuits but whole milk works just as well. It does not taste that different. Give everything a quick turn around stir with a spoon, literally just one quick turn, then add 3/4 of a cup of mashed sweet potatoes. Now stir it all together into a dough.

OK now here is where we go in two different directions..do you want the traditonal round biscuit or do you want to drop it like it is hot?

For the regular round toss the dough out onto a floured surface and take a rolling pan to it. Take out your biscuit cutter and you should get 10 good rounds out of it. Now until two days ago I did not have a rolling pan and I still don't have biscuit cutter so I use a plastic cup with a little flour on it to roll and I use a drinking glass to cut the rounds out. Toss em on a baking tray for about 10-12 minutes and your good to go.

Now what I have recently discovered is the love of the drop biscuit. instead of rolling the dough out I just take a large spoon and scoop up some dough and drop it on the cookie sheet. You don't get the traditional round that your use to but you get biscuits with a lot of character. This is actually how Red lobster makes those addictive cheddar biscuits.

With both for a little extra kick sprinkle just a little cinnamon on top of the biscuits before you shove them in the oven.

Now that I am a little more computer stable is there anything anyone wants to see me try?

Episode 1 Quick Breads for New Years!

A quick bread is a bread that is made from baking soda baking powder, or cream of tartar. It differs from standard loaves of bread because they don't use standard yeast which takes a couple hours to rise (hence the name quick bread). One of the most famous of the quick breads for all the folks out there who think they have never had any before, is banana bread.

Most quick breads are made from five simple ingredients. flour, Baking powder, Eggs, Fat, and Milk. Everything else you throw in is for taste and flavor and the options are endless.



Last night I made a Jamaican Jungle Bread which had almonds, cinnamon, pineapples, and bananas. You suppose to make a glaze for the bread, which I will be perfectly honest i questioned because with those pineapples I thought the bread might be sweet already, but the baking process gave you the taste without the usual syrup taste that pineapples bring.



I also made a bread of my own concoction I called "Sissy" bread. cinnamon, walnuts, almonds, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and a little vanilla.

Let me just state if your trying to make a quick bread yourself (which is very easy to make) that the more wet ingredients you add the longer the bread takes to bake. this can get tricky cause you don't want to the bread to over bake and dry out or burn. This was the case with my "sissy" bread. After an hour and some change the toothpick was still coming out a little moist, so after taking the bread out of the oven I covered the top and side with foil. Seemed to work really well cause an hour later the center was quite firm.

Since this is my first entry and a food blog is new to me, you guys tell me if i should add the recipes (or just take orders....kidding).