Tag: glaze

Categories
Dessert

Try a spiced cake that’s perfect for your next par’tea’

The use of earl grey tea adds lots of complex spice flavor to this moist cake.
The use of earl grey tea adds lots of complex spice flavor to this moist cake.

As a general rule, I have no concept of how long it takes me to complete recipes.

Poor Joey has had to wait until 8 or 9 p.m. on several occasions for me to complete a meal, because I was just sure I could finish it for a normal eating time.

And he’s thrown up his hands at me staying up into the wee hours of the morning, baking pies for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

You’d think I would learn. But I haven’t.

So, when I decided to take a birthday cake for our friend when we were going over to play games at her house that evening, it would come as no surprise that I was hurriedly trying to finish it before rushing over for game night.

Unfortunately, that meant my cake’s glaze looked atrocious. Fortunately, it still tasted amazing.

The cake I made features the flavors of earl grey tea, and I found it on the “Tastemade” website. You can find the original post at https://www.tastemade.com/videos/earl-grey-tea-cakes/. I doubled the vanilla and changed some of the directions in my version.

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Earl Grey Tea Cakes

The use of earl grey tea adds lots of complex spice flavor to this moist cake.
Course Dessert
Keyword cake, earl grey, glaze, spice, tea

Ingredients

Cake Ingredients

  • 1 cup milk I used skim
  • 5 earl grey tea bags
  • 14 tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla
  • 3 eggs
  • 2 cups flour
  • zest of one small lemon
  • 1 1/3 teaspoon baking powder

Glaze Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 3-4 tablespoons strong earl grey tea
  • purple food coloring optional

Instructions

  • Microwave the milk in a glass mug or bowl for 90 seconds. Place the five teabags into the milk, and cover it with aluminum foil.
  • Let the milk sit, with the teabags, for at least 15 minutes, letting it cool to room temperature.
  • Squeeze out the teabags into the milk and discard them. If some of your milk evaporated, top it off so you have one cup.
  • Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Prepare an eight-by-eight inch cake pan by spraying it with cooking spray and lining it with parchment paper. (If you want to remove it from the pan before serving. If not, just spray the pan.
  • Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla together for a few minutes until the mixture is light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, and then add in the flour, lemon zest, baking powder and milk until everything is combined well.
  • Pour the batter into the prepared pan, and tap it on the counter a few times to flatten the batter out before placing in the oven for one hour or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
  • If removing the cake from the pan, let it cool for five minutes before inverting it and placing it on a wire rack. Either way, though, let the cake cool completely before glazing it.
  • For the glaze, melt the butter and add it to the sugar and tea. Stir until the mixture is smooth. If there are lumps of butter that refuse to combine with the rest of the ingredients, microwave the mixture no more than 30 seconds at a time until it is smooth.
  • Either cut the cake into even squares or leave it whole, and position it on a wire rack over a rimmed backing sheet. Drizzle the glaze over the top of the cake. Let the glaze set, and serve.
  • Store any leftovers in an airtight container.

his cake was super delicious and very moist. I really wish I would have saved myself enough time to really make it as pretty as it should have been, but the flavor did not disappoint, and I’m lucky to have very gracious friends who were more than happy to eat the whole thing.

I do think I’ll make this cake again in the future. The flavors were deep and complex and felt just a little fancy. Plus, I always love a good spiced cake, and this one didn’t disappoint.

I’d like to say that this was the recipe that finally taught me my lesson, but I’m sure I’ll be hurrying through another one soon. It turns out you can’t rush perfection—or even something sort of near to it.

This piece first appeared in print on July 8, 2021.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

Categories
Breakfast Dessert

Have a ‘hole’ lot of fun with baked donuts

Coffee donuts with a coffee glaze are great for breakfast or dessert.
Coffee donuts with a coffee glaze are great for breakfast or dessert.

Several weeks ago, I got the opportunity to meet Tina Ostrander, owner of Main Street Co. & Kitchen Corner in Newton. We sat down over a cup of coffee to talk about working together, which we were both pretty excited about.

And then the world shut down, and I was super nervous that the first week of our partnership—this week—would mean I might have trouble finding more recipes to try, and Kitchen Corner wasn’t going to be open for us to do anything fun together.

But I’ve been discovering that I have lots of random ingredients hanging out in my kitchen, and despite her brick-and-mortar being closed for the time being, Tina has an online store set up.

So, for my part, I started examining my pantry and realized that I, for some reason, have quite a few instant coffee packets, so I determined it was time for something with coffee flavor—and time for something sweet. I landed on a recipe for cake donuts with a coffee glaze that ended up being a fantastic recipe.

I found this recipe on the blog “Marsha’s Baking Addiction.” You can find the original post at https://marshasbakingaddiction.com/baked-coffee-doughnuts. I added extra vanilla and nutmeg in my version.

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Glazed Coffee Cake Donuts

Coffee donuts with a coffee glaze are great for breakfast or dessert.
Course Breakfast, Dessert
Keyword coffee, donuts, glaze

Ingredients

Donut Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons instant coffee or make 1/4 cup strong coffee
  • 1 egg
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup buttermilk or use regular milk with a touch of vinegar
  • 1/4 cup canola or vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 1 1/2 cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

Glaze Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup warm milk
  • 1 tablespoon instant coffee or use a tablespoon strong coffee
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla
  • 2 1/4 cups powdered sugar

Instructions

  • Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Prepare a donut pan by spraying it with cooking spray.
  • If using instant coffee, dissolve it into 1/4 cup of hot water.
  • In a mixing bowl, beat the egg, sugar, buttermilk, oil, vanilla and coffee until smooth.
  • Beat in the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg until just combined and spoon the batter evenly between the six wells in your donut pan (this will fill them pretty much to the brim. If you’d rather have smaller donuts, you could fill them less and make another partial batch, too).
  • Bake for eight to 10 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in them comes out clean.
  • Let the donuts cool for about 10 minutes and then let them cool completely before glazing them.
  • For the glaze, in a shallow bowl, whisk the coffee, vanilla and milk until smooth, and then whisk in the powdered sugar, a little at a time, until you get the consistency you want. If it’s too thin, add more sugar. If it’s too thick, add a little more milk.
  • Dip the donuts into the glaze (just the tops, you don’t have to submerge them) and then place them on a wire rack to dry. I did two coatings on mine.
  • Once the glaze is dry, store any leftover donuts in an airtight container.

These were amazing. And I learned that I absolutely should never make them when only Joey and I are around to eat them, because they, embarrassingly, did not last more than a couple of days.

And, while Tina and I will have to wait on some of the in-person ideas we discussed a few weeks ago, I’m glad I can keep baking and she can still keep people’s kitchens stocked with needed supplies. If you need a donut pan, for instance, go visit her online store; she’s got ’em.

Also, if you’re bored and want to look back at some of my previous columns, I officially have my own website, and I’m still working on uploading my archives, so look for it to keep expanding over the next few weeks. You can visit it at spiceupkitchen.net.

Stay safe. Shop local online. And eat donuts.

This piece originally appeared in print on April 1, 2020.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

Categories
Bread Breakfast Dessert

Sweet roll recipe is the only ‘bun’ for me

No one will be able to tell that you completely transformed a cake mix into these delectable chocolate sweet rolls.
No one will be able to tell that you completely transformed a cake mix into these delectable chocolate sweet rolls.

When I first started going solo in the kitchen as a youngster, I was very concerned with cooking by the book.

Mom never minded me hovering over her shoulder (or if she did, she hid it really well), and I asked a lot of questions.

Once I felt ready to make meals on my own, I asked her to help me write out my own recipe cards, which I still have in my recipe box at home. My favorite one is for canned corn. She didn’t make fun of me when I asked her to help me write down the steps for how to heat it up and how much salt and pepper to add, and from the food stains on my notecard, I clearly used the “recipe” more than once over the years.

Nowadays, though, I’m a lot more adventurous and tend to tweak recipes regularly and without hesitation. Such was the case recently when I used a recipe for cake mix cinnamon rolls to make chocolate sweet rolls instead.

I actually used two authors’ recipes as my basis for this week. The rolls recipe comes from the blog “Norine’s Nest.” You can find her post at https://www.norinesnest.com/cake-mix-cinnamon-rolls/. The other recipe started as the filling recipe for some sweet rolls by Kate Wood on her blog “The Wood and Spoon.” You can find her recipe at http://thewoodandspoon.com/chocolate-sweet-rolls/. I made changes to each to come up with the concoction below.

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Cake Mix Chocolate Sweet Rolls

No one will be able to tell that you completely transformed a cake mix into these delectable chocolate sweet rolls.
Course Breakfast, Dessert
Keyword cake mix, chocolate, glaze, icing, sweet rolls

Ingredients

Rolls

  • 1 Dutch chocolate cake mix
  • 2 packages yeast instant or active
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 5 cups flour
  • 2-1/4 cups hot water

Filling

  • 6 ounces dark chocolate chips or chop up a bar
  • 6 tablespoons butter or margarine
  • 3 tablespoons cocoa powder
  • 2 tablespoons espresso or instant coffee powder I used a mocha-flavored
  • 1/2 cup powdered sugar
  • about 1/2 cup sliced almonds or your favorite nut, chopped

Icing

  • 1-1/3 cups powdered sugar
  • 2 tablespoons milk you may need to add more
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla

Instructions

  • In a mixer with a dough hook (or you can start by mixing with a wooden spoon and switch over to kneading to bring it together), combine the cake mix, yeast, salt and two cups of flour.
  • Mix until it’s well combined and add the water slowly while the mixer continues to run.
  • Add in the rest of the flour, and mix until everything is well combined and the dough is pulling away from the sides of the bowl to form a ball.
  • Turn the dough out onto a well-floured workspace, sprinkle the top with more flour and knead five or six times with floured hands until it forms into a well-shaped ball.
  • Cover the dough with a clean cloth and allow it to rise until it’s doubled in size (mine took about 20 minutes).
  • When the dough is almost ready to work with, combine the chocolate chips and butter into a microwave-safe bowl and microwave for 10 to 15 seconds at a time, stirring in between, until the mixture is smooth. Add the remaining filling ingredients except the sliced almonds and set aside.
  • Punch the dough down and roll out into a large rectangle about 1/4-inch thick.
  • Spread the filling out evenly over the entire rectangle of dough and sprinkle on the almonds.
  • Tightly roll the rectangle from the long side so that you get a nice, long, snake-like roll.
  • Cut the roll into 1-1/2-inch thick slices.
  • Grease two 9×12-inch pans and place the slices, with one of the cut sides up, into the pans. Space them out a bit to give them room to rise.
  • Cover both pans with a clean cloth and let them rise for about 30 more minutes or until they double in size.
  • Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and bake the rolls for 20 minutes or until they are a golden brown.
  • Before serving, mix the icing ingredients together until smooth. If it’s too thick, add a little more milk until you get the consistency you like.
  • Let the rolls cool for about 10 minutes, and then drizzle or spread the icing over top of them.
  • Store any leftovers in an airtight container.

These were absolutely delicious. I immediately delivered them to friends and family to get them out of the house before we ate too many of them ourselves.

The best part of this recipe is that it’s super easy to customize. Just choose another cake mix and filling ingredients, and you have a completely new type of sweet roll to enjoy.

Younger me would have been amazed at how off script I went with this recipe, but we all start somewhere. Looking back, I’m just so thankful I had someone willing to patiently show me the ropes in the kitchen—canned corn recipes and all.

This piece first appeared in print on June 27, 2019.

Spice Up Your Life is a weekly newspaper column written by Lindsey Young in south central Kansas. If you are interested in sponsoring this column, please contact us through the “Contact Lindsey” link at the top of the page.

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