There are few things better than the scent of cinnamon on a Saturday morning. While these waffles aren’t quite as decadent as fresh cinnamon rolls, they do offer more instant gratification. I had some toasted hazelnuts left over from another recipe and added them on a whim — turned out delicious. A little sweet, and warmly satisfying. (On yet another snow day.)

Recipe: Cinnamon Hazelnut Waffles

Ingredients:
2 cups unbleached flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 3/4 cups milk
1/2 cup butter, melted and cooled
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup toasted hazelnuts, finely chopped

Instructions: Preheat waffle iron.

In a bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. In another bowl, whisk eggs until frothy. Add milk, sugar, butter and vanilla and stir to combine. Add dry ingredients and mix until combined (you may have some small lumps still). Stir in the hazelnuts.

Cook on hot, oiled waffle iron. I use about 1/2 cup of batter per 4-inch-square. Makes 10 4-inch waffles. Enjoy! (Leftover waffles can be frozen and then popped in the toaster for quick breakfasts during the week.)

Cooking with Kids note: Waffle irons can be highly tempting to curious preschoolers … particularly ones who feel compelled to touch and see when you tell them it’s really hot. So for best results, I recommend letting young children help with the whisking, but distracting them in another room for the actual cooking. My son also likes to help garnish for the photographs (as seen above).

Like many others around DC, I turned to baking to stave off boredom during the Snowmageddon/Snowpocalypse blizzards of 2010. And with all that time on my hands, I decided to take the plunge and bake the bagels I’d skipped over in the Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge. You see, the book goes alphabetically and there was no way I felt ready to tackle bagels on just my third attempt! Especially not when I’m married to a New Yorker with rather high bagel expectations.

These bagels were much more labor intensive than my previous breads. The dough quickly becomes stiff and tough to mix, so much so that my KitchenAid gave up before the final addition of flour. I mixed the remainder in by hand and began to knead, but it was so stiff that I ignored the warnings of other BBA bloggers and put it back in my KitchenAid … when the motor began to smoke three minutes later, it was back to kneading by hand. I probably kneaded about 15 minutes in total, letting it rest for several minutes midway through. After letting the balls of dough rest, I shaped them into bagel shapes and let them rest again. After 20 minutes, you’re supposed to plop them in a bowl of water and hope they float. Mine did not. Not after another 20 minutes, and not an hour plus later. I gave up and stuck the bagels out in the (non-heated) sunroom over night — our fridge was a little too full with blizzard supplies.

The next day, they didn’t seem to have risen at all. I let them sit on the dining room table for a couple hours, tried the float test again, and they still failed. I wasn’t going to give up at this point, so I went ahead and put a large pot of water on to boil and preheated the oven. This time they finally floated (I’m sure the boiling helped) and after boiling 1 minute on each side I placed them back on their trays to be topped. Of course, I discovered then I was out of poppy seeds, so I used a sea salt, sesame seed and garlic powder blend for most of them. I added caraway seeds to a couple, and cinnamon sugar on the last three. Then they bake in the oven, at 500 degrees, for 10 minutes. Now this is probably obvious to most people, but 500 degrees is HOT. I had to put my husband’s ove-glove (he’s a sucker for infomercials) on under my oven mitt to handle the trays while I transferred the bagels to the cooling rack.

bagels!

We had the first round for lunch, topped with cream cheese and my mayo-free salmon salad. A little lettuce and tomato would’ve been nice, but, well, we were running low on fresh produce. (See aforementioned Snowmageddon. And, being February, I would’ve passed on those bland winter tomatoes anyway.)

Next time I might boil a little longer for a chewier crust, but these were pretty darn close to the real deal. My Jew-from-Flushing husband, who had skeptically asked if I wanted him to be honest or polite when he tasted them, actually liked them! I doubt we’ll stop going to Slim’s when we’re in New York, but these are a pretty good substitute … as long as you have a few hours to devote to baking them. I do want to try them again in the summer to top with fresh tomatoes and lox.

And as you can tell, the boy was perfectly content with his (with a hearty schmear of cream cheese, hold the fish!):

Shared with Friday’s Feast on Momtrends – go check it out!

If I try hard enough, I can almost a remember a time when my idea of unwinding after a long work week was heading out for cocktails with girlfriends. (Okay, so it really wasn’t that long ago.) But nowadays, few things are more soothing than spending some quality time creaming butter, sugar and eggs in the KitchenAid. Sure, cooking with a 3.5-year-old isn’t entirely relaxing, but it is especially rewarding to see the boy bite into a fresh baked cookie or slice of bread with glee and to watch him proudly boast to his dad, “Look what Mommy and me made!” And there’s no better time than February (hello Valentine’s Day) to share home baked goodies with the ones you love. So I’m declaring February “Homemade with Love” month here at FoodieTots. I hope you’ll join in and share what you and your kids are baking, too. There may even be a round-up at the end of the month if you have links to share.

First up is Cinnamon Swirl Bread, the next entry in my Bread Baker’s Apprentice challenge. Peter Reinhart’s bread calls for raisins and walnuts, which I like well enough, but I wanted to make a simple cinnamon bread first. This is the bread that inspired me to join the challenge, as I have strong memories of my mother baking cinnamon bread and the warm fragrance that filled the house. I don’t even remember if she ever made it more than once, but the cinnamon-sweet scent has stayed with me all these years, and motivated me to overcome my phobia of yeast.

This is a pretty simple bread, the dough smooth and pliable. In addition to omitting the raisins and nuts, I replaced the shortening with melted butter. The boy helped me knead, giving it a few enthusiastic whacks and pokes.

To add the cinnamon swirl, you simply pat the dough out into a rectangle, spread it with a generous layer of cinnamon-sugar, then roll up into a loaf. (You can see pictures of this step on Pinch My Salt’s post.) After a second rise in the loaf pans, it heads into the oven to bake.

(You can see the pronounced difference between the crappy over-stove fluorescent lighting and my Ego lights, the dough didn’t actually turn from yellow to white…) I had a stuffy nose the day I baked it, so the scent wasn’t as strong as I’d remembered, but the taste was everything I remembered.

Cinnamon swirl bread is best with a generous spread of fresh-from-the-farm butter, and maybe a little more of that cinnamon-sugar on top. Delish. Of course, if you somehow don’t finish the loaf the first day or two, it also makes scrumptious French toast. And needless to say, the boy was quite pleased with the finished product.

I haven’t had much time in the kitchen lately, as you might have guessed by my lack of posting. After a long and stressful month, I desparately needed some therapeutic time in the kitchen, breathing in the sweet fragrance of butter and sugar creaming in the KitchenAid. So I was thrilled when I heard there was snow in the forecast for the weekend, and sent the boy and husband to brave the mass hysteria at the grocery store Friday night to stock up on all the snowstorm-in-DC essentials: butter, sugar, flour, orange juice. I didn’t realize just how much snow was in the forecast until I finally paid attention to the weatherman Friday evening, and heard the predictions of a foot or two of snow.  Thus far in my son’s three years, he’s seen maybe a cumulative six inches over his lifetime. Clearly, this was going to be the perfect weekend for quality baking and family time.

Sure enough, we woke to quite a bit of snow Saturday morning, with steady snowfall throughout the day. The boy was so excited he ran out in a t-shirt and his Uggs (a.k.a. “cozy boots”) to start shoveling off the porch. I lured him back inside with the promise of breakfast cake, and started my weekend of baking with this sweet banana pecan coffee cake. Perfect fuel for a day of shoveling, snow ball tossing and snow angel making. (And stay tuned to see what else we baked.)

Recipe: Banana Pecan Coffee Cake
adapted from That’s My Home

Ingredients:

1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1 cup mashed bananas (2-3 bananas)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup sour cream
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 tablespoon milk

Instructions: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil a Bundt pan and set aside. In a food processor, chop pecans with sugar and cinnamon. Set aside. In mixer bowl, cream sugar and butter until smooth. Add eggs, mashed bananas and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and sour cream, mix until well combined. In a separate bowl, stir together dry ingredients. Add to mixer bowl and mix on low until just blended. Spread a light layer of the nut mixture in the bottom of the pan. Add 1/2 of the batter, spreading evenly over the nuts. Sprinkle remaining nut mixture over the batter, then top with remaining batter. Bake for 40-45 minutes, until top is lightly browned. Cool for 5 minutes in the pan, then invert pan and place cake on a cooling rack. Whisk together powdered sugar, 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract and milk until smooth (add more milk if needed to make a thin glaze). Use a spoon to drizzle glaze over cake. Let stand a few minutes for the glaze to set, and enjoy!

This is our entry for Kids Cook Book Soup — Apples! Check back later today for the full round-up.

The Story: This lovely book, How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World, by Marjorie Priceman, caught my eye at the bookstore with its colorful illustrations. In it, a little girl sets out to make an apple pie but discovers her local market is closed. So naturally, she charts a course around the world to pick wheat in Italy, sugar cane in Jamaica, and apples in Vermont. I admit, on one level my locavore’s conscious felt a pang of guilt, but it was too cute a story not to buy. Besides, the point of eating local, for me, is to ensure my son knows where his food comes from. Even if it’s not always somewhere nearby.

The Lesson: My son knows apples grow on trees, and milk comes from cows. This may seem obvious, but it’s not always! My brother went through a phase as a kid where he insisted that milk came from the grocery store. No amount of arguing could convince him it came from a cow. (This was probably just stubbornness, we certainly were exposed to cows.) Anyway, last week I picked up the boy from daycare and headed out to do errands, and I had failed to pack snacks. I asked if he wanted to go to the drive-thru for apple slices, and he replied, “We could go to the farm and get apples!” In an ideal world, yes, but convenience won out this time.

The Recipe: I recently went to Williams-Sonoma looking for yeast. They didn’t have it, but of course I managed to come home with a bag full of new must-have kitchen tools, including these adorable apple and pumpkin pocket pie molds. The boy saw the one I was packing in my niece’s birthday present, and started to whine, “But I don’t have one of those yet!” So he was pleasantly surprised when I pulled out a second one for him. I decided to stick with the recipe on the box for the pie crusts, which I was glad to see called for butter. I halved the recipe to make 4 little pies. This really doesn’t take too much more effort than making a full-size pie, and the results are just too cute.

Spiced Apple Hand Pies
crust recipe adapted from Williams-Sonoma

Crust:

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 2 Tbs. granulated sugar
• 16 Tbs. (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch dice
• 6 to 8 Tbs. ice water
• 1 egg, beaten with 1 tablespoon water
• maple sugar

Pulse flour, salt and sugar in food processor to combine. Add butter chunks, and pulse until it resembles a course meal. Add water, a little at a time, pulsing between each addition until dough begins to come together. I only needed 6 tablespoons. Remove and press into flat disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and chill for at least 2 hours. (Or, if you’re in a hurry, 30 minutes in the freezer.)

Filling:

• 1 apple, diced small
• 1 tablespoon flour
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• pinch salt

Combine all ingredients and set aside while dough is chilling.

To Assemble Pies: Prepare egg wash. Roll out dough to 1/4-inch thickness and use the mold to cut out 8 shapes. If you don’t have the molds, use a large cookie cutter to cut shapes. Cut a leaf-shaped vent into the top crust pieces. Place the bottom in the mold (or on your parchment-lined baking sheet) and place 2 tablespoons of apple filling in the center. Brush a little egg wash around the edge, lay a second piece of dough over and gently press in the mold or together with a fork. Brush the top with more egg wash and sprinkle with maple sugar. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet and repeat to make the remaining pies. Place in freezer for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and bake for 22-24 minutes, until crust is golden. Cool on a cooling rack at least 10 minutes before eating. Makes 4 small pies. Enjoy!

Note: I skipped the second freezing step, as we were in a hurry to finish before bedtime, so my crusts browned more quickly than they should have. But they tasted great! Oh, and despite the book’s instructions, our apples and eggs came from local farms.