Honeyed Macadamia Pears
It’s Autumn here in Australia and this is a great time to be eating pears. I like pears, but I don’t eat very much of them, nor do I do a lot of baking with them. Read more
Posts tagged ‘cinnamon’
May 2
5 Comments
Cocoa And Cinnamon Swirl Coffee Cake
I have not had the oven on for days – it has been so hot here in Sydney! Unfortunately, we don’t have air-conditioning like some other lucky people, so having the oven on just makes it worse (especially in the kitchen, of course). Read more
Apr 1
Starbucks' Chocolate Cinnamon Bread
I found the recipe for Starbucks’ chocolate cinnamon bread by total accident. I hadn’t even seen this particular bread for sale at my local Starbucks. It sounded way too nice to pass up on, so I bookmarked it for later – I used the recipe from Baking Bites, who made a few changes to the original Starbucks recipe. The only thing I did differently from Baking Bites’ recipe was adding a pinch of ginger to the sugar blend topping.
I love all the ingredients in this bread – especially the combination of chocolate and cinnamon. The sugar blend on the top is fabulous as well – it’s a mix of sugar, cinnamon, cocoa powder, cloves and ginger.
In my opinion, there was too much of the sugar blend for just the top of the bread – if I was doing this again, I would have made the sugar blend first and coated the inside of the loaf pan with it, using leftovers for the top of the bread.
I used a silicone loaf pan for this bread, but I would highly recommended a normal metal or glass loaf pan. The silicone isn’t strong enough to support the loaf as it’s rising – it ended up with big bulging sides!
And most of the sugar blend fell off when I took it out of the loaf pan. I sprinkled as much as I could back onto the bread.
Now, I don’t understand why this is called a “bread” – it most certainly does not have the texture of a normal bread, barely even banana bread. The chocolate cinnamon bread is super moist, and has a crunchy top.
The chocolate taste is super strong, with a hint of spice. A slice of this loaf goes a long way, so while Starbucks may serve you a slice that is nearly 2-inches thick, I’m recommending to slice it a bit thinner (unless you’re really hungry!). It tastes amazing with a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
I think this bread, which I personally think is more like cake, would look very nice baked in mini loaf pans, or even muffin pans. The top of the bread remains flat, so don’t expect to get a nice dome out of this.
Sorry for all the photos, but I thought the bread looked very photogenic! :)
Oct 13
Pumpkin Cupcakes With Cream Cheese Frosting
I am a member of a neighborhood women’s group that meets every month. This month’s meeting has an Autumn theme and members can bring their favorite Autumn foods. Of course, I had to bake pumpkin cupcakes!
These pumpkin cupcakes are absolutely delicious, soft and moist. I am so pleased with the way they turned out. The original recipe called for fresh nutmeg, but I used ground nutmeg instead. Also, the recipe called for coarse salt, but I decided to use regular table salt instead – instead of the 1 tablespoon coarse salt, I used a little less than 1/2 teaspoon salt. The recipe is from Martha Stewart – and warning about that recipe, it says it makes 18 cupcakes, but the actual yield is closer to 30.
I decided to use a cinnamon cream cheese frosting on these cupcakes and this recipe can be found at Recipezaar. This is a really nice frosting as well. I used just a pinch more cinnamon than the recipe called for.
I used Brach’s mellowcreme pumpkins and a jar of Fox Run Halloween sprinkles to decorate the cupcakes.
Banana Cupcakes
I found this recipe while looking for banana cupcakes, which uses a super sweet honey-cinnamon frosting. Fresh bananas are optional, but helped to alleviate the sweetness of the frosting.
Recipe from MarthaStewart.com. This recipe uses 1 1/2 cups of mashed banana, so there is definitely a strong banana taste which I loved.
I baked these in my Wilton silicone baking cups. Not sure if I like the silicone baking cups – they are hard to wash and while dishwasher safe it is hard to keep them in one place in the dishwasher.
