Pumpkin Oatmeal Cream Pies

From Dish Paige:

Happy November! It’s my favorite time of year right now (aside from all of the insane weather we’ve been having here in the Northeast) because as we near Thanksgiving, it means PUMPKIN EVERYTHING!!!!!!!! I’ve always had a weakness for pumpkin pie, and at this point, if I see the word pumpkin in front of anything, I’ll eat or drink it.  The other day, we made marshmallows in class and all I could think was, “how good would this taste with pumpkin pie spice!?” The answer, as you will find out below, is….AMAZING!

For the cookies (this recipe comes directly from the Quaker Oats website, and it amazing as is):

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/3 cups Quaker Oats (quick or old fashioned)

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2 sticks butter, room temp

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup pumpkin puree (not pumpkin pie filling)

1 large egg, room temp

1 tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven to 350

In a bowl, combine flour, oats, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Mix and set aside.

 

In the bowl of your mixer, fitted with a paddle attachment, paddle the butter until soft and fluffy. Add in the sugars and continue paddling until well combined and nicely creamed. Add the pumpkin, egg and vanilla and mix until just combined. Add the flour in 3 batches, paddling until just combined after each addition. Line your baking sheet with parchment and scoop the cookies using an ice cream scooper. With wet hands, flatten the cookies into discs. Bake for approximately 10 minutes – you want the cookies to set but remain soft. Cool.

For the filling:

75g egg whites

240g granulated sugar

60g glucose or corn syrup

water

2 packets powdered gelatin or 15g (bloom the gelatin in 2/3 cup water)

1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice

In your mixer, begin whipping the egg whites on medium speed. Once they reach soft peaks, turn the mixer down to it’s lowest setting and keep it stirring. Meanwhile, place the sugar in a VERY CLEAN pot and combine with just enough water to make it the texture of wet sand (like you’re building a turret on a sand castle). Add the glucose the sugar mixture and heat over medium heat until the mixture reaches 260 degrees. Turn the mixer up to medium-high and pour the sugar syrup in the bowl between the sides of the bowl and the whip. Add the gelatin and increase the speed, mixing until the bowl cools down and the mixture becomes fluffy. Stir in the vanilla and pumpkin pie spice.

Place the marshmallow in a piping bag and pipe a big old pile of filling on the undersides of half the cookies. Place another cookie on top and enjoy!

Note: You will have TONS of marshmallow filling so you might want to double the recipe. Or you can save it and use it for hot chocolate or any other confection you can think of!

Read Full Post »

White Cheddar Cheese Crackers

From Dish Paige:

If you’ve been following Saucy Little Dish, then you might have figured out something I love to do is make at-home versions of food items one can easily purchase at the store. Sometimes the end result is way more awesome than I could ever expect (English muffins, peppermint patties, peanut butter cups). And sometimes, after laboring away for hours, covered in batter and flour from head to toe, the store-bought version reigns supreme (I’m looking at you Milano cookies). The other day, I stumbled on this recipe for homemade cheddar cheese crackers (a.k.a. Cheez-Its or Cheese Nips) and I just had to make them. The verdict: Super delicious, super flaky, and totally worth it!

Ingredients:
8 oz. extra sharp cheddar cheese, grated
4 tablespoons butter or vegetable shortening (vegetable shortening will give you a flakier cracker, but some people find it gross)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cold water
coarse salt

Directions:
Combine shredded cheddar, butter or shortening and salt until well combined. Add in the flour and rub in with your hands until it resembles a coarse meal with some larger pea-sized pieces. Add the water and mix until combined. Knead just a little bit to form a cohesive ball. Cover in plastic and refrigerate at least 30 mins or over night.

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Roll out the dough into a thin rectangle and cut into 1-inch squares. Place the squares on a sheet tray lined with parchment and sprayed with non-stick spray. With a skewer or toothpick, poke a hole in the center of each square. Sprinkle with coarse salt and bake 10-15 minutes until golden brown (mine took 13 minutes).

Eat as a snack, or float on top of tomato soup. Stores for a day or two in an air-tight container. Will not last more than an hour if you live in a house like mine.

Read Full Post »

English Muffins

From Dish Paige:

Hello and welcome back to Saucy Little Dish! While we’ve been on summer hiatus, I started culinary school and have been very busy making my way through my International Baking and Pastry program. I figured, since I’ve already learned so many new things, I should share a few of them with everybody here.

I just finished a bread course, and one of the things we learned was that bread loves to ferment at 80 degrees Fahrenheit, in 80 percent humidity. Which, if you live in the Northeast, is exactly the temperature outside (and inside if you don’t have central air like me). I know you’re all thinking, “but it’s 80 degrees and 80 percent humidity in my apartment, why would I also turn on the oven?” Well, that’s the beauty of this formula (I call recipes for baking “formulas” now, it’s a professional thing *wink), the English Muffins are cooked on the stovetop!

Ok, so now it’s time to get super technical on you all. There are ten steps to yeast bread production. If you follow these steps, you will get bread. Great bread. Delicious bread. All formulas follow these ten steps. Follow the steps. Follow them and apply them to future bread endeavors:

1. Scaling/Measuring
2. Mixing/Kneading
3. Fermenting
4. Punching
5. Portioning
6. Rounding/Benching
7. Make-up/Shaping
8. Proofing
9. Baking
10. Cooling/Storing

Let’s go!

INGREDIENTS:
Milk – 9.25 fl. oz.
Active dry yeast 0.4 oz.
Pastry or cake flour – 1 lb.
Bread flour – 1 lb.
Baking powder – 0.4 oz.
Granulated sugar – 1.25 oz.
Salt – 0.25 oz.
Unsalted butter, room temperature 1.5 oz.
Water – room temperature 9.25 fl. oz.
Cornmeal – as needed for dusting

This formula uses the “sponge” method, which basically means that we are going to create a mini little starter (kinda like a sourdough) and let that get going a little bit before we mix everything together. Let’s go step by step:

1. SCALING/MEASURING:
Scale out all of your ingredients. Measuring by weight is the most accurate, so here you go.

Now make the sponge: Heat the milk until just scalded. Stir in the active dry yeast, then mix it with the pastry flour. Cover and let ferment about 15 minutes.

2. MIXING:
Once your sponge has fermented, mix together the rest of the flours, baking powder, sugar, salt, butter and water and add the sponge. You can use your hands or a mixer fitted with a doug hook. Mix for about 3 minutes, then begin kneading for about 7 minutes until the dough is soft and somewhat sticky.

3. FERMENTING
Cover and let your dough sit for 20 minutes wherever it is 80 degrees and humid. The dough should double in size and slowly spring back when poked with your finger.

4. PUNCHING
You can literally punch your dough, or if you want to be nice, fold the outsides of the dough in on itself a few times in order to equalize the temperature. Let the dough rest again, covered, for another 10 minutes.

5. PORTIONING
Here, with other doughs, you would divide it into however many loaves or rolls or whatever you have, keeping the section you’re not working with covered while you work on the rest. With this dough, we’re going to roll out it out to a 1 inch thickness.

6. ROUNDING/BENCHING
Again, with other doughs, you would now take the portioned dough, roll it into a smooth ball and then let it take a nap for about 10 mins, covered. For the English muffins, cover them and let the rolled out dough relax just for a few minutes to relax the gluten strands. Otherwise, you’re going to cut out the shapes and they will shrink on you.

7. MAKE-UP/SHAPING
Shape the portioned doughs. For the muffins, cut them into the desired size. You can use biscuit cutters, or something circular that’s close to the size you want and trace it with a paring knife. I used a coffee mug for the small ones, and the top of a Chinese soup take-out container for large, sandwich size ones. Place them on a baking sheet that has been lightly dusted with cornmeal and cover.

8. PROOFING
Let your dough take another nap, covered, until doubled in size.

9. BAKING
Bake, or in the case of English muffins, cook on a skillet or in a pan until golden brown, about 3-7 minutes per side. The inside of your bread should be in the temperature range of 190-210 degrees.


10. COOLING/STORING
You don’t want to put your hot breads in a plastic bag or aluminum foil because they will sweat. Use parchment to wrap them when warm. Once they are cool, use whatever you want! Just remember, bread you make at home will go bad way faster than what you buy at the store, so keep your English muffins in the refrigerator or freeze them for longer storage.

Read Full Post »