Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Toast

I've made this recipe a couple of times recently; not too close together, because I'm afraid of what it will do to my arteries, and my midwife warned me about too much sugar. But it's soooooo good. Sorry for the lack of pictures, but mine looked almost exactly like the pictures in the original recipe post over at The Pioneer Woman Cooks.

Pioneer Woman's Cinnamon Toast

Original recipe here (I usually halve it, because even when we have company, 16 pieces of cinnamon toast is too much. So....)

8 slices 100% whole wheat bread

1 stick (1/2 cup) butter, softened

1/2 cup sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a small bowl, mix together butter, sugar, and cinnamon (as a side note, if you end up with some chunks of unmixed butter, as I did when I was in a hurry, it still comes out delicious. Just mix it until it's sort of a uniform brown color.)

Spread butter mixture across bread from edge to edge, arranging slices on a cookie sheet or other baking pan. Bake for 10 minutes. I skipped the broiler step, because I was a) paranoid (I tend to burn things under the broiler) and b) starving. 

Conclusion

This is amazing. The butter soaks in to the top half of the bread and caramelizes there. It's fabulous and wonderful and I love it. Which is why I can only make it every so often, and only when there's company, so I can avoid eating it all myself. Even telling myself how much harder it will be to push out a 10-pound baby than a 7- or 8-pound baby doesn't help. You probably shouldn't start making this recipe if you're at all concerned about sugar. Fat? Oh, I guess so. But you can't beat real butter. You really can't

Note to self: should stop browsing the Pioneer Woman site if I'm actually serious about not gaining 50 points this pregnancy

Pie Crust with Butter (aka Reason #572 why I love my food processor)

It's been awhile! I have a longer draft post waiting for some time when my daughter isn't attacking my keyboard. But I'm super excited about how easy this crust was to make, so I wanted to share.

I wanted apple pie. My brother has been taunting me with pie on Facebook (okay, so he wasn't actually taunting me, but posting pictures of your pie on Facebook when your sister is in the third trimester is basically the equivalent of taunting). I NEEDED apple pie. But my standard pie crust recipe uses shortening, which is basically partially hydrogenated oil in solid form. I'm trying to avoid the partially hydrogenated stuff. So, in my handy-dandy Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook I found a recipe for a tart crust that is basically pie crust, but with butter instead of shortening. I modified the recipe a bit from the original, but it still worked rather well

Pie Crust with Butter

1 1/4 c. all-purpose flour
1/4 c. sugar
1/2 c. (1 stick) cold butter
1 egg
1 T. cold water

Here's the exciting part; I made this pie crust in the food processor. I had seen on other sites how you could use the food processor to cut the butter into the flour mixture, and I wanted to try it, given how time-consuming it is to use a pastry blender to cut in butter or shortening. I don't have any pictures of this part, because I was afraid it wasn't going to work, but it was AMAZING.

Combine flour and sugar in food processor with the chopping blade and process for about 30 seconds to mix. Add cold butter (yes, put it in straight from the fridge; thermodynamics says so) and process for about another 30 seconds. Check to make sure you don't have any huge chunks of butter left; if it's working right, it will look like the butter disappeared into thin air. In a separate bowl, beat the egg and add the cold water. Add the egg mixture to the food processor and process for about 1 to 2 minutes, until the dough comes together. It won't form a ball, but you should have several larger lumps of dough.

I ignored the original recipe instructions to refrigerate the dough for 30 to 60 minutes to make it easier to handle, which is why my pie crust looks slightly zombiefied in the pictures. It doesn't affect the taste at all, but the dough did have a tendency to come apart as I transferred it to the pan. I would highly recommend chilling the dough, and using extra flour to reduce the stickiness.

Conclusion

I was a little afraid to try this, having only had crust made with shortening in my entire life. But it was delicious, and didn't taste noticeably different from the crust I was used to. I will need to experiment with if it's possible to get pretty crust from this recipe, but for me, taste is a much, much higher priority than looks.

You gotta have ice cream with your pie!