Savory Pumpkin Pizza Dough!

Welcome back! Hope everyone is having a great weekend thus far. Since I made the recipe I'm going to share with you here, I have not stopped thinking about it. Okay, well maybe I have been able to think about and focus on other things, but let's just say that thoughts of this savory pumpkin pizza dough have been dancing around in my mind quite a bit since I made it a few days ago. ;-) It has changed my life.

I found this recipe several weeks ago when I was perusing an awesome new cooking blog I found called "The Cooking Photographer." I saw her recipe for savory pumpkin pizza dough and knew I'd just have to make it at some point! That time finally came a few days ago when I had some leftover canned pumpkin that I wanted to use up. Suddenly, it hit me! Make that pumpkin pizza dough, Colleen!!!

So I did. :)

All in all, this was a very easy recipe. It does call for active dry yeast, so it involves letting the dough rise for an hour or so. It's important to know that ahead of time so you can plan accordingly! The link to the recipe can be found here, but I'm also going to copy and paste the instructions for you below.

Ingredients:
½ cup barely warm water
1 teaspoon honey
1 Tablespoon active dry yeast
3 ½ cups bread flour
1 cup canned pumpkin, (Not pumpkin pie filling)
2 Tablespoons olive oil, plus more for the bowl
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon onion powder
½ teaspoon garlic powder
Instructions:
1. Measure water in a wet measuring cup and stir in the honey and yeast. Set aside for 5 minutes.
2. In a stand mixer with a dough hook add all the ingredients including the yeast mixture and knead for several minutes.
3. Turn the dough onto a clean surface and knead with your hands for a couple more minutes. Coat a large bowl with a little olive oil, toss in the dough turning coat once to coat, and cover in plastic wrap.
4. Let the dough rise in a warm place for about an hour, or until large and poufy.

I followed the recipe almost exactly. The only things I did differently were omit the onion powder and add about 1 teaspoon of dried rosemary instead. I could really pick up on the rosemary flavor in the dough, so I was pleased with that addition! I have to say that the pumpkin flavor was subtle but still there, for sure. I think the level of "pumpkin-ness" was just right, personally. I even think that people who don't care for pumpkin might even like this dough!!

Time for pics!

I made this pizza on my awesome new Pampered Chef pizza stone. LOVE this new addition to my kitchen! I've used it twice so far, and I already can't wait to use it again. :)

On this particular pizza, I put on a regular tomato sauce with sauteed green peppers and onions, roasted asparagus, and roasted sweet potatoes (both the asparagus and sweet potatoes I had leftover from roasting the night before). And on half the pizza, I put small pieces of leftover baked pork chop I had cooked a few days before. Yummm. I love using up leftovers as pizza toppings! Remember my other post about being creative with homemade pizza? This pizza is definitely a good example of that creativity. ;-)

Mozzarella!

Here she is in the oven. :) I baked the pizza at 400 degrees for about 15 - 17 minutes or so.

Look at that puffy crust!!

This dough was SO good. It was dough-y and airy, yet it was slightly crispy around the outside crust too. It was just the right texture for pizza dough, in the Barbershop's opinion. And as I said earlier, the pumpkin flavor was noticeably there but definitely not overpowering at all. It's a winning recipe, friends!

I had a little extra dough, so in addition to the large pizza, I also made a couple rolls.

Check out that inside of that roll! Oh my goodness. I could have easily eaten like 6 of these rolls in one sitting. Next time I make this dough I think I might just make rolls out of it! (by the way, if you look closely at the picture of the roll's inside, you can see a speck of rosemary on the left side there...click on the picture to enlarge it so you can see it :)).

If you're looking to be slightly adventurous in the kitchen, I definitely think you should try this savory pumpkin pizza dough. And when you do, let me know how it's changed your life because I know it will.

:)

Friday Favorites, 4.8.11

Welcome to the Barbershop's second edition of Friday Favorites! (and yes, I know I'm publishing this on Thursday evening - no time to do it tomorrow!). I hope everyone has had a great week. My exciting baking adventures this week included making an AMAZING savory pumpkin pizza dough (yes, you heard me right - pumpkin! this dough has changed my life) and a couple different renditions of the recipe I'm going to submit to the Pillsbury Bake-Off. It's a work in progress still so I can't share the recipe with you just yet! The only thing I'll share is that I'm going to submit a recipe to the dessert category. But you probably would have guessed that one without me telling you. ;-) I will share the pumpkin pizza dough and Pillsbury recipe at some point in the near future! Oh, and in case you missed my first edition of Friday Favorites last week, you can check it out here.

But for now, onto this week's favorites! I have four items for you this week.

1) Chocolate Granola

It looks heavenly! I love homemade granola, but then you make it chocolate flavored??! Yes, please!

These next two are Easter-themed. Easter is just a few weeks away, friends! Time to start planning your menu for the holiday...

2) Chick and Egg Cupcakes

How darn cute are those?

3) Cadbury mini eggs

I am in love with these. They are by far my favorite Easter candy! I like to have a couple before I head out for a run sometimes...I am pretty sure they make me run faster. ;-)

Maybe I'll put them in cookies, like these! Fun fun.

4) Mike's new blog! Mike formerly had a blog entitled "Relaxing, Not Worrying, Having a Homebrew." He took a hiatus from blogging for a while, but now he's back with a new, fun blog called "Mike's Imbibations." Go visit his page and read his first two posts about what he's been "imbibing in"! Cheers! :)

Have a wonderful weekend, all! Hope you're enjoying my Friday Favorites so far!!

Apple Date Walnut Muffins and Mini Loaves

I love muffins. They definitely fall under the umbrella of "comfort food" for me. Eating a muffin baked to perfection is such an enjoyable experience. Pair it with a great cup of coffee and I'm even happier. :) One of my favorite quotes is "There's nothing bigger than the little things." Muffins are one of those "little things" in my book!

Okay, enough rambling from me. Onto the recipe! I semi-followed a recipe in this fun cupcake book that my mom gave me for Christmas. Thanks, Mom!

Yes, it is a cupcake book, but it has some muffin recipes in it too! The original recipe was for "fruity lunch box muffins" (they contained berries), but there was a variation on the page for "apple and golden raisin muffins" and that's what I semi-followed. I still changed the recipe slightly though because that's just what I do! 

Here are the ingredients and instructions I followed to make my apple date walnut muffins:

-3/4 cup all-purpose flour
-1/2 cup whole wheat flour
-2/3 cup regular oats
-2 tsp. baking powder
-1/3 cup sugar
-1 tsp. cinnamon
-2 eggs
-6 oz. yogurt (I used Yoplait apple pie flavor, perhaps it enhanced the apple flavor in the muffins ;-))
-3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
-3 Tbsp. melted butter
-1 Tbsp. maple syrup
-2 tsp. vanilla
-1 cup chopped apple (macintosh)
-2/3 cup chopped dates
-1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Line muffin pan with liners or grease the pan. Mix the flour, oats, baking powder, sugar, and cinnamon with a whisk in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, mix together the eggs, yogurt, oil, melted butter, maple syrup, and vanilla with a spoon; once incorporated, add to the flour mixture and stir until thoroughly combined (but do not over mix). Mix in the chopped apple, dates, and walnuts.

Fill muffin cups 3/4 of the way full, and bake for approximately 15 minutes (oven times may vary, as always!). Transfer to a wire rack to cool.

Quite a few additions that I made were not in the original recipe; those included the cinnamon, maple syrup, dates, and walnuts. I love changing recipes a little bit to make them my own. :)

This recipe made 12 muffins and 4 mini loaves for me.

See this cute little mini loaf pan below? I LOVE this pan! I used it for the first time with this recipe, and it was so great. The loaves baked really evenly and they were really easy to remove from the pan. Yay! I'd highly recommend it. I bought mine at Crate and Barrel. I've used it one other time since this recipe, and it worked great that time too.

Like my new towel with all the baking related words on it? So fun! It was another gift from my mom. :)

There's the goodness on the inside. :)

I liked that these muffins were light and airy, yet hearty too, thanks to the additions of apples, dates, oatmeal, and walnuts. Healthy healthy, friends! Love it.

Talk to you again soon!

Friday Favorites, 4.1.11

Happy April Fools' Day. :) You may notice that the title of my blog post is a little different than usual since it's not the name of a tasty treat that you'd eat. Hmmm, what's going on? I assure you that I'm not playing an April Fools' joke on you - don't worry! However, Mother Nature is playing a joke on us with this snow in New England today!! Anyway, back to the point... I was brainstorming about my blog recently, trying to figure out a way to "switch it up" a bit. And I came up with Friday Favorites!

Every Friday, what I'd like to try to do is share with you a few recipes, websites, or ideas that I've found throughout the week that piqued my interest! The actual content and number of items I share may vary from week to week, but it'll hopefully provide you with a few fun new recipe ideas, introduce you to some other cooking/baking websites or blogs, or anything else at all really! Perhaps some weeks all of my favorites will have a theme. The possibilities are endless. I'm not limiting myself with these favorites, folks. Heck, maybe one week I'll share with you a picture of my favorite sweater or pair of shoes or something. ;-) But for this week, I'm going to stick to my general cooking and baking theme in the Barbershop. Here goes!

Disclaimer: these are in no particular order!

1) Baked Doughnuts with Cinnamon-Sugar

These look so light, fluffy, and just plain heavenly, don't they? This post on Brown Eyed Baker about doughnuts was actually created by a guest blogger (not the usual Brown Eyed Baker herself), and as a result, I discovered a fabulous new blog, Sugarcrafter. What a lovely, delicious blog! I'd highly recommend browsing through some of her recipes.

2) King Arthur Flour's (April) fools rush in...

This is too funny!

3) KALE! 

This is a post by my good friend Jenn over at LiveWellFitNow (you've heard me mention her before ;-)). She has three delicious and nutritious recipes using kale. YUM! I still have yet to cook with kale, but it's on my ever growing cooking/baking to do list. I think Jenn has inspired me with this post to buy some very soon and make one of these yummy recipes!

Well, there you have this week's Friday Favorites. I hope you enjoyed! I'd love to know what you think about my potential new weekly "edition" on the blog. Thanks!

Overnight Egg Casserole

TGIF and welcome back to the Barbershop. :) Hope everyone had a great week! This week I shared with you a main dish recipe for healthy butternut squash mac n' cheese and a dessert recipe for black bottom banana cream pie...and now I think I'd like to share a breakfast recipe with you! Gotta cover all the bases. ;-)

As you know from my last post, my family was in town last weekend and I did some cooking for everyone, including brunch on Sunday morning. I had planned to have several items on the brunch menu, and I wanted one of the items to include eggs. So I searched around for an easy recipe that wouldn't take too much of my time (I wanted most of my time to be spent with the fam!), was fairly healthy, and of course, delicious! I settled upon this overnight egg casserole from Taste of Home. Luckily, it was a success!

Now, as I typically do, I adapted the recipe a bit and did not follow it exactly. As you can see by reading the recipe here, the recipe calls for ham. Well, I was already going to cook sausage with brunch, so I decided to make this dish meatless and therefore omitted the ham. Also, I did not add the chiles that are in the original recipe. I added a few new ingredients as well, as you'll see as you continue to read...

The original recipe says it makes nine servings, and although that would have been enough for us (there were six of us), I decided to increase the proportions just a bit for a few ingredients. This casserole is made in layers. I kept the bottom layer as is, by layering hash browns on the bottom of the pan. I used a 13 x 9 glass baking pan.

I sprinkled some pepper and herbs de provence on the potatoes for a little extra flavor! I added about 4 or 4.5 cups of potatoes here.

Next up comes the shredded cheese. I decided to use a combination of a mexican blend and Vermont sharp cheddar. About 1 cup total of shredded cheese (maybe slightly more than 1 cup) was sprinkled on top of the potatoes.

The next step is to combine the eggs and evaporated milk. Although the recipe calls for 6 eggs, I used 8. I still used the 12 oz. can of evaporated milk called for in the recipe though; I did not increase the amount of milk.

Now, a few ingredients I chose to add that weren't in the recipe were red pepper, green pepper, and onion! I wanted to add some healthy veggies AND some bright color. :) Mike chopped the veggies for me; thanks, Mike!! In total, we added about 1 cup of finely chopped red and green pepper and 1/2 of a yellow onion, finely chopped. These veggies got mixed in with the egg and milk mixture, as did some black pepper and more herbs de provence.

The only thing left to do was pour the egg mixture overtop the potatoes and let the whole thing sit overnight in the fridge! That's all, folks. Super simple.

The next morning I took the casserole out early so that it could sit for at least 30 minutes before baking. After baking it, uncovered, at 350 degrees for about 45 minutes, it was done! The recipe says to bake it for one hour or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean; my oven tends to cook faster, so for me, it was done after just 45 minutes.

How colorful! I love it.

I decided to add a little salsa to my helping - yummm! It gave the egg casserole just the right kick. ;-) 

Overall, this dish was great and I would definitely make it again. My only concern was that the bottom hash brown layer was a tad dry, but not everyone who ate it thought so. So maybe that was just my own preferences talking! Maybe next time, if I made it again with 8 eggs rather than 6, I'd also increase the amount of evaporated milk. 

A couple additional items on our brunch menu were other tasty Barbershop recipes, including healthy carrot muffins and Irish soda bread scones. I'm getting hungry for brunch again as I type this. Uh oh!

:)

Enjoy the weekend, friends!

Black Bottom Banana Cream Pie

Back so soon?! YES! I am posting just one day after my last post...and that typically means a couple things. 1) I actually have some free time for blogging this week and 2) I am super excited about the recipe I'm about to share with you!!

Last year for Father's Day, I gave my dad a gift certificate for a homemade banana cream pie, which is his faaaaavorite. Well, it's obviously now several months after last year's Father's Day, but I finally got around to making that pie! And I'm so glad I did because it was a huge hit! My parents and aunt were in town visiting my brother and me this past weekend, so I served this for dessert on Saturday evening after we enjoyed a delicious home cooked crock pot corned beef and cabbage meal. :)

Pie time!

I followed a recipe in one of my favorite Cooking Light cookbooks. The original recipe calls for a traditional pastry crust; however, I did not have the time to put into making a pastry crust, so I decided on making a graham cracker crust! Super easy. Here are the ingredients for that:

-1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs (approx. 24 cracker squares)

-1/4 cup sugar

-1/3 melted butter

Combine the crumbs and sugar in a mixing bowl, and add the melted butter until everything is well-blended. Press the mixture onto the bottom and up the sides of an ungreased 9-inch pie plate. Bake at 375 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes or until the crust is lightly browned. Cool completely before filling.

Pie crust done!

Now, onto the actual pie. Although I used a cookbook, lucky for me (to save me some typing ;-)), the recipe I used is also online. You can find it here! As you can see, it receives a 5-star, "outstanding" rating. I would completely agree!!

To start, you make the "black bottom," which is a chocolate pudding.

Black bottom done!

Next, onto the custard filling. This is no instant pudding mix, folks! This is the real thing. I have never made a custard from scratch before, and I have to say, it really wasn't that bad! I read through the instructions carefully (and several times!) before beginning. If you've never made homemade pudding before either, I'd recommend you do the same. It's really not difficult, but the steps do need to be followed carefully!

Somewhere around the time when the custard was thickening, I panicked. It had a lot of lumps in it, and I was afraid it wasn't going to smooth out. If this happens to you, have no fear! The lumps magically go away, I promise. I didn't have to do anything special other than continue to follow the directions as they were.

Mmmm, vanilla extract.

A small amount of cream cheese is added to a portion of the pudding...

And then the two are fully combined to make the actual vanilla pudding layer.

Before adding the vanilla pudding layer, first come the bananas! Yay for potassium! ;-)

Although the recipe didn't call for a second layer of bananas, I added a second layer. I couldn't resist.

Finally, atop the pudding and second banana layer, I added some light cool whip.

Chocolate shavings!

The graham cracker crust stayed together for the most part, but as you can see, there were a few crumbs that didn't make it. Not to worry...those didn't go to waste. It's possible they disappeared into my tummy...

YUM. Seriously. What a dessert. You're going to love it.