Amish Friendship Bread

 During high school, this recipe made the rounds with all my friends' moms.  It was called Amish Friendship bread, and it involved this milk, sugar, flour starter that sat on your counter, got fed occasionally, and then got baked into this delicious cinnamon "bread", which really was more of a cake, and inevitably got shared with everyone during whatever events it was that required moms to bake.

Eventually, everyone got tired of feeding their starter and the "bread" disappeared from my life.  But I still remembered it.

Then, magically, during this pandemic, it resurfaced in my Buy Nothing groups (which, if you haven't heard of them, I encourage you to google it and then join your local one).  I got my hands on a starter and I just baked off my first batch this weekend.  It was love all over again.

I had a heck of a hard time finding consistent recipes, so here's me using this blog again for my own record keeping.

Day 1: Do nothing. This is the date that you receive the bag of starter (or the date that you make your own batch of starter / Day 10). Squish the bag.
Day 2: Squish the bag.
Day 3: Squish the bag.
Day 4: Squish the bag.
Day 5: Squish the bag.
Day 6: Add to the bag – 1 cup flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk.  Squish the bag.
Day 7: Squish the bag.
Day 8: Squish the bag.
Day 9: Squish the bag.
Day 10: Baking/Feeding Day.  Pour the entire contents of the starter bag into a non-metal bowl and add: *1½ cups of flour, 1½ cups of sugar, 1½ cups of milk.  Set aside any starter you will bake with.  Divide the remaining starter into 1 cup portions in separate ziplock bags.


Amish Bread Recipe (Day 10 Baking Instructions)
1 cup starter
3 eggs
½ neutral oil
1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
2 cups flour
Optional: 1 large (5 ounce) box vanilla instant pudding mix (just the dry mix)
Topping: 1/4 cup of sugar + 1 teaspoon cinnamon

Combine the ingredients in the ways normal people combine ingredients for baking.
Top with sugar mix.
Bake at 350F for 50 minutes.

This made two not very tall loaves for me, so next time I will put all of this batter into one loaf pan.  Also this tastes great with berries baked into the middle!

*Note about Day 10: This is what I read online and it seemed like too much stuff.  So I experimented with only giving it 1 cup of each.  Now I'm waiting to see if I've messed up.

A return for cherries

 It's been a really long time.  Blogging was put on the far back burner while I dealt with residency and life, and then I wasn't sure if I would or should ever come back to it.  But the truth it, I was still coming back to this blog all the time to find my favorite recipes, and then I've been developing new ones and struggling to keep track of them on post it notes and emails to myself.

So in a fit of optimism, I will write about this new recipe I tried today, in the hopes that it will be a keeper.

We hit the end of Rainier cherry season in Washington, which always makes me sad because those cherries are one of my favorite things at the farmer's market.  The last week I bought them, I knew it was the end of the season, but I persisted in buying several pounds anyway.  Because of Covid19, I could not painstakingly hand select each and every cherry, so I got many many bruised ones that just weren't that tasty.  They were also getting to that too sweet point that they hit at the end of the season, where the tart balance just isn't there any more.  I'd never baked or cooked or done anything with Rainiers except eat them fresh, so I had to do my research.

It turns out, very few people recommend cooking or baking with them.  Because, as I said, they are too sweet.  You need a little acid to make things taste balanced.

However, I did find some recipes for cocktail cherries aka Maraschino cherries (or Luxardo cherries) which immediately piqued my interest because I. Love. Cocktail. Cherries.  I'm not a big cocktail drinker because alcohol makes me feel both sleepy and also vaguely ill, but I'll happily sip a Shirley Temple.  And so I went and bought myself a cherry pitter (did you know they make cherry pitters that pit six cherries at a time???  I'm not normally a kitchen gadget person so this blew my mind a little), cooked up a little syrup, and now I'm sitting at the counter admiring some jars of cherries marinading in sweetness.

A lot of recipes I read depended on a lot of alcohol or, conversely, no flavoring at all except water and sugar.  I decided I didn't like either of these options, so I looked for cherry juice.  I couldn't find any at Costco, and because there's a pandemic going on currently, I decided I wasn't going to another store and so pomegranate juice would work just fine.

Here's what I threw together:

- 1 cup pomegranate juice (100% juice, no sugar added)

- 2/3 cup granulated sugar

- pinch of salt

- small piece of a cinnamon stick (I smash whole sticks with my mortar and pestle)

 - two allspice berries

- 1/2 teaspoon almond extract

- a dozen cherry pits, smashed (again, with my mortar and pestle)

- splash of leftover red wine that's been in my fridge for 2-3 weeks, maybe 2 shots?

- splash of bourbon, less than 1/2 a shot

- splash of honey drinking vinegar because I am fancy and have that in my fridge (it was a gift from a friend)

- 1/2 cup of water

I had already pitted about a pound of Rainier cherries.  Some of the pits I saved to cook, since that's apparently a technique (says Google and other food blogs) for infusing some bitter almond flavor.  Possibly from the cyanide.  It's fine though, just take some extra Vitamin B12*.

I let all that come to a boil and then simmer for about 10 minutes,** then I poured it through a strainer, and into my glass jars filled with cherries.  And tada!  They were gorgeous in their redness.  Also, I did have some extra juice, which I tasted and it is delicious.  What a way to come back to blogging.

*This is not medical advice.

**According to my brief internet research, at least 50% of the alcohol is gone.

***No pictures because this is always what has made me so slow about posting.