This year we spent Thanksgiving with my parents and my younger brother in Maine. As always it was a great time preparing for the trip and an even better time with the family.
We spent the day before rushing to make several food items to take with us. These included cinnamon buns, herbed bread (Pain de Provence), anadama-maple bread, pumpkin-maple whoopie pies, and of course my favorite apple pie.
Many of these items I have blogged about before and came from recipe’s I have gotten off the fresh loaf website or what I think is the best bread making book the “The bread baker’s apprentice” by Peter Reinhart.
The cinnamon bun recipe in Peter Reinhart’s book is awesome and simple. The glaze or frosting recipe in the book is not very good so when ever we bake them and take them somewhere we always bring a simple cream cheese frosting consisting of: 4 oz. of softened butter, 4 oz. of softened cream cheese, 1 cup of powdered sugar, and 1 teaspoon of vanilla, which is easily blended together in a mixer. When making the cinnamon buns, I usually get a couple that are of a different size than the rest. Typically these are the buns that are close to each end, so these go into a separate baking sheet for the family to enjoy. This recipe is so good more often that not we do not frost them and enjoy them fresh from the oven.
The breads are two loaves that I enjoy. Pain de Provence an herbed bread from the Fresh Loaf website and a slightly tweaked version of Anadama bread from Peter Reinhart’s book. The Anadama was tweaked because I only had half the molasses required to make the bread, so I went to the other liquid sugar we had in the cupboard. Our very own maple syrup. Secretly I was hoping for some maple flavor I used medium light syrup which lacks the strong maple flavor of a B-grade syrup. Both loaves were good with the herbed bread much more light and airy than the Anadama. However everyone seemed to enjoy the sweetness of the Anadama loaf with the turkey feast.
No turkey day feast can be complete without pie! The wife and I baked our apple pie the night before. I am on apple duty and she is on the crust. With some hearts for vents the pie was ready.
As always we had a great time preparing out items and an even better time catching up with the family enjoying a great meal, great conversation, and some great football!