Breads and Cookies Made Fresh Every Weekend

Mmmm... Do you smell the whiffs of yeasty bread baking in the oven? Do you drool just looking at a yummy choc-ful-of-ingredient cookie that's just finished baking in the oven?... Well, we certaintly do, and we especially enjoy our weekends to bake and cook some great tasting treats. This week we made rye bread, pancakes, and oatmeal cookies!


We followed have cake will travel's Rye Whole Wheat Bread as a base for our Homemade Rye Wheat Bread. We changed it up a bit with the flour amounts because our flour stash is just about gone. We are planning to go to Bob's Red Mill next week to stock up on some great flours, grains, and other goodies!
Instead of 1 cup bread flour, 1 cup dark rye flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, and 2 Tb wheat germ, we used 1 1/4 cup white wheat flour, 3/4 cup dark rye flour, 3/4 cup whole wheat flour, and 3/4 cup rye flakes processed coarsely. We put this in the bread machine on dough cycle, then baked it in the oven in a loaf pan. Rye flakes sprinkled on top was the perfect touch. This bread had such a wonderful flavor and texture. Baked just right with a nice crust and a soft crumb inside. This recipe and the sweet potato (or pumpkin) wheat bread from have cake will travel are our top two favorite bread recipes!


For a nutritious breakfast this morning, we made our homemade pancakes, only this time we added hemp seeds, hemp milk, and applesauce, and omitted the tea and oil. We used fresh blueberries for the topping instead of cherries. We served this with more applesauce, slightly warm like a healthy syrup, along with a sprinkle of hemp seeds, guava jam (periodically), and raw walnut butter.


We created a new favorite oatmeal cookie. I don't know where the original recipe came from, but we made it our own - into a chewy hearty oatmeal cookie. I like this recipe because it's not cakey, dry, greasy, or like a sugar cookie. It's full of great texture - we used extra thick rolled oats, and lots of it! It uses all natural ingredients, with no margarine, and with pineapple juice and agave as the sweetener.

Our first batch was "Maple Lemon Date" oatmeal cookies, flavored with maple extract, lemon zest, and date pieces, along with walnuts. To die for, so zesty, yet nutty and comforting.

The other batch was "Chocolate Mint" oatmeal, although our mint extract is a mixture of peppermint and spearmint, so it wasn't the greatest addition. Next time we will use pure peppermint. What is so tricky about chocolate mint cookies is that you don't want to overpower the cookie with too much mint. I think the amount of extract we used was a subtle amount, it just had that spearmint flavor that we didn't want. Actually, these taste better frozen, like a chocolate mint chewy fudge treat. There are a lot of chocolate chips along with almond pieces.

This recipe is very versatile - we plan to adapt this basic oatmeal cookie with different flavors. Ideas: apple cinnamon oatmeal, banana oatmeal, cranberry orange oatmeal, nut butter oatmeal, and pumpkin pie spice oatmeal cookies.

Stay tuned this week for a post on our raw eats! We will try to post more frequently with smaller posts (just that work keeps us busy for most of the week).

Have a yummy week! LK