Bready or Not: Pumpkin Caramel Chip Bars
Caramel chips are a new and awesome thing in stores, and I couldn’t help but try pairing them with pumpkin in these bars. The result? YUM.
This is modified from a recipe I shared about a year ago for Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Bars.
I didn’t simply switch out the kinds of chips. I also decreased the spices. I wanted enough to add some flavor, but I didn’t want them to be spice cake-like as in the old version.
The use of bread flour creates bars that are especially thick and cakey. Unlike a standard frosted cake, these travel very well. The bars are nice and cohesive.
I like to place waxed paper between layers to prevent sticking and melting chips (because in Arizona, well, it’s still hot at this time of year).
Bready or Not: Pumpkin Caramel Chip Bars
Ingredients
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- 1 cup bread flour
- 2 teaspoons cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ginger
- 1/4 teaspoon allspice
- 1/4 teaspoon cloves
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 cups caramel chips divided
- 1 cup unsalted butter 2 sticks, softened
- 1/2 cup brown sugar packed
- 3/4 cup white sugar
- 1 large egg room temperature
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 1 cup pumpkin puree
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350-degrees. Line a 13x9 pan with aluminum foil and apply nonstick spray or butter.
- In a medium bowl, combine the flours, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, cloves, baking soda, and salt. Stir in most of the caramel chips; coating them with flour will keep them from sinking as they bake. Set bowl aside.
- In a big mixing bowl, combine the butter and two sugars until light and fluffy, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add the egg, vanilla extract, and pumpkin puree. Once that's mixed, slowly blend in the dry ingredients until just combined.
- Pour the batter into the ready pan and smooth out. Sprinkle the remaining caramel chips over the top.
- Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until it passes the toothpick test in the middle. Cool completely. Lift up by the foil and place on a cutting board to cut bars. Store in a sealed container at room temperature or chilled. Since pumpkin can be a little sticky, use parchment or wax paper between stacked layers of bars.
- OM NOM NOM!
Bready or Not Guest: K. Bird Lincoln with Spicy Mocha Chocolate Mochi Cake
I’m excited to welcome author K. Bird Lincoln with a special Bready or Not guest post! I’ve read over 130 urban fantasies and it’s hard to wow me these days, but the first book in her Portland Hafu series was a delight. She’s here today to celebrate the release of her second book, Black Pearl Dreaming, with a multicultural chocolate cake.
Plus, you can enter a Rafflecopter giveaway for her first book, Dream Eater! Read the recipe, and you might win yourself a great book to pair with this special chocolate cake.
The Portland Hafu Urban Fantasy series features a Japanese American young woman named Koi. She finds out her father isn’t entirely human and has to battle evil professors and dragons. The second in the series, Black Pearl Dreaming, has Koi traveling to Japan to seek answers for her father’s mental decline.
Chocolate is a huge part of Koi’s world. Like really important. So important that when love interest, Kitsune trickster Ken, wants to apologize for getting her in trouble in Tokyo, he gives her Oregon Chocolatier Dagoba’s Xocolatl Chocolate bar, invoking rosy childhood memories of the only chocolate Koi’s father ever deigned to consume.
So Xocolatl, possibly “bitter water” from the Mayan language, is the flavor I thought I’d play with for this recipe. Drawing on Koi’s happa haole heritage (she’s Japanese on her father’s side and Caucasian-Hawaiian on her mother’s) I thought it fitting to turn Hawaiian Butter Mochi into an homage to my favorite Oregon Chocolatier.
Butter mochi isn’t the same thing at all as Japanese mochi celebrated at New Year’s and used in making daifuku. Butter mochi is a Hawaiian cake incorporating Mochi flour (sweet rice flour or glutinous rice flour not to be confused with ye olde plain rice flour) milk, and butter to make a squishy, bouncy, chewy rich cake like deliciousness.
Don’t be scared off by the mochi flour. All the rest of the ingredients in this are pretty easy to get, and I even found Mochiko Flour (Koda Farms Brand) at my local Hy-Vee grocery store here in the Southeastern Prairie of Minnesota in the Asian Foods section. And of course, you can order Mochiko on Amazon.
This is Hawaiian soul food with a spicy chocolate twist, y’all. One bite, and you’ll be hooked, I promise.
Bready or Not Guest Recipe: BLACK PEARL DREAMING Spicy Mocha Chocolate Mochi Cake from K. Bird Lincoln
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup butter
- 3/4 cup dark chocolate chips
- 1 1/2 cups white sugar
- 16 oz Mochiko Flour sweet or glutinous rice flour
- 2 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 cup cacao powder
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 2 eggs
- 12 oz coconut milk
- 1 1/2 cup milk if you don’t mind the sugar, use 1 cup condensed milk
- Cayenne pepper to taste I used 1/4 tsp
- Cinnamon to taste I used 1 Tb
Instructions
- Grease or insert parchment paper into a 9×13 pan.
- Melt the butter and chocolate together. Mix in sugar and vanilla. In a different bowl, mix Mochiko flour, cacao powder, baking powder, cinnamon, and cayenne. Beat in 1/2 of the Mochiko flour mixture, eggs, and coconut milk. Add in another 1/2 of the Mochiko flour mixture, 11/2 cup milk and beat until all flour and milk is added and mixed in until smooth.
- Pour into pan and cook at 350 deg F for 45-55 minutes.
- Let cool completely. Cut with a plastic knife or wet your knife between cuts.
Koi visits Japan looking for answers and instead is forced to make an impossible choice.
With the help of powerful new friends, Koi defeated her dragon enemy in Portland. Now, no longer able to deny her dream-eating powers or the real reason for her father’s mental decline, she flies to Tokyo with her new Kitsune love, Ken, and the trickster Kwaskwi, seeking answers. But secrets from Ken’s past and Kind politics threaten to unravel their newfound trust and someone in Tokyo is desperate to kidnap a Baku. Koi must untangle a long history of pain and deceit in order to save her father, an imprisoned dragon, and herself.
“I absolutely got sucked in by the way several mythologies were mixed with modern-day and WWII history to form a cool, surprising, and action packed plot. ”
— Pat Esden, author of The Dark Heart and Northern Circle Coven series.
“In Black Pearl Dreaming, Koi is a delightfully watchable heroine in way over her head. She struggles to figure out whom to trust, where she can get good coffee, and what exactly she should do about this enormous sleeping dragon, in this fast paced paranormal intrigue set
in a vividly detailed contemporary Japan.”
— Tina Connolly, author of Ironskin and Seriously Wicked series.
World Weaver Press
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
iTunes/Apple iBooks
Kobo
K. Bird Lincoln is an ESL professional and writer living on the windswept Minnesota Prairie with family and a huge addiction to frou-frou coffee. Also dark chocolate– without which, the world is a howling void. Originally from Cleveland, she has spent more years living on the edges of the Pacific Ocean than in the Midwest. Her speculative short stories are published in various online & paper publications such as Strange Horizons. Her medieval Japanese fantasy series, Tiger Lily, is available from Amazon. World Weaver Press released Dream Eater, the first novel in an exciting, multi-cultural Urban Fantasy trilogy set in Portland and Japan, in 2017 and will release the sequel, Black Pearl Dreaming, October 2018. She also writes tasty speculative fiction reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Check her out on Facebook, join her newsletter for chances to win chocolate and ebooks, or stalk her online at kblincoln.com
Read MoreBready or Not: No-Bake Mummy Biscoff Buckeyes
Here’s a great recipe to make with kids! These No-Bake Mummy Biscoff Buckeyes are quick, cute, and secretly healthy.
Buckeye treats typically include peanut butter and brown chocolate. I switched in Biscoff (aka cookie butter, available by the peanut butter in most American grocery stores these days) but you can use peanut butter instead.
What makes these secretly healthy, you ask, since I made them unhealthier with cookie butter? Well, the base ingredient of this recipe is… CHICKPEAS. Also known as garbanzo beans.
You cannot tell there are beans in this. All you taste is Biscoff and chocolate. They keep in the fridge for up to a week, too; they get a little sweaty, that’s it.
The white chocolate drizzle is pretty fun. There’s no art to it. Just drizzle every which way, then very quickly add the mini chocolate chip eyes. (Hopefully your mini chips won’t have bloomed like mine did! That means the chocolate has a white cast to it. Perfectly fine to eat, it just doesn’t look as pretty. FYI Mummies don’t care about being pretty.)
Modified from Cooking Light October 2017.
Bready or Not: No-Bake Mummy Biscoff Buckeyes
Ingredients
- 15 1/2 ounce chickpeas rinsed and drained
- 1/2 cup cookie butter Biscoff, Speculoos, store brand, etc
- 2 Tablespoons honey
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
- 1/3 cup white chocolate chips
- 2 teaspoons mini chocolate chips
Instructions
- Pulse chickpeas in a food processor until smooth. Add cookie butter, honey, vanilla, and salt, and pulse more. Use a teaspoon scoop to measure out the dough; place on a wax paper-lined baking sheet that will fit in the fridge. Use hands to smooth out each ball. Chill until firm, at least 30 minutes.
- Carefully melt white chocolate in the microwave at 20% power in 15 second bursts, stirring well between each pass, until it's smooth. Dip fork prongs in the chocolate and drizzle back and forth over the buckeyes to create a mummy bandage effect. Immediately place two mini chocolate chips for eyes on each mummy head. If need be, melt white chocolate again to use some dots of it as glue for the eyes.
- Store in the fridge for up to a week, but expect them to sweat and get moister.
- OM NOM NOM!
Bready or Not: Pumpkin Cookies with Penuche Frosting
October is here, and that means pumpkin recipes! Let’s kick things off right with Pumpkin Cookies with Penuche Frosting!
What is penuche, you ask? It’s a fudge-like candy made from brown sugar, butter, and milk. It has a very caramel-like vibe going on.
That makes it the perfect complement for these incredible cookies. The pumpkin-filled base is soft and cakey, with fragrant fall spices.
These are really, really good. Pumpkin, spices, penuche. Oh yeah.
The recipe makes about 60 cookies if you use a teaspoon scoop, and they hold up best if eaten in one day. They get softer after that, but are still good.
Recipe modified from Taste of Home magazine.
Bready or Not: Pumpkin Cookies with Penuche Frosting
Ingredients
Cookies
- 1 cup unsalted butter 2 sticks, softened
- 1/2 cup white sugar
- 1/2 cup light brown sugar packed
- 1 large egg
- 1 cup pumpkin puree
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
- 2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 3/4 cup pecans chopped
Frosting
- 1/4 cup brown sugar packed
- 3 Tablespoons butter
- 1/4 cup milk or half & half
- 2 1/2 - 3 cups confectioners' sugar
Instructions
- Preheat oven at 350-degrees. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugars together until they are light and fluffy. Beat in the egg, pumpkin, and vanilla.
- In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt. Gradually mix the dry ingredients into the wet. Fold in the pecans.
- Spread parchment paper on two large baking sheets. Drop dough by rounded teaspoon scoops spaced out to allow for a small amount of spreading. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes. Move cookies to wire racks to cool, which won't take long.
- Meanwhile, in a small saucepan, bring the brown sugar and butter to a boil. Keep on medium heat for 1 minute, continuing to stir, then remove from heat. Cool for 10 minutes. Transfer to a larger bowl and beat in the milk. Slowly add in enough confectioners' sugar to reach a spreadable consistency. Immediately frost cookies. Let set for an hour or so before packing up.
- Makes about 60 cookies. Best eaten within 1 day; they will still taste okay after that, but will soften more. Store cookies between wax paper layers in sealed containers.
- OM NOM NOM!
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