Maple Cranberry Pecan Breakfast Cake

Are breakfast baked goods desserts? Well, they are in this blog! They're also my biggest food weakness. I probably get more satisfaction from a fluffy, chock-full-of-something-tasty muffin than almost any dessert. However, such indulgences are not practical - so, I usually settle on cereal or Greek yogurt. Unless it's a week when I do a lot of running...

...or there's a potluck brunch at work.

A year ago, we had work brunches fairly regularly. All team members contributed something, and we'd have "team meetings" while noshing on all manner of morning treats. An ideal meeting scenario, correct? I was so excited when my manager put a brunch back on the calendar in 2013. I jump at any opportunity to try another Flour recipe, so I thumbed through my baking Bible, hoping for inspiration. Inspiration came in the form of a maple cranberry pecan breakfast cake.

The recipe is in Joanne's cookbook, so I won't copy it here. This post's title lists its flagship ingredients, and Joanne's instructions, though verbose, are easy to follow. That said, I have two suggestions.

• Thaw, then chop, the cranberries. The frozen fruit rolled out from under my knife, which nearly sliced the fingers holding the fruit in place. Next time, I'll either thaw the fruit to room temperature before chopping, or I'll use fresh cranberries. The chopping is necessary to keep the fruit incorporated throughout the batter; the whole cranberries floated to the top of the loaf as it baked.
• Line the loaf pan in parchment paper. As the berries floated to the top, the caramelized pecans sank to the bottom. I was not prepared for how sticky they'd be, frustrating all efforts at removing the cake from the pan. I finally got the cake out in chunks, with the base of the loaf separated from the crown; fortunately, it wasn't too hard to reassemble, and it held fast once set. Still, none of that would have happened if I had lined the loaf pan in parchment paper for easy removal. Lesson frustratedly learned.

Here is the reassembled cake, ready to go in its glazed glory! (Yep, that's a drizzle made of powdered sugar and maple syrup. Whoa.)

Inconsistent distribution of contents aside, I was really pleased with this cake. First of all, it looks extremely festive. Secondly, it has a taste to match! It has a syrup-soaked flavor without a syrup-soaked texture; just the right amount of syrup, apparently, goes in the batter. Its texture varies from top to bottom; you start with something fluffy and buttery, and end with something dense and moist. The overall effect is like a buttermilk pancake, stuffed with tasty fruits and nuts, that has been exposed to varying degrees of maple syrup. Another way of saying that is that it's a Friendly Toast pancake, in actual-cake form. (Cantabrigians and New Hampshirites will understand the praise in that analogy.) The cranberries provided pleasant bursts of tart juice that cut through the sweetness, and the caramelized pecans enriched the batter with their dense chewiness and earthy flavor. Oh, and that maple glaze? It was literally icing on the cake!

The baked good went over well at our potluck brunch, alongside the chocolate chip pancakes, French toast casserole, miniature quiches, maple sausage meatballs, donuts, bagels, and fried chicken with waffles ( ! ) that rounded out the spread. But really, would you have expected a lesser reception for anything from Flour? I hope not.

Here's to the next brunch, whenever it may be!

Things In Things: Oreo Peanut Butter Brownies

I'm seeing a trend when baking recipes surface on social networks. Everyone's combining multiple mass-produced treats into any number of uber-desserts - or so I've seen in friends' recipe suggestions, culled from Facebook and Pinterest. Think of them as homemade via premade. One colleague is particularly good at sharing these ideas with me, so that a small part of each workday is spent salivating over [insert CANDY NAME plus SOMETHING TASTY AND SPREADABLE plus BAKED GOOD TYPE here] rather than, say, project management. I baked the most tempting of Shannon's recommendations just the other week.

The treats in question were Oreo and peanut butter double-stuffed brownies. If there's usually a correlation between name length and difficulty of recipe, these are an exception to the rule. You will need:

• Cupcake liners. Spray their interiors with cooking spray before you start. Doing so will keep your treats from sticking at the end.
• 1 box of Oreos. You could be ambitious and use Double Stuffs, but they're probably too thick for the cupcake pan.
• Creamy peanut butter
• Brownie mix, prepared as directed on the box. I normally make brownies from scratch, but that effort's not worth it when the brownie is just one of many "things" in the "thing".

And now, the process!

Take an Oreo, and spread one side with peanut butter. Do the same with another Oreo. Stick one on top of the other, and place them in a cupcake liner. Repeat until your cupcake pan is full.

Prepare the brownie mix according to the package's instructions. Then, pour some over each Oreo.

Bake the treats for 15 minutes, remove them from the oven, and let them cool in the pan on a cooling rack FOR A WHILE. I tried removing them too soon; they remained gooey well after the cooling limit for cakes and muffins.

The finished product tastes exactly as you would expect. There are a lot of soft Oreo crumbles, and not enough Oreo filling. (This is when I wish the Double Stuffs would have fit!) There's gooey peanut butter oozing between the layers, which flows like fudge after being heated. Lastly, there's a thin coating of brownie around it all. I was very pleased with the fudgy and flavorful Ghirardelli mix, but there isn't enough of it per treat to really satisfy a brownie craving. That said, the dessert in its entirety satisfies any sweet, and a hint of savory, craving that you might have had due to its size.

These are so easy to make, and they go over so well, that I highly recommend making them if you ever need a quick, tasty crowd-pleaser. Thanks, Shan, for the idea!