Pumpkin Pancakes

The more time I spend in my graduate program, in classes like "Human-Computer Interaction" and entry-level positions like "Usability Intern," the more it bothers me when people give things inaccurate descriptors. A link farm is not a "Research Guide;" it is a list of "Databases" or "Resources." People looking for databases would not click on "Research Guide," and people intrigued by "Research Guide" would be disappointed to find a static list of general databases.

Outside of professional concerns, misleading or vague descriptors are still a pain in the tuckus. We spent several hours last weekend trying to find a tri-wing screwdriver to dismantle our Wii, because both online and brick 'n mortar retailers waffled between calling it a security screwdriver, a precision screwdriver, or a "Nintendo" screwdriver. Recently, the powers that be at our favored Kroger decided that aluminum foil was no longer a "Baking Need," but a "Paper Product." Have you tried to find a cell phone lately? Not a smartphone, or an iPhone, or whatever fancy gadgets with soaring monthly bills your provider wants you to buy, but a cell phone in the cell phone section? Fun times.

Proceeding down the funnel of nitpickiness, we arrive at the relevant example for today's goodies: calling foods other foods they are not. People love to slap the names of popular foods onto less popular ones to make them sound more appealing. Tomato sauce and mozzerella do not make your standard casserole "Pizza Macaroni"...they make it lasagna with differently shaped pasta. Grilling a portobello mushroom does not make it a "steak" any more than sauteeing rib-eye would turn it into a mushroom. The "pie" misnomer is especially popular with anything involving fruit and sugar. I've probably done it myself in the past; you might find a recipe for "banana cream pie oatmeal" or some silliness in the archives. But that was back when I was too undernourished to think for myself. Bananas and milk in hot cereal is not banana cream pie. Squeezing lime juice into cake batter does not make a batch of "Key Lime Pie Cupcakes." You wouldn't call chopped apple sprinkled with cinnamon a complete apple pie, but stir it into yogurt and you suddenly have "Healthy Apple Pie a la Mode."

And according to Google, there are about 185,000 recipes on the indexed Internet for "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes."

These are not "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes." They do not contain bits of pumpkin pie. They are not prepared in remotely the same fashion as pumpkin pie. They contain the same vegetable and spices as pumpkin pie, and there the similarity ends.

Why do I stick on this point? Why can't I just accept the irrational naming conventions of breakfast foods and move on? Because I do not want my pancakes to be stuck within the constricted definitions of pumpkin pie. There are a lot of downsides to pumpkin pie: it's squishy, it often comes straight out of a frost-bitten box, and it's associated with high-pressured cans of whipped corn syrup and stressful holidays stuck at crowded relatives' houses. Not everyone likes pumpkin pie. And even if they do, calling my dish "Pumpkin Pie Pancakes" makes them sound like they aspire to be pumpkin pie. Like they are a watered-down stand-in for the "real thing" because actual pie is "fattening" or "off-limits" as a breakfast food.

No. My pumpkin pancakes are pumpkin pancakes. They are excellent pumpkin pancakes. Hefty, fluffy, delicately spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and a trickle of molasses. I don't need to call them "pie" to convince myself they are delicious.

Now, I've written about pumpkin pancakes before on this blog, way back when I relied on boxed mixes because I feared the baking powder. Erase any memories of that pseudo-recipe from your mind (even if I just put them there with the preceding sentence), because these are the real deal.

Pumpkin Pancakes Makes 12 large pancakes

• 1 cup whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/4 cup milled flax seed
• 1/4 cup wheat bran
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tbsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp nutmeg
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 cup pureed pumpkin
• 1 tsp molasses
• 1/2 tsp vanilla
• 2 cups soy milk

Mix the flours through cinnamon and nutmeg in a large bowl. In a smaller bowl, beat the eggs. Mix in the pumpkin, molasses, vanilla and soy milk until uniform. Carefully stir the wet ingredients into the dry, just until combined. Fry up 1/4 cupfuls of batter over medium heat.

These are only lightly sweetened, to leave plenty of room for maple syrup on top. They're best with unobtrusive drinks like black tea or milk; I wouldn't pair them with juices or herbal teas that could wash out the flavor.

As a final disclaimer, I would like to note that I'm not a maniac about naming things accurately.

Sorry, René, but this is a pipe. As a representation of a pipe, we understand it to be a pipe. It is a pipe as much as the picture our brain creates from light reflected off a physical pipe is a pipe. But we don't understand my pancakes to be pie, or a mushroom to be meat in disguise. Just try to communicate clearly, people.

Mini Donut Pan!

I'm going to reveal something about myself right now that may shock my delicate foodie readers. Fair warning: it may be painful to read. You may feel offended in your very core. If you progress past this sentence, you have acknowledged informed consent and waive any rights to litigation regarding the psychological distress you may endure. Ready? Okay:

I don't like muffins. Or cupcakes.

"Nooo! You lie! The muffin/cupcake is a staple in the food blogger's collection of acceptably posh-looking sugary treats! The world couldn't go on without cute little cupcake stores, cupcake wedding cakes, and homey homemade coworker's birthday cupcakes!"

Sadly, it is true. I don't like any baked goods turned out of a muffin tin. I ate them for years, and even posted old recipes on this blog. But after making them and putting their rosy photos on the web they went straight into the freezer and languished, dry and frost-bitten, until a suitable amount of time had passed to justify throwing them away.

Why am I so full of hate? I admit, the poor muffins never did anything to me. They just annoy me for the same reason triple decker sandwiches, pizza cut into squares, and insufficiently chilled ice cream cones do: they're difficult to eat. You can't get your mouth around the whole thing, so you have to kind of nibble around and into the cakey middle while holding the wrapper gingerly on the other side and hoping the crumbs don't rub into your carpet. In both muffins and cupcakes, the good stuff is usually on top, so after you're done with that bit you just stuff the so-so rest of it into your mouth out of obligation.

I don't have anything against the muffin part of the muffin. I love sweet carby things. There's nothing better than a slice of quickbread with tea in the afternoon. The shape is the issue, and the little bits of paper stuck to the bottom if you use a low-fat recipe. So I was elated when I saw that the black sheep of American baking, the donut, was making a comeback in food blogging circles.

Donuts take a bad rap these days. They're the poster pastry for misguided anti-obesity campaigns. Drawing a cartoon cop without a box of donuts is like drawing a cartoon teacher's pet without glasses or a cartoon black man with normal hair. They top the list with potato chips and Big Macs as the foods we blame for all of our personal problems and the world's ills at large. Its dirty reputation is pretty irrational, given that your standard Krispy Kreme glazed donut has as many calories and fewer grams of sugar than the fashionably "nutritious" Larabar. It's junk food, to be sure, but I'd sooner attribute the skyrocketing diabetes in the Western world to those caramel-infused whipped-cream-topped lattes in the morning than the humble circlet you eat beside them.

All of that was just to build up to this point: I bought a mini donut pan!

(Photo stolen from Amazon, where I bought it)

This donut pan cures all of the problems I have with muffins. Thanks to the hole in the center, they're easy to eat and don't leave crumbs (also, they bake really quickly). The maximized surface area means I can cover the whole thing with "the good stuff." The logistics did take some getting used to, though. The first time I used it I filled the tins too much and ended up with mushroom-shaped mini muffins with holes in the middle.

But that didn't prevent me from messing around with toppings to find the perfect combination.

I tried powdered...

...then added water to my bowl to make a glaze...

...then stirred in melted chocolate chips to make a "ganache"....

...mixed up some cinnamon sugar for kicks...

...then played with coconut flakes.

The winners: cinnamon sugar and powdered. Obviously. They're the easiest to eat, being dry, and have the lightest taste. I focused on these for my second batch, after making some tweaks to the recipe and making a conscientious effort to use less batter per donut.

Isn't that better?

A little spray of oil keeps the sugar on the donut instead of my counter, but I put paper towels under the rack just to be safe. I also took a shortcut to the cinnamon sugar one by putting a standard crumb topping directly on the batter before baking.

I'm still adjusting baking times to get these just right. After I made them the proper size, they came out a little dry. I also need to perfect my storage methods.

My poor powdered donuts turned into sticky glazed when the condensation in the container hit the lid and trickled down again :(

I'll post my go-to recipe when I'm satisfied with it...if I remember and have the time. I haven't been posting lately because the world is out to get me, but that's a rant for another time on another blog.

Autumn Spiced Potato Doughnuts

My world has been crazy lately. Since I'm at the center of my world, the origin of the craziness is obviously me. I could blame the professors who simultaneously assigned three hair-tearing midterm papers due this week. I could blame the virus that's going around taking all of my group members out. I could also blame the weather, which is wreaking havoc on my lips and skin and makes it difficult to get out from under the cozy covers under the morning.

However, the source is ultimately me. My professors didn't tell me to spend my weekend coding a jQuery & Google Maps API prototype for an app design; we were just supposed to make pretty pictures. (Actually, that's why I did it. "Does the app need to be functional?" a classmate asked. "No," the professor said. "Of course not. Not for this class." That sounds like a challenge to me.) The virus only took down one member in a group of 4, and I have fuzzy pajamas and a new humidifier to combat the effects of the weather. So the problem is really me, for letting the stress pile up irrationally. That, and for spending all afternoon yesterday watching "Community" episodes.

Now, there are two primary ways to fix me, so that I stop whining and things get done. Three, actually, if you split one of them into two variants.

1) Give me money.
OR
2) Give me food.

Obviously, number two is the only viable option right now. The pursuit of the first one is what causes most of my worries in the first place. Hence, even while I'm "supposed" to be reading and writing papers, crafting surveys and designs, or coordinating group meetings and interviews, you will find me on any given day in the kitchen for an extended amount of time. I've made a whole slew of new recipes I've been meaning to post, like these carrot cookies...

...and these blueberry bars...

...or an unpictured batch of pumpkin cookies that appeared on my counter last night around midnight. But given my limited amount of time to devote to things that don't get me a diploma, I could only choose one for today. That one will be these adorable Autumn Spiced Potato Doughnuts.

Aren't they cute? They might be cuter if you had some sense of the scale of them, but I'm not going to take a picture of one in my hand because that would require effort, and I have little effort left to spend.

As per usual, I took someone else's recipe and made it my recipe. The original called for sweet potatoes, but I didn't have any and I don't really like them (the shock!). The original recipe must have been insanely sugary, because after cutting the sugar in half (adding a bit of molasses for flavor) and leaving off the cinnamon topping, they were still pretty darned sweet. I guess to qualify for the name "doughnuts" they have to send your blood insulin levels through the roof, so maybe you should call mine "buns" instead. Buns sounds cuter anyway.

Pro tip: leave your dough really moist for a light and fluffy texture. I usually flour my yeast doughs until they're almost dry to the touch...don't do that. If you leave it just under the threshold of "too sticky" you'll get a lovely, tender little bun, instead of a boring mini bagel. These are perfect if you need to eat breakfast in the car because you couldn't get out from under the cozy covers in the morning, or if, like today, you need something small that would digest in under an hour before you get on the treadmill.

Now, to listen to a Korean rock comedy group while huffing and puffing through two measly miles.