Baking - quick and easy recipes - page 119

We made this granola a little more interesting by substituting rolled barley and wheat for the oats. It’s sweetened with maple syrup, and also includes crunchy toasted pecans and dried cranberries. Try it on your morning yogurt or use it as an ice cream topper. What to buy: Rolled barley flakes, not to be confused with whole or pearl barley, can be found at health food stores, gourmet grocery stores, or online. Rolled wheat flakes, not to be confused with wheat berries, can also be found at h...

This easy breakfast “pizza” is a quick way to use up leftover pita bread. In just about the time it takes to brew your coffee, you can have slices of this hot, eggy dish ready. And that beats a congealed triangle of leftover cheese and crust any day. Game plan: You can speed up the preparation even more by grating the cheeses the night before.

Spending a few minutes preparing a handful of ingredients for a marinade gives this dish tons of flavor, plus the bonus of a built-in sauce after the chicken is cooked. Just combine soy sauce, ginger, garlic, and a little brown sugar in a baking dish, add the chicken, and let it marinate in the fridge overnight. When you’re ready to cook it, put the whole dish in the oven, and in 40 minutes you’ll have crispy, saucy, flavorful chicken.

Like banana bread, zucchini bread is an easy quick bread to put together, without the need for any fancy appliances. Just mix the dry ingredients together in one bowl, the wet in another, combine the two, and pour the batter into a bread pan. After about an hour in the oven, and a little time to cool, you’ll have a tender, sweet, flavorful bread to enjoy for breakfast, teatime, or a snack. Special equipment: You’ll need a metal 9-by-5-inch loaf pan for this recipe.

If you’re hankering for a great steak but don’t have access to a grill, try this soy-sauce-marinated rib-eye recipe from Le Pigeon (nicknamed the Dirty Bird) in Portland, Oregon. Throw the steaks in a smoking-hot cast-iron skillet, sear on one side, flip them over, and top with butter. Finish the steaks in the oven, then serve with a seemingly odd but tasty Hawaiian-inspired relish made with pineapple and blue cheese. A pile of crispy semolina-coated onion rings makes the perfect side.

This chocolate cake recipe is delicious. We love a buttery and dense pound cake, but we thought a chocolate version would be even better so we folded lots of dark cocoa into the batter to give it a deep chocolate flavor. After the cake is baked and cooled, it’s drizzled with a chocolate glaze made from semisweet chocolate, cream, and a bit of corn syrup to keep the glaze gooey and shiny.

To get cheese to stick to popcorn, you need melted butter. The problem is, the melted butter makes the popcorn soggy. To solve this, we drizzle popcorn with some spicy butter, coat it with lots of finely grated Pecorino Romano cheese, then bake it in the oven for half an hour. The cheese melts and the popcorn gets crispy again. Serve this savory snack for happy hour with a mezcal–apple cider cocktail to wash it down.

You hear pizza, you think cheese that flows like roof tar; pepperoni slices cupping in the oven, filling with grease; and a crust so overladen with toppings it droops like sorrow when you try to lift a slice. It is both elegant and summery, full of flavor from good-quality cheeses and produce—so flavorful, in fact, that you won’t even notice it’s vegetarian.

S’mores are a campfire classic, but even classics get boring. With canned cherries, a box of Bisquick, and a crackling fire, you can have cobbler in 40 minutes. Serve with Crème Fraîche Whipped Cream or, if you’re more or less roughing it, a spritz of whip from the can. Special equipment: You’ll need a heavy, 4- or 5-quart Dutch oven (with a lid) that you don’t mind setting directly over the embers.

Think baking a cake is impossible while camping? Think again. With this recipe you don’t even need cake pans—each cake is baked individually in an orange, infusing the chocolate with citrus flavor. So grab your cake batter and tinfoil and start baking!

Picture this: You’re camping, you’ve hiked, pitched your tent, and had dinner, and now it’s time for dessert, only you’re not in the mood for s’mores. We recommend campfire strawberry shortcake—all you need is Bisquick mix, a couple of pie tins, and some strawberries and whipped cream to pile on top. Game plan: If you’re homebound, bake the shortcake in a 425°F oven until done, about 10 to 12 minutes. You can also try Crème Fraîche Whipped Cream instead of standard whip.

Everybody likes lasagna, so it’s great to serve at a party or bring to a potluck. These individual lasagna roll-ups solve the problem of messing around with a spatula to hoist servings out of a baking dish. Instead of layering the ingredients en masse, you simply layer pasta strips with spinach and cheese, roll them up cinnamon bun–style, and cover with sauce. They’re easy to make, and it’s a great activity to do with the kids.

What do you get when you incorporate fresh strawberries into the tomato sauce for an otherwise classic margarita pizza recipe? A strawberita, of course. The berries are a surprising addition—they give the sauce a bright, fruity quality that tastes right at home on a pizza crust, and it’s a great way to make the best of unripe strawberries out of season.

This fun, slightly wacky twist on the chile relleno calls on everybody’s favorite savory snack food—ramen noodles—to stuff poblano chiles. Simply boil the noodles, then mix with Jack cheese, bacon, and mushrooms, and stuff away. Since the starchy element (the ramen) is already inside the peppers, you can bypass dipping the stuffed chiles in batter and frying. Just bake and enjoy.

Instant ramen noodles become an edible art installation with this dessert born out of scanning the cupboards for something crispy and sweet one late night. Spread the cooked noodles out on a baking sheet and crisp them in the oven, then drizzle with an easy white chocolate sauce. Voilà: dessert!