Tuesday Twister: Highs & Lows

I tried several different recipes this week.  Some were hits, and some were misses!  I tried a recipe for buckwheat flour pancakes.  Most buckwheat pancake recipes I have seen use a mixture of buckwheat and wheat flours, but this was all buckwheat.  Have you seen buckwheat flour before?  When it was in the soaking stage it looked like refried black beans.  Buckwheat has a very strong flavor, somewhat "earthy" I guess you could say.  It was way too strong for us.  I even tried adding syrup and vanilla to the batter, but this was definitely not for us. 

I also made a homemade syrup to stretch our real maple syrup, using this recipe here.  I adjusted the recipe a little- I only used 1 cup of (turbinado) sugar to 1 cup of water, plus 1/4 cup of honey, and a tablespoon of maple extract.  I ended up with about 1 1/2 cups of a nice syrup that I mixed with a slightly larger amount of maple syrup.  100% pure maple syrup is still the better choice health wise, but this is a budget-friendlier compromise.

Another first for me was making homemade chocolate chips.  My son was begging for chocolate chip cookies. However, I learned that homemade chocolate chips (chunks) can not be used in chocolate chip cookies!  Keep in mind that the homemade chocolate chunks were made only of cocoa, sugar, and butter/coconut oil.  I used the soaked oatmeal cookie recipe, here they are before going in the oven:

And, this is what they looked like coming out of the oven- my son wouldn't even try them.  Poor guy!  All that oil from the chocolate just melted like crazy & made these a crumbly mess.  Better keep the homemade chocolate for things like no-bake granola bars.

So let's finish with some good news, because that's how I always like it!  Friday was my birthday and my daughter (age 11) knows that my favorite breakfast is cream cheese stuffed french toast.  I helped her out by setting some yogurt to drain the night before so she had yogurt "cream cheese" to work with in the morning.  Daddy made us some french toast and then she sandwiched mine with some cream cheese and blueberries, top it off with maple syrup & it was a great birthday breakfast!

I have more recipes to share with you this week.   Next I'll share my birthday cake: a "soaked" carrot yeast cake adventure!

This post is a part of Tuesday Twister at GNOWFGLINS.

Enjoy!
Lisa