Oat Soda Bread

Heidi's Oat Soda Bread is a spinoff of her Rye Soda Bread from Super Natural Every Day.  I loved the rye version and I was actually a bit skeptical about the oat version since I liked the rye so much.  Fortunately, this is some of the best bread I have ever had and probably the best bread I have ever made myself.  I love the whole soda bread technique because it's so much quicker and easier than making a yeasted bread.  This bread makes a great sandwich bread as long as you like it by itself.  I tried it with some tomato, arugula, and whole grain mustard (also homemade, recipe from Super Natural Every Day).  I topped this bread with oat bran, since I have a whole bunch of it hanging around.  I'm really looking forward to experimenting a little more.  This bread has a lot of all-purpose flour in it, which I'm sure really helps the texture, but I would like to find a way to make it more whole-grain.  I'm looking forward to trying a spelt version too, now that I've got the basic technique down.  For someone who never makes bread because of the time commitment, this is a great option.

Carrot Muffins

As we are all well aware I love baking and I love baking whole grain muffins specifically.  These Carrot Muffins from Good to the Grain used spelt flour, which I haven't used until now.

I don't have too much to say about these, as I only ate one and the rest went in the freezer or were shared.

My carrots were too dry - the muffin was good, but a little on the dry side - my carrots must be pretty old.  I usually use a trick from Mark Bittman - cut them into carrot sticks, then fill the container with water.  This works pretty well, but when these were cut up, they went into two huge containers and I only remembered the next day to put water in, and only in one container.  Also, it was a pain to grate carrot sticks on a box grater.  Next time I will just go get more and use whole carrots - or the food processor!  What a fabulous invention.

The streusel topping on this was delicious - and although it's a LOT of extra calories I think it added a sweetness that the muffin itself was lacking.  I'd like to play around a little and find a way to add a little more sweetness to the muffin without using the streusel topping.

While I'm writing this I couldn't help but think of the Carrot Oatmeal Cookies I made for this past year's cookie exchange.  I would love to try the carrot/ginger/coconut flavor profile in a muffin form - this could be a great starting point for that recipe.  Maybe I can do a combination of this with the Ginger Peach Muffins to move toward that flavor profile.