First off, a yummy breakfast with a recipe from Chocolate and Zucchini. This is the post with the recipe that Clotilde calls Oatmeal Breakfast Clafoutis. Anyways, I of course do not follow it absolutely exactly. I always halve the recipe and make it in an 8 inch round cake pan. I also don't think of it as Clafoutis, which really has no meaning to me, but as Breakfast Cake. It's a cake I can eat copious amounts of for breakfast without feeling that I'm eating unhealthily.
This time I didn't use any dried fruit and put in a chopped banana and a chopped nectarine. I also didn't use nuts and only had about a cup of oatmeal left, so I put in some crushed bran flakes . . . a bit odd i know. The texture seemed right on the first few pieces with a nice crust on the edge that I quite like. However, either because there wasn't enough oatmeal or because of the fresh fruit mixed in, it was a bit mushy in places. This hasn't been a problem on previous occasions making this recipe. I also reduced the sugar a little bit as I don't like my food too sweet. Probably the main thing that kept my creation from being really good was that the nectarine was a dud, as was the other one I bought. It tasted like. . . nothing. It was a disappointment but not surprising. Anyways, I still like to have cake for breakfast, here's what it looked like fresh from the oven:
Next up, oatmeal cookies. I really like oatmeal cookies. There's just something about the oatmeal flavour in a cookie that's really comforting and delicious. In the past, I've made them with raisins or chocolate chips. Shockingly, raisins make better oatmeal cookies than chocolate chips, they just work perfectly with their sweet chewiness.Anyways, I found the recipe for these on David Lebovitz's site. I'd never tried any of the recipes he posts, but he is all about dessert, so the cookie recipes he posts must be good. The recipe, from a cookbook by Nick Malgieri, is low fat with some apple sauce in the base, which intrigued me. I've had success with applesauce to moisten muffins, so why not cookies. I did not alter the recipe aside from using dark brown sugar in place of light brown sugar and cooking some of the cookies on an unlined, ungreased, new, nonstick cookie sheet (which caused no problems).
I don't have any electric beaters, so creaming the butter and sugar with a fork and a wooden spoon was a bit of work. But it was so worth it to create this luscious batter:
Even the cooking time for that batter given in the recipe was very accurate. (I often find recommended baking times for cookies are too long). This is what the finished product looked like:
If those don't look good to you, why?
Anyways, I sample a couple last night and they were quite good. I brought them to the Campus Community Garden this morning and people said they were quite good. (People were impressed that I made them. Hey, they're just cookies. But if you can impress people that way. . .) Nobody guessed that they were low fat either with their desirable chewy, moist texture. I also brought some to the Edmonton Gay Pride Parade this afternoon, which was a good time except when it poured rain. My friends quite liked them and almost fought over the last one I brought.
This recipe is a definite keeper. For the record, I got 31 cookies out of it, although the last 3 were rather large.
