Harvest Snack Cake

I probably should have posted this recipe a little closer to Thanksgiving (which was this past weekend), because it would have tied in with it with perfectly, but I just haven’t been very organized lately! 

Canadian Thanksgiving is a celebration to give thanks for “the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed” (source), along with all the other good things in our lives, especially our family and friends.  I love that there is a holiday specifically dedicated to celebrating the harvest and all the amazing food we are lucky to have readily available here!

I’d love to tell you that I made this cake in honour of the harvest and Thanksgiving, but I honestly didn’t make the connection until now.  Still, this harvest snack cake is a great way to celebrate fall food and flavours!

This cake is easy to make, will fill your kitchen with the smell of fall, and is full of good-for-you ingredients like carrots, apples, and walnuts.  Plus, it uses whole wheat flour and contains no butter or oil, so in my books that makes it a pretty healthy snack.  Of course, there’s still sugar in it, so I’m not putting “healthy” in the title, but I certainly don’t feel guilty about eating a piece for my snack every day!

Harvest Snack Cake

Adapted from Taste of Home

Makes about 16 squares

Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup packed brown sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

2 large eggs

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup grated carrot

3/4 cup grated apple (about 1 large apple – if one apple doesn’t reach ¾ cup, you can increase the amount of carrots so total grated carrots + apples = 1.5 cups)

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°F.  Line the bottom of a 13x9 baking pan with parchment paper and spray lightly with cooking spray.  Soak your raisins in hot water for 5-10 minutes so they won't absorb the moisture from your cake during baking (drain your raisins before using them).

Whisk together the dry ingredients (flour to ginger) in a large bowl.  In a separate medium bowl, whisk the eggs, applesauce, and vanilla.  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and fold together with a spatula until just incorporated.  Fold in the carrots, apples, raisins, and walnuts.

Spread the batter evenly into the prepared pan, and bake in preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.  Cool on a wire rack.

Note: I knew I wouldn’t eat all of this in a few days, so I kept about half of the squares in the freezer and found that they froze well.

Cinnamon Chip Coffee Cake

I hesitated to post this recipe because I know cinnamon chips aren’t available to everyone (including us Canadians), but this cake was just way too good not to share! I hope that by now, more grocery stores in the US are carrying cinnamon chips, but if not, you can always order them on Amazon (they’re worth it). I also hope that Canadian stores will start carrying these, but until then, I’ll have to keep driving to the States to get them (no I don’t drive all the way there just for cinnamon chips, but I do go shopping there once in a while and I always grab a bag of cinnamon chips when I do!) For those who are still stuck, I have seen cinnamon chips in bulk food stores before, so don’t give up hope!

This coffee cake is full of those delicious little cinnamon chips, and it’s also really dense, moist, and delicious! The original recipe name was Cinnamon Chip Applesauce Coffee Cake, but I removed the word ‘applesauce’ from my title because you really don’t taste it at all, I think it’s mainly there to add moisture to the cake. The recipe didn’t specify which kind of applesauce to use, so I guessed and bought unsweetened applesauce. Once I tasted the cake, it was very sweet already, so I was glad I used the unsweetened kind. It’s definitely sweet enough to serve as a dessert cake, but I also enjoyed it for breakfast (though next time if I plan on serving it only for breakfast, I might reduce the sugar a bit). I also left out the nuts because I was sending the cake to work with Ryan, and I always try to omit nuts when they’re not essential so that people with allergies aren’t left out. But I’m sure this would be delicious with the added crunch of some pecans so go ahead and add them in if you don’t need to worry about allergies!

This cake is so easy and quick to throw together. The hardest part is waiting for it to cool before removing it from the pan, because it smells so amazing – but it’s important to let it cool so that it will keep its shape when you invert it out of the pan. The cake is perfect on its own, but I decided to add a simple maple glaze just to dress it up a bit. However, you’re also supposed to wait for the cake to completely cool before adding a glaze, otherwise the glaze just kind of gets absorbed into the cake. I was in a hurry and so that’s exactly what happened to mine, but if you are a little more patient than me, it will look much better!

One more thing I wanted to add before I get to the recipe is that my twin sister Genevieve (from Vanilla & Spice) and I have decided to have a “Thanksgiving Week” on our blogs for the week leading up to Canadian Thanksgiving (which is next weekend already!) Every day next week, starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday, we will both be posting a different Thanksgiving recipe idea on our blogs. So be sure to come back on Sunday and follow along if you’re in need of some inspiration!

Cinnamon Chip Coffee Cake

Adapted from Hershey’s Kitchens

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup granulated sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

3/4 cup unsweetened applesauce

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1-2/3 cups (10-oz. bag) Hershey’s Cinnamon Chips

1 cup chopped pecans (optional – I left them out)

Glaze ingredients (optional):

3/4 cup icing sugar

1 teaspoon maple extract

2 tablespoons milk

Directions:

Heat oven to 350°F and lightly grease a 12-cup bundt pan.

In a large bowl, beat together the butter and sugar with an electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Mix in applesauce.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, beating until well blended. Fold in cinnamon chips, and pecans if desired.

Pour the batter into the prepared bundt pan and bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in the thickest part comes out clean. Cool 15 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack and let cool completely.

If using a glaze, mix together the icing sugar, milk, and maple extract, and drizzle over cooled cake before slicing.

Low-Fat Peach Blueberry Muffins

After recently going through two baskets of peaches and findings ways to incorporate them into breakfast, dinner, and dessert, I vowed never to peel another peach again until next summer. Well, silly me to believe I would be able to resist the baskets overflowing with juicy ripe peaches everywhere I went. I of course broke down and bought another basket, this time using them for an appetizer, snack, and drink. I hope you’re not already peached out, because this batch of recipes was just as amazing as the first!

First up I thought I’d share the snack recipe, for low-fat peach blueberry muffins. I find myself making muffins fairly often because they’re a great way to use up leftover fruit and berries, they take so little time to make and bake, they’re really easy to make low fat, and they freeze well, so I can grab one from the freezer in the morning and it will be thawed out in time for a morning or afternoon snack at school.

These are adapted from a recipe for blueberry strawberry muffins I saw on Eat Yourself Skinny by guest blogger Not Rachael Ray. The recipe only had one tablespoon of oil for 12 muffins, and incorporated other healthy ingredient substitutions like applesauce, skim milk, whole wheat flour, and ground flax seeds. If you’ve never heard of flax seeds before, don’t be scared! They're a good source of fiber and healthy fats, and they carry a lot of other nutritional benefits that make them a great addition to baked goods and smoothies (such as the extremely popular Green Monster smoothie). You should be able to find it in the bulk section of most food stores (it’s also really cheap when you buy it that way!)

I replaced the strawberries with peaches and the lemon zest with vanilla and cinnamon. The smell while these were baking was irresistible and the muffins tasted amazing warm out of the oven. They rose up really nicely, and I loved the bursts of fruit and the hint of cinnamon. I especially loved the fact that these were practically guilt-free! I did find that they were slightly drier the next day, but a quick zap in the microwave fixed that, and I have a feeling the reason for it was that I both overmixed and overbaked them - so be careful not to make those mistakes!

Hope everyone else is still enjoying peach season and the last bit of August!

Low-Fat Peach Blueberry Muffins

Adapted from Not Rachael Ray as seen on Eat Yourself Skinny

Makes 12 muffins

Ingredients:

3/4 cup skim milk
1/4 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons ground flax seed
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup fresh blueberries
3/4 cup chopped peeled ripe peaches

Directions:

Preheat oven to 400°F. Line 12 muffin cups with paper liners or spray with nonstick spray.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the wet ingredients (milk, applesauce, egg, oil, and vanilla).

In a large bowl, stir together the dry ingredients (flours, flax seed, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon).

Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Do not overmix – batter should be lumpy. Gently fold in the blueberries and peaches.

Divide batter among the 12 muffin cups, filling each about 2/3 full. Bake 20-25 minutes until golden brown then let cool on a wire rack before eating.