Scones for the Win!

I know. January 16th and it's only my second post of the year. Lame. Even though I haven't been in school, I've been working 40 hours a week and simply not taking my camera into the kitchen when I make things. However a few delicious things have come out of our itty bitty kitchen in the past week or so:

Thanksgiving Detox Soup
Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Bites
lots of Yogurt Flatbreads
& BBQ Veggie Chili

The recipe I have for you today was made at my parents house a few weeks ago. But it was so good that even though it's out of date I'm going to share it anyway.

I've never been a big scone person. They're always pretty dry. Let's be honest: if I'm going to treat myself, I'm going to make a milkshake out of Peanut Butter Cookie Dough Bites and Trader Joe's french vanilla ice cream (not that Kyle and I did that last weekend or anything). But these aren't just any scones. These scones are pumpkin, whole wheat, AND vegan.

And tasty enough that I may have survived on them for two days when I came back to an empty kitchen in Pittsburgh.

I came across the recipe, here. These were created the same day as the previous baking adventure. Aka- Molly took all the sweet pics. Enjoy!

This is step (the whole - mixing dough by hand thing) that is always the hardest. This go round I did learn the lesson that it should be done with a pastry cutter. I also was able to take advantage of having a boy in the kitchen :)

The rolling of the dough into circles/ cutting it into quarters part was by and far my favorite part. Not really sure why..

Then we made a tasty glaze:

And viola! Best breakfast, lunch, desert any/all time of the day snack. 

Semi Healthy Baking?

It's possible, believe it or not. Given the amount of butter and sugar that most of my recipes have been calling for lately, I think this was necessarily. Mike suggested we make zucchini bread and I was all about it (I hadn't made a cake-y bread in ages). When I told Molly what was going down she volunteered to document (read: the pictures for this post are awesome).

First: After a lot for google and foodgawker searches, we settled on this recipe. They're pretty healthy all-in-all. There is some white flour, but we did replace the oil with applesauce. We added a little more chocolate (the bar we bought was 4.25 oz) and made a bunch of muffins instead of bread and some muffins.

Ingredients:

Mike shredded the zucchini:

Wet Ingredients

Chocolate!

Into the super-greased muffin tins (yes, one of the pans is for giant muffins - just because Molly found it in the cabinet)

And in significantly less than the time listed in the recipe later:

Unfortunately they came out a little tough. 50 minutes was way too long for muffins. If Mike hadn't made a point to check them, they definitely would have been burned to a crisp. 

I was much happier with the recipe we made after this, but I'll save that for the next post.

Happy 2012!!