• New Products
• What to Do with Leftover Bread
• To Egg or Not
• Emergency Bread: A Usable Recipe
• Refer a Friend
The Prepared Pantry's
Helpful Baking Tips
In this Issue:
• New Products
• What to Do with Leftover Bread
• To Egg or Not
• Emergency Bread: A Usable Recipe
• Refer a Friend
Missed Newsletters: Retrieve Them Here
We know that some of our valued subscribers missed our newsletters for the last two weeks. We apologize. Our service provider had a glitch in their system that resulted in some failed deliveries. If you missed a newsletter in the past few weeks and would like to see them, you can do so by clicking below. To see more past newsletters, click here.
December 8 (click here)
• The Primer for the Perfect Cookie
• New Improved Yoyos
• Gifts for Under $6
• A Baker’s Gift Suggestion
December 1 (click here)
• Troubleshooting Cookies
• A Holiday Special: The Heritage Collection
• What to do with Leftover Cranberry Sauce
• Finding a Substitute for Rum
• Can I Substitute Butter for Shortening?
November 21 (click here)
• Keeping Holiday Food Safe
• Building Better Burgers
• Gift Giving with a Personal Message
• Picture Perfect Bread
New Products: Monkey Bread, a Traditional Focaccia, and Half-Paks
Rosemary Focaccia is a traditional focaccia that is light and airy with the open crumb of a classic Italian focaccia. We added a little potato flour to keep the bread fresh and moist and add a bit of sourdough-like favor.
Like the best breads, this dough is aged—this time in the refrigerator. It’s really quite convenient. Mix it and store in the refrigerator for up to three days. On the day you want to serve it, take it out, let it warm to room temperature, form the loaf, and bake. To see our new Rosemary Focaccia, click here. To see our Onion and Herb Focaccia, click here.
Monkey Bread is an old-fashioned coffeecake that has been around for a long time. Why they call it Monkey Bread, we have no idea. It was a favorite of Nancy Reagan’s and served often around the White House. This bread is easy and fun to make. Roll out the dough, cut the dough into pieces, and dip those pieces in butter and then in a cinnamon and sugar mixture. Layer the pieces in a bundt pan or tube pan, let rise, and bake. The result is an elegant pull-apart loaf. The kids will want to help you make this treat. We think it would be a great project on a snowy day between Christmas and New Year’s. Click here to see our Monkey Bread.
We had requests for packages half as large as our typical “quad-paks” so we introduced both a cookie and bread product in a “half-pak”. We put our new yoyo mix in a half-pak for $5.95. (If you missed last week’s introduction, “The Improved Yoyo--Faster, Bigger, Better”, click here.) We also introduced two one-loaf bread mixes in a half pak for $5.95. Each package contains a mix for Old-Fashioned White Bread and a mix for Old-Fashioned Honey Wheat Bread. Click here to see these products.
Leftover Bread: What to Do with it?
If you’re like most of us, over the holidays we will end with more bread than we can use. What do you do with day-old bread? May we suggest either French toast or grilled sandwiches. Either will be as good with day-old bread as fresh bread.
In addition to grilled cheese or tuna sandwiches, consider grilled jam sandwiches. Spread thick jam on your bread, top it with another slice, spray the bread with a little butter-flavored oil or your favorite spread, and cook it as you would a grilled cheese sandwich. We like to cut the sandwiches into strips for a little more elegant touch.
There’s a whole world of opportunities with French toast. French toast doesn’t always have to be sweet. We like Beth Hensperger’s recipe for baked French toast found in her wonderful book, Bread for Breakfast. Click here to see the recipe.
Refer a Friend
If you have friend or family member that you think would appreciate these newsletters, you can share our newsletter with them in three ways. (1) Send us an email and we will contact your friend with subscription information. (2) Click here to sign up your friend or (3) forward this email to a friend with the suggestion that they subscribe. Every subscriber will have a chance to win 1000 cookies (mixes to make 1,000 cookies to be exact) on Christmas Eve.
There is no cost and your friends can unsubscribe at any time with the click of a button. We do not share email addresses.
Emergency Bread: A Usable Recipe
The story that we ran on emergency bread was one of our most popular articles. (Click here if you missed that article.) While any of our bread recipes can be used in an emergency, we have a recipe that we use from time to time that we would like to share. It’s simple, kids like it, and it can be made without an oven. It’s also a bread to make on camping trips that doesn’t take a lot of trouble and you don’t have to wait for the yeast to work. When we go on youth backpacking trips, this is a staple. We served it on a dark night early last spring in the Big Hole Mountains to a group of hungry venture scouts. Served around the campfire with hot with maple syrup, this was a real hit. It’s called Indian Flatbread. For the recipe, click here. To see directions for a maple syrup that you can store or take backpacking, click here.
To Egg or Not to Egg
Our mission has been to provide premium baking mixes that are storable (so that they can be used as part of a family emergency preparedness plan) but that are so good that people want to use them everyday. As part of our philosophy, we developed mixes that did not require fresh eggs. Our reasoning was that people may not have fresh eggs in an emergency. We’re evolving. Some products just take fresh eggs to be at their best. There is nothing quite as reliable to provide a moist cake-like structure as fresh eggs. So we’re adding eggs to some of our products. We’ve accepted that in a dire emergency, folks will make those cookies without eggs and in anything less than a dire emergency, they’ll have eggs.
To this end, we have been testing our cookie and pastry formulas and have modified some of them. Some products, like the Hermits in a Bar and Caramel Crumb Cake, are perfect without fresh eggs. Some, like our new Grandma’s Oatmeal Raisin Cookies and new Almond Chocolate Chip Cookies, can be made either way. (They are more cake-like with fresh eggs.) Our new Brownie Chocolate Chip Cookies are best with eggs. If eggs are needed in any of our products, we will clearly state so in the description.
Your friends at,
The Prepared Pantry
www.preparedpantry.com