quinn's place

SARAH is actually my mother-in-law ❤️ but one of her many other titles, “auntie sarah,” sounds much more fitting alongside a granola recipe. 😊

i just looove how mapley and crunchy and chunky her granola is - not all loose and sandy, no way.

the lighter crunch of all the coconut flakes against the crunchier crunch of the nuts & seeds….oooh i fancy that experience.

her granola seems a little bit different every time we have it, but that’s the beauty of a recipe that’s so versatile!

sarah makes it gluten-free by omitting the oats (probably why her version is so chunky, which i adore), but i love oats so i kept them in the recipe.

i used extra coconut flakes and a little extra maple syrup to compensate for sweetness in this recipe ratio.

another idea that would be great is to use melted coconut oil instead of the olive oil - or better yet, an equal combination of both!

make sure to taste your seeds in advance for freshness - i could tell the sunflower seeds that i used were a bit funky after it was a little too late.

chopped dried cherries are great in this granola. i used chopped dates and that is also lovely. i’m not too much of a dried cranberry fan, but they would be nice, too. there are also orange flavored dried cranberries that i have a random bag of in my miscellaneous foodstuffs bin. basically - any chopped up or small dried fruit of your choosing would suffice. or leave it out altogether!

….just had an idea. if this were a “dessert granola” (a thing??) you could toss in some chocolate covered almonds, raisins, acai berries, etc after the whole mixture has completely cooled.

YUM. a bonus snack mix recipe.

also a big shout out to the passionfruit flavor of the ellenos greek yogurt - holyyyyyy moses, it has to be one of the best things i’ve ever tasted. pete is nuts for passionfruit & lilikoi like they have growing all over in hawaii. those little tangy seeds and the bright juiciness will just make you feel alive!

this ellenos yogurt is a splurge. if we have it on hand, i’ll put a scoop of plain greek yogurt on the bottom of the bowl and a small scoop of the ellenos fancy yogurt on top, and then all the toppings. i would never let us eat the whole container in one sitting unless it were, say, christmas! ha! it is a special occasion treat for us. it is sooo delicious and rich and tastes like dessert!

this is now just veering into dessert for breakfast territory. 😛

this recipe yields a ton of granola - so feel free to halve anything to make a smaller batch, or give a jar of it to a friend or neighbor. 😊

i’ve been really enjoying having it around for variety and crunch in our morning yogurt bowls.

thank you to my sweet MIL, sarah, for sharing this with me!

Sarah’s Coconut Granola

Makes about 2 Quarts

Total Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

Ingredients:

2 cups oats
1 cup raw pepitas, hulled pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup hulled sunflower seeds (taste for freshness!)
1 1/4 cup walnuts or pecans, or a mixture of both, chopped
1 1/2 cups unsweetened coconut flakes
1 - 2 tsp. kosher salt, to taste
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil or melted coconut oil, or a mixture of both
2/3 cup pure maple syrup
1/2 cup chopped dates, dried cherries or cranberries
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 - 2 tsp. vanilla extract

Instructions-

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Line a large rimmed sheet tray with parchment or a silicone liner.

Gather and prepare all ingredients and combine in a large bowl until evenly coated with maple syrup and the oils. Add any extra salt to taste.

Evenly spread the granola across the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 1 hour, tossing the granola every 15 minutes or so. Bake for an additional 10-15 minutes until all the components are evenly golden. Watch carefully for any burning during the last 5 minutes.

Remove from oven and cool completely. Store in glass jars or quart containers at room temperature.

Enjoy as a snack, on yogurt bowls, ice cream, oatmeal, with fruit, etc!

this is all to say - please don’t be too hard on yourself when taking on big baking or cooking projects. i worry for people who are so scared that something won’t turn out perfectly that they won’t even make an attempt at a recipe. you must learn somehow!

i cook and bake frequently, and do not consider myself an advanced cook or baker whatsoever - there is still so so so much endless learning to be learned.

[ps. i know the title of this post is grammatically incorrect, but it rings much better than writing ‘badly’ and ‘well.’ (ok, DAD?!) 😜]

i’ve made a version of babka once before - but here’s how this loaf went down:

where i went right:

the brioche dough turned out perfectly! i followed the ‘chocolate krantz cakes’ recipe in yotam ottolenghi’s jerusalem cookbook and cut the recipe in half as to make only 1 loaf. not sure why the written recipe yields 2 separate loaves. because 2 is more than 1, i suppose.
i finished the whole process even though i knew i’d messed up a few key things along the way.
it tasted good!

where i went wrong:

i did not use high-quality chocolate, like a goon. i made this on a snow day (cozy!) and did not want to venture out to buy nice chocolate bars, so i used a combination of semi-sweet chocolate chips and cocoa powder. i do not recommend this. it looks decent after melting, but once i added the powdered sugar, it became a bit thick and crumbly. you can really tell once i started twisting my goofed up braids that the chocolate quality was not up to par.
since i halved the original recipe, i was supposed to adjust this part to roll up only ONE large dough log with chocolate spread inside (like a cinnamon roll). instead, i kept following the original recipe instructions and made 2 separate logs, sliced each of them in half vertically, yielding 4 long pieces to be braided into my desired single log loaf. do you follow? i had gone too far with the final pieces to be braided and decided that i would just braid all 4 pieces somehow into one dense loaf. i’m not sophisticated enough to maneuver a 4-stranded braid, but it came together, kinda.
keyword: dense. brioche is supposed to be fluffy and a bit airy. the tightness of the 4 pieces braided together did not allow the loaf to rise again - i think it was all too tightly compacted and twisted together. the final babka loaf should have been significantly taller after baking.

here’s where you can really see that chocolate i used was not high-quality. it should be much smoother and less chONky looking.

but - i know exactly where i went wrong, what i learned from this process, and how i would approach it differently the next time i make a babka recipe.

and that, my friends, is the beauty of failure. failures are just building blocks of knowledge.

i wouldn’t even call this a “failure,” because it still tasted very good, just dense - we ate the whole thing on a snowy weekend. how glorious is that?