Fresh Cherry Oat Crumble

Fresh cherry & oatmeal crumble, made with backyard cherries! Our cherries were not very sweet, so adjust the sugar as needed.

Coconut oil can be substituted for the butter, and vanilla extract can be used if you don't have almond extract.

2 Cups rolled oats, divided

1/2 Cup All Purpose Flour

1/2 Tablespoon Baking Powder

1/8 teaspoon sea salt

1/3 Cup White Sugar

1/4 Cup Light Brown Sugar

1/2 Cup Unsalted Butter, cubed

1 Large egg

1/4 Cup Sliced Almonds

*

4 Cups Fresh Cherries, pitted

1 1/3 Cup White Sugar

1 Teaspoon Lemon Juice

1/4 teaspoon Almond Extract

2 Tablespoons Corn Starch

*

Generously grease a 9 inch square pan with butter, oil, or cooking spray.  Preheat oven to 350° F.

Prepare the cherries. Add 1 1/3 Cup white sugar to the washed and pitted cherries to coat them. Add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to prevent browning. (Don't add the almond extract or cornstarch yet.) Set aside.

In a blender or food processor, pulverized 1 1/2 Cups oats into a coarse flour. (Set aside the remaining 1/2 Cup oats.) Add AP flour, baking powder, and salt. If using a blender, transfer the dry mixture into a bowl or mixer.

Add 1/3 Cup white sugar and 1/4 Cup light brown sugar. Mix to incorporate. Add 1/2 Cup cubed butter and mix or stir with a spatula until the butter has blended and the mixture is a sandy texture. Stir in the egg.

Press 2/3 of the mixture into the bottom of the pan.

Stir the 1/4 teaspoon almond extract and 2 Tablespoons cornstarch into the cherries. Spoon the cherry mixture into the pan, keeping most of the syrupy juice away from the edges to avoid the dessert sticking to the sides of the pan.

To the remaining oat & butter crumble, add the 1/2 Cup oats that had been set aside, plus 1/4 Cup sliced almonds. Stir together. Pour the crumble loosely on top of the cherries in an even layer, allowing a lot of texture. This will make a crunchy top as it bakes.

Baked at 350°F for 30 minutes. Allow to cool for at least 15 minutes before cutting. Enjoy warm or after it has cooled!

#😋

Spiced Sweet Potato Bundt Cake with Brown Sugar Center

Here's another case of not having the ingredients of a recipe on hand, little time and less money, and still wanting to have a cake to eat. Obviously, if you have lots of choices, you can have a rich, succulent cake. The original recipe for this one loaded up with eggs and butter.

Drawing on past success with substitutions, I got this sweet darling.

All bundled up.

This recipe is for a large (12 cup) bundt, but I opted to used a small bundt pan and bake off the extra in a loaf pan, because I wanted a shorter bake time. With all the substitutions, I knew it was going to be a very wet batter.

Cake ingredients
2 3/4 cups All Purpose Flour
2 teaspoons Baking Soda
1 teaspoon Salt
1 Tablespoon Ground Cinnamon
1 teaspoon Ground Ginger

1/3 cup Coconut Oil
1 1/2 cups Granulated Sugar
1/3 cup Mayonnaise
1/3 cup Apple Sauce
2 Tablespoons Plain Yogurt (optional)
2 small Eggs
1 teaspoon Vanilla Extract
15 ounces of cooked sweet potato

Filling
 2 Tablespoons coconut oil (or butter)
1/2 Cup firmly packed Brown Sugar
1/8 teaspoon Ground Cardamom

Drizzle (make when cake has cooled)

1 1/2 cups Powdered Sugar, sifted
2 Tablespoons milk

If you haven't cooked your sweet potatoes yet, start with that. It sounds obvious, but if you are using fresh sweet potato instead of canned, you need to cook them first. I got tiny ones, none thicker than 2 inches across, so I boiled them whole with skins on for 30 minutes. They are easy to peel once cooked and cooled down enough to handle.

If you are using bigger ones, peel and cut into 2 inch cubes.

Drain all water from the cooked sweet potato and allow it to cool. Mash them smooth. You don't want your eggs to cook when you mix the wet ingredients together.

Preheat your oven to 350° F.

Grease and flour your pan(s).

Mix the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and ginger together in a bowl and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together coconut oil and sugar. Gently stir in the mayonnaise, applesauce, yogurt until incorporated. Beat your eggs and fold them in. You can do all this by hand, but if using a beater, mix on low speed. Add in the mashed sweet potato.

Gradually fold in the dry ingredients until fully incorporated.

Fill the bundt pan 1/3 full with the batter. Sprinkle in 1/2 of the brown sugar filling, careful not to let it touch the sides of the pan (or it will carmelize and stick). Add more batter until the pan is 2/3 full.

Pour 1/2 the excess batter into your 2nd pan, layer with the remaining filling and remaining batter.

Bake for 45 minutes. Check with a bamboo skewer. If it's still goopy, and not because of the filling, turn the oven down to 300 and let it bake 10 more minutes before checking again.

Leave it in the pan, on a wire rack or cool surface, for 30 minutes. Then invert to de-pan and let it cool completely before drizzling with the glaze.

To get a nice, porcelain white glaze, make sure to use as little liquid as possible, use milk, and pour it over cool cake. If you want to skip the glaze, you can dust the top with cinnamon or leave it plain.

Sweet and delicious! The sweet potato made orange flecks, like carrot cake, and had the charm of pumpkin bread while still having its own identity.

As I mentioned, the recipe I started from used four large eggs, sour cream, and a cup of butter, just in the cake. Rich, but I was going to eat those eggs for breakfast. Additionally, I had small, local eggs, so I would have had to use five or six.

Mayo, especially when the best-before date is looming, makes a good understudy for eggs-and-oil in baking. This was, in fact, national brand olive oil mayonnaise, believe it or not. Applesauce can be a tricky substitute for butter, but it does work. In this case, the sweetness of the applesauce and the sweet potato (instead of canned pumpkin) meant I could hold back on some of the granulated sugar, too.

Breakfast Biscuits

This morning, I made biscuits to use up half a pint jar of homemade applesauce. The applesauce had been a test where I cooked the apples without the honey first, then added the honey after twenty minutes. It came out runny, no structure, just like you'd expect from boiled apples, really.

It had cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, clove, and nutmeg in it. The jar has been open since before Christmas and I already boiled it again once. I figured it would be fine if cooked into something.

So what do you do with little motivation, a need for breakfast, and a cup of thin apple sauce? Me, I make biscuits. Now, when I say biscuits, I mean drop biscuits, scones, bannock -- whatever you want to call it. They are essentially all the same thing:
2 Cups of flour
2 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda
1 teaspoon of salt
1/3 Cup of fat
3/4 Cup dairy (or any wet thing)
and whatever you want to add in, such as spices or cheese.

Today I used butter, apple sauce, and a dollop (seriously, did you think I measured?) of thin vanilla yogurt.

Drop biscuits are just a thing you learn to do. The first day I successfully made roll out biscuits, only a few years ago, I felt the achievement. I can still do roll out biscuits, but when I do, I mostly stick to classic recipe. Drop biscuits are far more forgiving. If you make them too dry, you can add a spritz of milk or water to the dough and still be able to eat them once baked. If you make them too wet, it's not a good idea to add flour, but you could if you couldn't bake them as is. Heck, if they're really too wet, you have waffle batter or pancake batter missing eggs. If you put sugar for the salt, or ginger powder instead of cinnamon, you're still probably OK. (But next time, sniff your spices, OK?)

This morning, because I was using spiced apple as the dominant flavor, I chose to make the biscuits with butter. Apples and butter are meant to be together. I cut the butter into slivers and then cut it into the flour with my hands. This isn't pastry. Fluffy flour and softened butter feel nice to manipulate. (As will all cooking, make sure your hands are washed and clean under the fingernails.) I had forgotten the leavening and salt, which should go in with all the other dry ingredients, so before the butter was incorporated, I put those in and stirred it up.

Lumpy butter still works, but you always get a better result if you have as close to a sandy texture as reasonable. If you want to add sugar, put it in with the flour. (I believe this is "scone method." As opposed to "muffin method," where the sugar is creamed with fat and eggs, and the dry is added secondary.) I forgot the sugar, too -- but the apples and yogurt were sweet enough.

Once the butter, flour, pink Himalayan salt, and baking soda were incorporated, I poured in some yogurt, around 2 tablespoons. Then in went the spiced apple sauce.

It's important not to overwork biscuit dough. Don't stir it. Don't knead it like pizza dough. You don't want chewy-making gluten to build up. Be gentle with the dough. Fold it in the mixing bowl (yes, I use a bowl -- and still get flour everywhere) like a big fluffy goose down comforter.

A well-preheated oven at 475 ° Fahrenheit, and 12 minutes later, breakfast!

They came out delicious, in case you are wondering. Fluffy, nicely flavored, just a hint of sweetness.

Honey Granola with Pumpkin Pie Spice

Honey Granola with Pumpkin Pie Spice

4 C rolled oats (not quick oats)
1 Cup nuts (whole or pieces) (suggested: almonds, pecans, walnuts, filberts, pumpkin seeds)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1/2 tsp pumpkin pie spice (or 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon, pinch of nutmeg, pinch of clove)

1/4 Cup vegetable oil
1/4 Cup washed cane sugar (white sugar)
1/2 teaspoon molasses
1/2 Cup honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (optional)
1 1/2 Cups raisins and/or other dried fruit (added while cooling)

Preheat oven to 300° F. Lightly grease a 13" x 9" pan with deep sides.

Mix oats, salt, and spices in a bowl and set aside.

In a saucepan, combine oil, sugar, molasses, and honey. Warm until incorporated. (Do not boil.) Stir in the vanilla extract.

Carefully pour the warm honey mixture over the oat mixture and fold it in.  Spread the combination into your pan.

Bake for 40 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes. Check in the last 5 minutes because oven times vary.
When it is done and cooling, stir in the dried fruit. Scrape the granola loose from the pan while warm; this will reduce the amount of sticking to the pan when cool. Allow it to cool completely before storing in an air-tight container. It will keep at room temperature for up to one week.

If you like clusters, I recommend using baking parchment instead of greasing the pan. That will allow you to leave the mix until completely cool, which is how you get clusters. Otherwise, when you scrape the granola loose, you break the granola into a looser, muesli-like cereal. Increase the sugar by 1/4 Cup and decrease the honey by the same amount for a harder, sweeter granola.

Granola is one of those things that is expensive when store-bought, but can be marvelously cheap if you make it yourself -- especially if you are using up ingredients on hand. It is one of those straightforward recipes that work consistently, as long as you follow the easy instructions. Stirring every 10 minutes is vital, or else the granola will not toast evenly, and it will burn instead.

It's a superb use for crystalized honey. Honey is often expensive these days, but if you have a Farmers Market, there is often a honey vendor who sells better honey than the supermarket for a lower price. If you have a Trader Joe's store near you, their mesquite honey is perfectly suitable and as low as $10 for a 3 pound container.

Have you noticed that when you buy a bottle of molasses for holiday gingerbread, you still have most of a bottle well past New Years? Other granola recipes ask for brown sugar, but I use my brown sugar up on a regular basis. Regular sugar and molasses take the place of brown sugar in this recipe. (Brown sugar is sugar where the molasses has been returned to it after the first stages of refining.)

Pumpkin pie spice is another one of those things that shows up around the holidays but has limited use, unless you like a lot of things to taste like pumpkin pie. If you have it, it's a good shortcut for this recipe. If not, cinnamon is the vital spice in this recipe. Clove, nutmeg, ground ginger, and even cardamom are merely accents.

Oats can be purchased from the bulk section of grocery stores and co-ops for lowest cost. I usually have oats on hand, but I'm not good about eating oatmeal often enough to use my oats up fast. I'm a big fan of granola, which is full of crunchy goodness, spice, and sweet. I first decided to try my hand at granola because I was concerned that my oats had been hanging around too long, and might be getting a little stale. I had some nuts in shells left over from holiday nuts, and raisins that had been forgotten until they lost all plumpness.

I made this batch with "plumasins," little pieces of dried plum. Previous batches had dried apricots that I chopped into fine pieces. If you aren't a fan of raisins, there are a lot of options. I may try drying some backyard tree apples to use in granola later.

Chickpea Popovers stuffed with Curry Chicken Salad

For the chicken salad:

2 Cups of roasted chicken, chopped

1/2 Cup plain yogurt, or mayonnaise if preferred

2 TBL curry powder

1 Cup roasted, salted cashews

1/4 Cup golden raisins

1/4 Cup cranberries

 cilantro leaves for garnish (optional)

For the popovers:

1 Cup chickpea (besan) flour

1/2 tsp salt

3 eggs (I use medium sized eggs)

1 Cup milk

1 tsp olive oil

1/4 tsp garlic granules

1/4 tsp black pepper

spritz of lemon juice (about 1/8 tsp)

Jumbo (6 muffin) muffin tin

Cooking spray

Mix all ingredients except cilantro for the chicken salad together. Set aside. If possible, prepare the chicken salad in advance. The flavors of the spices come out more fully after a day. 

Preheat oven to 450.

In a separate bowl, gently wisk together all in ingredients for the popovers until a smooth batter forms. Grease the muffin pan; cooking spray makes this easy. Pour the batter equally into each of the muffin cups, about halfway. 

Bake at 450 for 20 minutes. Then lower the heat to 350 and continue baking for 15 more minutes. Total bake time is 35 minutes.

Pop popovers out of the pan while still hot. Turn so that the side with a depression is up, and fill the "bowl" with curry chicken salad. Garnish with cilantro.

Lemon Lavender Cake with Lemon Icing

This is an easy recipe that uses plain, non-fat yogurt and safflower oil, with just a little butter to fill out the flavor notes. I used culinary lavender from Lost Mountain Lavender Farm in Sequim, Washington. If you are a fan of lavender, you can experience the best-smelling festival around: the Sequim Lavender Festival, which happens each year in July.

Though our lavender is spectacular here in Washington, our citrus is less  wonderful. For this reason, I had something called "volcano lemon burst" on hand instead of actual lemon. Volcano Lemon Burst comes in a plastic lemon-shaped container; it's a blend of water, lemon juice, and lemon oil. Since I didn't have any lemon zest or lemon oil for this recipe, it was a good choice for this cake. You could use fresh lemon and its zest, if you have them.

The other ingredients are available year-round, allowing a taste of summer any time the winter blues get to you.

Cake Ingredients:

1 TBL unsalted butter

1/4 C oil

1 C white sugar

2 medium eggs

½ tsp vanilla extract

2 C all purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

½  tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

1 C plain yogurt

1 ½ TBL dried lavender flowers

¼ C lemon juice

Preheat oven to 350. Grease and flour a 12 Cup bundt pan.

Cream butter, oil, and sugar. Add in eggs and beat until mixed, about 1 minute.

Mix dry ingredients except for the lavender. Add the dry mixture into the oil-sugar mixture, alternately with yogurt. Do not overmix. Fold in lemon juice and the lavender.

Bake for 1hour, or until a toothpick comes out clean. Allow the cake to cool completely before removing it from the pan. When cool, drizzle on the glaze. (See recipe below.)

If you cover the cake (such as putting it in a cake carrier or covered container) before the icing sets completely, the icing will wrinkle slightly.

     

Lemon sugar glaze

For the sugar glaze:

2 cups powdered sugar, sifted

2 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon lemon juice

A pinch of dried lavender flowers

Prepare the glaze:

Combine the powdered sugar, milk and lemon juice in a small bowl. Stir with a rubber spatula until the glaze is smooth and of drizzling consistency. Spoon the glaze over the top of each slightly cooled cake, letting some run down unevenly on the sides. Sprinkle the lavender decoratively over the tops of the glaze and serve.

Gruyere & Applesauce biscuits

2 C all purpose flour
2 1/2 TBL baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/3 C non-hydrogenated shortening
small knob of gruyere, about 3 TBL


1 C small curd cottage cheese (including separated whey)
1/4 C unsweetened applesauce

Preheat oven to 450F.

Combine flour, b. powder, & salt. Mix thoroughly. Cut in shortening until you create a sandy consistency. Slice the gruyere into small pieces and blend in.thoroughly. You can do this with your hands.

Add cottage cheese and applesauce. Mix in, allow to rest 5 minutes if it looks dry. Knead to incorporate the dough into a ball, shape into a log, and slice into 6 pieces. Bake for 15 minutes for a golden color.

The Pastry Crust that Works

Here is the pastry crust recipe from Great American Home Baking: Chicken Pot Pie. It's usually successful when made exactly to recipe. I think it would also work with shortening instead of butter. It can be made several days ahead as long as it is well sealed in the refrigerator against air.

1 1/2 Cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/3 Cup chilled butter, cut into pieces
1 large egg
2-3 Tablespoons ice water

To prepare pastry, in a medium bowl, mix together flour and salt. Using a pastry blender or 2 knives, cut butter into flour until course crumbs form.

In a small bowl, beat together egg and water. Add to the flour mixture. Mix lightly until a soft dough forms. Shape into a disk, wrap in plastic wrap, and chill in the refrigerator for 1 hour.

On a lightly floured surface, using a lightly floured rolling pin, roll out the pastry to fit your dish. Bake at 400 F. (This is from a pot pie recipe with a 25-30 minute bake time.)

Mayonnaise Chocolate Cookies

I don't think I've made the Tollhouse recipe for chocolate chip cookies as written in decades. Really. It's a good jumping off point, and can be found on the back of any Nestle morsels package:

2 1/4 Cup flour
1 C (2 Sticks) of butter
3/4 C brown sugar
3/4 C white sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 C chocolate morsels
1 C chopped nuts

Which is too much sugar and too much salt, even when using unsalted butter. Bleh. It's a recipe to cover up the inferior quality of Nestle chocolate chips. Like all too-many-tools recipes, it asks you to cream the butter with a mixer, yada yada. Too many bowls.

In its most primitive state, this is a One Bowl recipe that can be made with a spoon or hard spatula, half the sugar, and allowed to wild forage for other goodies in your pantry.

Today I almost stuck to the recipe. I was intending to make it to spec. Nevertheless, as I was setting out the ingredients, I noticed the cocoa powder. As I was getting out the beater I found myself thinking about how the mayonnaise in mayo chocolate cake is, because of the vinegar, supposed to bring out the chocolate. (I was recently reading mayo cake recipes because I have a store brand -- Kroger -- mayonnaise that is just awful. It is not, as intended, putting me off mayo so much as making me want the good stuff.)

You might guess what happened next. No? I substituted half the butter, one stick, for 1/2 C of mayo. I reduced the eggs to 1. I added 1/2 C of cocoa. I reduced the sugar to 1/2 C white + 3/4 C brown sugar. I reduced the salt to 1/2 tsp, but I should have left it out altogether because my butter and mayo both had salt. I forgot about the salt in the mayonnaise.

The chocolate, chocolate chip, pecan and white chip cookies came out well. They were slightly drier than ideal; that can be fixed by reducing the flour by that 1/4 C, making the dry 2 C flour + 1/2 cocoa. The dough was very nice, fluffy, not too sticky but with good cohesiveness. The slightly over-salted flavor of the raw dough baked out so it was fine in cookie form. Warm from the oven, they had a brownie-like flavor but were cookie-firm. Cooled, they are an almost perfect cookie. The dryness promotes enjoyment with a glass of milk.

Mayonnaise for the win -- who knew?

Scotch, Raisin, & Banana Muffins with Oatmeal-Pecan Crumble Topping

3 C cut up ripe bananas
1/2 tsp ground Ginger
pinch of ground Clove
2 TBL butter
2 TBL corn oil
1 TBL Scotch
1/2 Sugar (regular white cane sugar)
2 Eggs
1 1/2 C All Purpose Flour
2 tsp Baking Powder
1/4 tsp Baking Soda
2 TBL Cinnamon
1/3 C raisins

1/4 C Rolled Oats
1/3 C Pecans
1 TBL oil+butter+sugar mixture (remaining in the bowl)
pinch of salt

There are more elegant ways to do this, without using as many vessels, but this is how I made these muffins today. I had a hankering for some morning baked goods. These were the ingredients on hand. The bananas were frozen; when they get too ripe to eat, I save them in the freezer for banana bread, and experience has taught me that cutting them up first makes them thaw out faster, which makes them easier to use. Because they were frozen, I popped the icy lump of them into a small saucepan, covered them, and put the flame on very low. In about 5 minutes, they were steaming enough to break apart. I stirred them (this consisted of me giving the saucepan a shake every now and again) until they were warm, not hot. Remove from heat. This is very important because if the wet ingredients are hot, they will make scrambled eggs out of your eggs. Yuck. Add the ginger & clove at any point.

I preheated the oven to 350 F. In my steel mixing bowl, I put the butter and oil and popped that into the oven while it was warming, to melt the butter. Now, the bowl will be hot even before the butter melts completely, so remove the bowl from the oven once the butter looks soft. Stir the butter and oil together. Why oil? Using oil cuts down on the cholesterol (and cost), and corn oil adds another sweet flavor into the medley. Stir in the sugar. In this case, I specifically cut down the amount of sugar from my usual recipe because I wanted to use the white sugar I had on hand. (Otherwise, I would use 3/4 C honey or loose brown sugar.)

Pour the butter+oil+sugar mixture into the bananas. Leave about 1 TBL in the bowl for the crumble topping. Add bourbon into the banana, etc. mixture.

Toss the oats and pecans together in the steel bowl that has the remaining sugar mixture until you have a nicely coated crumble. Scrape into a dish and set aside.

Move the saucepan mixture into the bowl. Wisk the eggs separatedly and fold into the mixture.  Add the flour in a half cup at a time, alternating with the remaining ingredients: flour, then powder, soda, and cinnamon; flour, then raisins; finish with flour. You want to mix the raisins into the flour because this helps them grab their place in the batter and stay distributed. Like the cinnamon it also distributes the flavors throughout better than mixing all the flavors into the wet ingredients.

Pour into a tray for large muffins (6 muffin tray). My batch was a little too much batter for one pan, and I cooked off the rest in a small pyrex. Top with crumble. Bake 25 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Honey, Almonds, Dried Figs, Dried Apricots, and Two Colors of Raisins

The timer is on its final 10 minutes. I've peaked at the baking, and I think it will be done at the projected time.

Wouldn't it be great to stick to the rule of dessert only once a week? It's unlikely. I've already had an oatmeal raisin cookie today (from Little Ray's Bakery, all natural). After dinner I had a craving for something sweet, but not sugary, yet not one of the deliciously perfect gala apples of which I still have two. I wanted something like the baked honey-date-butter-phyllo creation I made that one time a few years back. I didn't want anything that was only at its best while still freshly made, like a scone.

Using a coffee cake recipe as a guideline, I came up with this:

Batter
 1/3 Cup light brown sugar (tightly packed)
2 Tbl butter, cold
1/3 C oil (Canola, because that's what I had on hand)
1 egg
1/2 C plain yogurt (Greek style, in this case)

1 C All Purpose Flour
1 tsp Baking Powder
pinch of salt
pinch of ground Cloves
1/4 tsp ground Ginger (lackluster stuff)
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Fruit & Nut filling
Chopped dried figs, golden raisins, and Thompson raisins simmered in 1/4 of black tea with a cinnamon stick
Chopped dried Apricots
Whole dry roasted, unsalted Almonds
About 1/3 C (a little more than) Honey. (Mesquite honey from Trader Joe's, in this case.)

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Mix dry ingredients and set aside.
3. Cut the butter into very small cubes and cream into the brown sugar with the oil. I did this by hand.
4. Mix in the egg. Don't overwork it.
5. Mix in the yogurt.
6. Fold in the dry mix, adding a third of the dry at a time while you blend it with the wet.
7. Prepare the baking dish. I used an 8" cake round lined with a circle of parchment.
8. Spoon half of the batter into the pan. It will not cover the bottom layer.
9. Drizzle on half the honey.
10. Spoon on the soaked fruit (no extra liquid)
11. Drizzle on the remaining honey.
12. Layer the apricots and almonds.
13. Top with the remaining batter. Using a rubber spatula, shaped the sides so that you have a dome of unbaked goodness.
14. Bake for 35 minutes. Allow to cool enough to remove from the pan, but serve warm.

I love tea and fruit together, poaching fruit with tea or, as in this case, softening hard, dried fruit to make a soft filling. Black tea adds a subtle flavor. I just used a tea bag that had already been steeped once for a cuppa.

Yogurt is awesome in places where sweet recipes usually ask for heavy cream or sour cream. It's a good way to use yogurt that you don't want to eat, because you have too much of it, or it's been open for a while, or it just crossed the expiry date. (Look at me, using non-American words. Snark not.) Yogurt is less expensive than sour cream and far less expensive than heavy cream. I find it works well in scones, waffles, and coffee cakes (anything levened with baking soda).

Most batter cake recipes that I have made that call for butter work just as well with oil. I like to put a couple of tablespoons of butter to get some of butters oomph. Mixing fats creates all kinds of rewarding results in flavor and texture. Roll out biscuits and cookies have to be made with solid fat, and if it calls for shortening, don't think you can get away with butter. If you make a biscuit recipe with oil, you get a fluffy scone or bannock. Make it savory with cheese, herbs, and olive oil and you have a good thing.