What Did You Eat?

Bread Baking Babes: Dark Onion Rye

I thought I would have to pass on this month's recipe, which was created by our very own Breadchick, who is the host for this month's challenge.  But, decided that it wouldn't be too hard, because I already had starter in the fridge, and my Mixmaster would do all the hard work.  Plus, several of the Babes had baked test runs, and I could take advantage of their tips.  And, how could I skip making rye bread?  At one time, I made it several times a month, so it was too tempting to pass this up.  Mary's recipe contains a small amount of onions in the starter, which I've never used before when I made rye bread.  I would have used fresh onions, but decided it would be easier to use some Penzeys dried onions lurking in my pantry.  I liked this bread very much, it makes great sandwiches.  Next time, I'll use fresh onions, as my dried onions were a bit old, so the flavor was muted.

The title of the bread is Dark Onion RYe.  However, the molasses I used wasn't the darkest variety, and the color of the bread was a tad light--but the great taste trumped that problem.

Bread Baking Buddies!

Note:  If you sent me an e-mail with a link to your site about the Poilane-Style Miche, and you aren't listed below, please leave it in the comment section below and I'll add you. My server has been crashing  as I try to open mail or write this post on Typepad!

Despite a formidable looking recipe, our valiant Bread Baking Buddies decided to try their hand at making the Poilane-Style Miche.  And the results are beautiful.

Here they are! Please go to their blogs and see how they did it. 

First out was Ulrike at Kuchenlatein, who produced her marvelous loaf in record time, because she already had her own starter in her fridge!  Well done.  We should all be so well prepared.

My friend Astrid at Paulchen's Food blog made this beautiful loaf, adding spelt flour to the dough. It was her first attempt at sourdough, and it came out great.

Gea at Koekje Van Eigen Deeg produced this lovely loaf. Looking at those perfect slices makes me hungry for a sandwich.  Corned beef, anyone?

Look at the beautiful design Jude, at Apple Pie, Patis & Pate, made on his bread. Marvelous!  It's a work
of art.

Unfortunately, I left out Soepkipje at Ipernity! Look at this beautiful loaf.  That was a crime!

I also left out Gretchen at Canela & Comino!  She had to contend with the fact that she can buy almost any kind of flour, but whole wheat flour wasn't available.  But, like a true baker, she persevered and created her beautiful loaf.

Judy at Judy's Gross Eats was faced with the eccentric nature of this starter. But, she persevered (thank heavens for us) and produced beautiful bread! 

Bread Baking Babes

• A Fridge Full Of Food - Glenna
• Bake My Day - Karen
• Breadchick - Mary
• Cookie Baker Lynn - Lynn
• Grain Doe - Gorel
• I Like To Cook - Sara
• Living on bread and water - Monique
• Lucullian Delights - Ilva
• My Kitchen In Half Cups - Tanna
• Notitie Van Lien - Lien  (Our wonderful logo and Badge designer)
• Thyme For Cooking - Katie
• What Did You Eat? - Sher

 

 

Daring Bakers: Opera Cake

This Month's Hosts:   Ivonne, Lis, Fran, and Shea 

Another Daring Baker Challenge, and it introduced me to a famous cake I never knew existed!  The Opera Cake was first introduced to the world in 1903 and has been quite popular since then.  But, I've never heard of it until now.  Maybe our noble founders of Daring Bakers, Ivonne of CreamPuffs In Venice, and Lis of La Mia Cucina, assisted by Fran at Apples Peaches Pumpkin Pie and Shea at Whiskful, knew there were people like me, and wanted to enlighten us.  Well, I'm very happy that they chose this recipe. I admit that my first glance at the recipe made me groan. It was so long and I immediately thought...too complicated. Then I remembered that a long recipe can actually be easy to make, because everything is spelled out clearly. And so it was.  I made this cake over a period of several days and easily assembled it on Mother's Day, for a party I attended.

This lovely recipe is dedicated to Barbara of Winos And Foodies, the driving force behind LiveStrong Day.  If you haven't already done so, stop by her blog and see beautiful, funny, and inspiring photos and stories.

Bread Baking Babes: Poilane-Style Miche

Several months ago I finally bought the Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  To my delight, every recipe begs to be made, but none more than the enormous loaf that graces the cover of the book, a Poilane-Style Miche.  When my turn came to host a bread for the Bread Baking Babes, I immediately chose it. Then, as I read the recipe, I wondered what I had gotten myself into?  The recipe is huge and detailed. As well, it requires making your own wild starter.  No convenient packages of yeast from the grocery store need apply. This is the way people made bread through out history, by capturing wild yeast, indigenous to their own area, into their own unique self-made starter.  Nursed along, fed, and cherished, many of those starters became family heirlooms and were passed down through generations of bakers who created bread for their families. So, here's your chance to gift your son or daughter with the family sourdough starter at their high school graduation, rather than some mundane choice like a new car.

I was faced with creating my own wild yeast starter.  I would need to make something called a seed culture to go into something else called a barm.  And there was that recipe to wade through!  I was a bit overwhelmed.  I'd never made my own wild yeast starter.  To my relief, it was all quite simple and easy to make. It's broken down into steps, that are done over time.  You make the seed culture, which takes minimal effort over 4 days. Then the seed culture goes into the barm, which again requires little effort. (OK, there's also a thing called a firm starter, but I don't want to scare people off.) Finally, you use the barm to make the bread, which is a standard, flour, water, knead, proof, and bake kind of affair.  The result is a magnificent loaf of whole wheat bread, with a thick, chewy crust and mild sourdough tang.  The bread was not only delicious, it was very filling. While I can inhale a whole loaf of ciabatta, this bread is so substantial, it satisfied me readily.  And it was easy to make, (but I think I said that already). 

Cupcake Overload

I love cupcakes, but sometimes there is too much of a good thing.  I made 40 cupcakes on Friday, for Lizzie's birthday.  Lizzie, my friend Nancy's daughter, was all about cupcakes for her party this year. Fortunately, a recent article in Food & Wine magazine detailed how to make the perfect cupcake.  Mine weren't perfect, but they were pretty good.  I made a big vat of buttercream, and used it to make strawberry, peanut butter, and Oreo cookies and cream frosting.  And of course, I made chocolate frosting too.   I worried that I'd be gobbling all of Lizzie's cupcakes, but hours of inhaling the buttery, sugary fumes made me sick to my stomach.  I never thought I'd say this, but it will be a long time before I crave another cupcake.

BBB: Sullivan Street Potato Pizza

Several years ago, I bought Maggie Glazer's magnificent book, Artisan Baking and fell in love with two recipes.  The first recipe I made was Hi-Rise Corn Bread, which launched Tanna and me into a frenzy of one upping each other in different ways to eat those heavenly yellow loaves of bread.  I think she won the contest with her toad in the holes.  The other recipe that I longed to make was the Sullivan Street Potato Pizza, named after the bakery that produces it in New York City.  It looked wonderful in the book, a foccacia like bread topped with a mountain of thinly sliced potatoes, onions and chopped rosemary.  After years of procrastination, I finally made it, thanks to the Bread Baking Babes, and Tanna, our hostess for this month.

Several of the Babes made the pizza before my attempt, and I knew that the crust was proving difficult.  So, I was forewarned when I chose to make the pizza for dinner with my cousins, Charmayne and Keith.  I can't say that the pizza was a marvelous as the Hi-Rise Cornbread, but it was quite a hit at the dinner.   

Daring Bakers: Dorie Greenspan's Perfect Party Cake

Yes, it's another Daring Bakers Challenge.  This time we have Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Perfect Party Cake.  I wondered if it would live up to it's name, and it most certainly did.  I baked it for Easter dinner at my friend Nancy's house, and it was a huge success.  It's always heart warming when people nearly give you a standing ovation.  The cake was really a birthday cake for her mom, Katherine, and it cut beautifully and tasted...well, perfect.  The recipe this month was chosen by the wonderful Morven, of Food Art and Random Thoughts, and I thank her very much for choosing it. I'll be making this cake a lot. I think it is, indeed, the perfect party cake.

The recipe was simple to make and, and it provided me with lots of yummy batter and frosting.  Enough to "sample"  before I baked the cake and frosted it.  I love raw cake batter more than when it's cooked, and drove my mother crazy as a child, by standing at her arm, begging for it as she tried to fill her cake pans.   I'm glad I showed restraint and baked my layers, resulting in tender, yet resilient layers that easily handled being split in half before being filled and frosted.

That part went OK, but, as usual, I had some problems.

Accident Prone Almond Wafers

I'm addicted to Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies. They're thin and crisp, with a sweet caramel taste,  perfect with a cup of coffee. I walk quickly past them, eyes averted, when I'm in the grocery store.  "Don't look, don't look," I say to myself.  When I saw these cookies in Martha Stewart Living, they reminded me of my favorite, so I had to make them.  Basically, these are a shortbread dough, using dark brown sugar instead of white, which changes the texture of the cookie and provides a caramel flavor. The dough is frozen and later sliced for baking, which I find very efficient.  It took a few batches before I figured out how long to bake them.  The recipe says 10 minutes, but they were too dark when I left them in the oven that long.  So, they need to be monitored carefully. I found that 9 minutes was perfect for me.

The resulting cookies weren't exactly like the Bordeaux, but they were close. Crisp, not too sweet, with a delicious caramel flavor, they seemed to taste better and better with each cookie that I ate. 

Bread Baking Babes: Coccodrillo (Crocodile) Bread

The last Bread Baking Babes Project dealt with wet dough.  I thought that dough possibly the wettest I would ever encounter. Wrong.  This month's recipe, called Coccodrillo Bread, easily takes the title of Weirdest, Most Liquid Dough, hands down.  The name of the bread is supposedly due to the bread looking like a crocodile.  If I squint really hard and use my imagination, it looks a little like a crocodile, or a slug, or an amoeba.  But, that's not important. What counts is that the wacky recipe produces a marvelous tasting bread.  I thought it was great fun making this recipe.  And, for all you bread bakers who worry about the amount of flour to use, it's a non-issue here.  You add exactly the amount the recipe specifies and not a bit more, even if you think your bread will run off the counter like Silly Putty.

Bread Baking Babes: Royal Crown's Tortano

Is the world ready for another baking group?  And what compels baking aficionados to seek others with the same obsession (affliction)?  Is it the influence of the leavening ingredients?   I don't know, but there are a lot of us out there. Just look at the success of the Daring Bakers.   My love for bread is so deep, the opportunity to join with another group, devoted to yeast dough, was perfect.  The name of this group is Bread Baking Babes. And when Tanna extended an invitation to join, how could I refuse?  I could satisfy my constant desire to feel yeast dough in my hands.  And truth to tell, I was smitten with the fact that I'm now officially, a real babe. 

So, let me introduce you to the Bread Baking Babes (and look at the spiffy logo designed by Lien) :

A Fridge Full of Food (Glenna), Bake My Day (Karen), Cookie Baker Lynn (Lynn), I Like to Cook (Sara), Living on Bread and Water (Monique), Lucullian Delights (Ilva), My Kitchen in Half Cups (Tanna), Nami-Nami (Pille), Notitie van Lien (Lien), The Sour Dough (Mary aka Breadchick), Thyme For Cooking (Katie), and What Did You Eat (Sher)

Our first project is being hosted this month by the lovely Karen at Bake My Day.  The recipe is a fabulous, to die for bread, called Royal Crown's Tortano. It makes a big round loaf with a strong yeast flavor and deep chewy crust.  I made the recipe twice, and while my results were imperfect, the bread itself was marvelous.