I made a batch of burger/sandwich buns this afternoon.

I baked Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers on Monday from dough I made last week.

Hi. It's been crazy! Hope you all are doing well.

Never had a banh mi with headcheese. I don't think I would have tried it. Headcheese creeps me out.

I've started to tinker with gluten free. I volunteer for a place and all the people who run it are GF and craving sourdough. I've been using KAB GF bread flour. It's several different starches. The exec chef there tried it and said it didn't have the big, airy feel with holes but the crust was great. Some how none of my bread (GF or regular) have those big airy holes. Not sure what I am doing wrong. My ciabatta, for example, has a tighter crumb than typical ciabatta. I might need to let it rise at room temp longer after taking it out of the fridge.

I'm experimenting with hand pies. I have good recipes for dough and for fruit filling. I may use it for Thanksgiving pies. Not sure how to put pumpkin or pecan pie filling into hand pies but maybe I'll put the pie dough in muffin tins and make individual pies. It uses sour cream for the liquid and it's pretty extensible and it has really nice layers.

My challah program has its second client now. It is remarkably hard to give away bread! I have a 20 quart Vevor stand mixer which does a nice job with the dough. I'm up to about 20lbs and not sure how much more I can make. But I get better kneading after 20 minutes in the mixer than 45 minutes by hand. My challah finally has the right texture. I finally used up my SAF red so I'm going to try some sample loaves this week with SAF gold. And Violet - my baby - is helping me as part of her bat mitzvah project. I cannot believe my baby will be bat mitzvah in July. No wonder I am too old to knead 20lbs of dough by hand.

On Tuesday, I baked another recipe from Sarah Leah Chase's Year Around Cookbook (Nantucket Open House Cookbook, which is one of the two included in this joint volume), Cranberry Harvest Muffins. I replaced AP flour with whole wheat flour and 1 cup of melted butter with ½ cup of canola oil. I added 2 Tbs. milk powder and 2 Tbs. flax meal. I replaced the milk with buttermilk. I halved the white and brown sugars. I did not use her spices, which were 1 Tbs. cinnamon and 2 tsp. ground ginger. Instead, I used 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 tsp. allspice, and ¼ tsp. cloves. I could not find dried Calimyrna figs, so I followed an online suggestion to use dried Turkish figs instead. I am pleased with how the recipe turned out. The spices are just right, nicely complementing the fruit. I made one unintentional change. I planned to reduce the baking powder from 1 Tbs. to 2 tsp. However, I accidentally put in 2 tsp. of baking soda because I was thinking about something other than the task at hand. The baking soda was already in the flour, so I had to proceed. I put in ½ tsp. of baking powder (which should have been the baking soda amount) and deleted the salt. The muffins came out fine, but next time I will do it the right way. The recipe said it yields 20 muffins. I made 6 large muffins and 10 small muffins. I think it would make close to two dozen. I will freeze the large muffins for future breakfasts. Even Scott, who is not a cranberry fan likes the muffins.

BakerAunt - that's good to know about the Vegalene - I used it for a while and always liked it, but I didn't replace it when I ran out - maybe on my next order

Aaron--Did your older son graduate? Time is flying! It's so nice to have a baking family.

Baking bagels is on my list of baking projects, but probably not until after the New Year.