I tried a new recipe from King Arthur - Golden Grains Bread - and a bonus is it's baked in the long baker.

It calls for AP, whole wheat, semolina and harvest grains blend - I subbed bread flour and WWW. I did not use the optional brown sugar or malt. I made a parchment sling. It was a beautiful dough when it came out of the bread machine. I have realized with this loaf that I have a bad habit of underproving my dough which explains a lot of my issues. I did the poke test, and the imprint held but when I went to cut the slits it filled in. I probably should have stopped at that point and continued the rise, but I was afraid I'd already deflated it. I keep assuming that because I'm in the South, I should prove it for less time. Next time I won't second guess the timing - it's definitely dense and doughy but it will be fine as toast. The sling worked perfectly and it didn't stick to the pan.

No baking here today. We went to the National Bakery in Tarpon Springs yesterday and brought back two bags of the Greek cookies that are Scott's favorite and one bag of the cinnamon-molasses ones that I wrote about last year and hope to try baking using a recipe I found.

Hmm--think I'll drop by for a slice....

I made brownies for the poker ♣️ game tonight.

Your trifle looks delicious Mike!

The cakes and brownies all look good!

I made 24 loaves of challah. This is the first batch where Violet helped me make the dough. I have been making it Wednesday morning but I shifted that to Tuesday afternoon so she could join me. The dough was a little drier than normal when I made the loaves so I may increase the hydration to try to counteract that.

I have pans with pre-shaped dough balls for four three-strand loaves. I timed things and it took me about 10-12 minutes to make four loaves. I also tracked the time so when I was done with the last loaves I knew how long the first loaves had been rising and I staggered their entry into the oven accordingly. The whole batch took me about two hours. Then I was stuck inside for another half hour as we had a bomb threat and went into lock down until the police cleared us.

Then I went to help the chefs at the nonprofit kitchen wear I volunteer for an event they were catering that evening. They had already made unhealthy snickerdoodles so I had to make gluten free healthy cookies. They said they had coconut so I was going to make macaroons but the coconut turned out to be almond flour so I made chocolate chip cookies with raw sugar.

The snickerdoodles tasted a little flat to me. They usually had a tang and I swear it came from cream of tartar. I can't find my old recipe that I was working on, but it had cream of tartar. There are some recipes with it online. I may try to resurrect them again.