What are you Baking the Week of December 11, 2022?

[Mike Nolan]

Got your cookies made yet?

Spread the word

      

  

  

[BakerAunt]

I plan more cookie baking this week, but today was about bread.

I was looking through my pile of untried recipes and came across "Mixed Grains Bread," which Martha Rose Shulman contributed to Zester, a newsletter and recipe site that went out of existence some years ago. In the headnote, she said that it was her signature bread when she began cooking in the '70s and was still a family favorite.

We were out of bread, except for a loaf of Challah in the freezer, so on Sunday, I decided to try baking this bread. As an added advantage, it called for quinoa flour or millet flour, and I have some millet flour taking up freezer space. I made a few changes. I used just 200g of water and replaced the other 475 g with buttermilk. I used bread flour rather than unbleached white flour, since the bread is mostly wholegrain. I reduced the salt from 20g to 15g. Her instructions were for kneading by hand, but I used my stand mixer. It is a heavy dough, but my Cuisinart 7-qt. mixer has the power to handle it. I added the salt with the final flour addition. The bread had a biga stage, and it also had two risings before it is panned for the final rise. I left off the light sesame seed topping in deference to my husband, but I had some egg wash left from two projects late last week, so I did the two egg washes. It baked in 50 minutes. The 9x5 loaves had good oven spring and have a rustic look. I look forward to slicing one tomorrow, at which time I will report on taste and texture.

Note: I tried to find a link to the recipe, but since I printed it eleven years ago, and Zester is no longer a site, I could not find it online anywhere. (This might be a job for the Way Back Machine.) If anyone is interested, I can post the recipe here, with my re-worked instructions to use a stand mixer.

[BakerAunt]

I made my adaptation of Cornmeal Pumpernickel Waffles for breakfast on Monday. I had previously halved the salt, cutting it from 2 tsp. to 1 tsp. Today, I further cut it to ¾ tsp., given that the recipe (from King Arthur's Whole Grains baking book) also has 2 tsp. baking powder and 1 tsp. baking soda. We did not miss the extra salt. I usually make waffles on Sunday, but yesterday was the last day, for two weeks of duck hunting season, and hunters set up off of our lakeshore, so I needed to take the dog over to our Annex, as she is terrified of the gun noise. As it turns out, no ducks showed up, and the hunters packed away their decoys and left around noon. There will be two more weeks of duck season starting December 26, provided the lake has not frozen. However, there have not been that many ducks for several years.

[cwcdesign]

My apologies that I never wrote back about my remake of the Irish Chocolate Cake last Wednesday. It was a success. I used the melted butter/cocoa powder paste to grease the larger of my two bundt pans. I made sure my butter was soft and mixed everything through the eggs with the stand mixer. I then added the flour and liquid by hand and it was the right texture to go in the pan. I baked it for 50 minutes and it wasn't quite done so I baked for another 5. I didn't want to over bake again so I took it out. It un-molded beautifully. So after it cooled, I wrapped it and put it in the freezer. On Friday, I took both cakes (the rum cake and whiskey cake) out of the freezer and wrapped them for the bake sale - I borrowed large saran from work so you could see the cakes. One neighbor saw me taking them to the car for delivery to the sale with pretty ribbons and all and got excited about the sale. When I got to the gardens, everyone wanted to buy them then - we don't allow members to buy early. Turns out my neighbor asked a friend to get there at 9:00am on Saturday and she got my rum cake - I guess the members kept looking for it after that!

On Thursday, I made bourbon balls with crushed cookies (Chocolate Bourbon from a Bakery we buy from for the store - they had passed their best by date, so we had to damage them out - you can still eat them, you just can't sell them.), pecans, powdered sugar, cocoa powder, maple syrup and of course Bourbon for a neighborhood Christmas party. I rolled half in sparkling sugar and half in chocolate sprinkles. Everyone wanted the recipe and one neighbor asked if he could pay me to make them. I said I was sorry, no, but I'd happily give him the recipe!

[BakerAunt]

Congratulations on your baking success--and growing baking reputation--CWCdesign! I had a similar experience at Christmas bakes sales at a church I attended in California years ago. My Limpa bread sold just as I took it out of the bag. (It helps to have people of Swedish heritage.)

I'm glad that your cake came out well on the repeat.

[BakerAunt]

Update: Martha Rose Shulman's Mixed Grains Bread is wonderful. It has a dense, yet soft texture and a delicious flavor. It will become one of my regular breads.

[chocomouse]

I made Mint Chip Chocolate cookies. I used the basic Toll House Chocolate Chip cookie recipe, adding about 3 tablespoons of cocoa; I didn't measure, just dumped the last of the container into the dough. The mint chips are coated with colorful sprinkles; I found the 12 oz bag of them while cleaning out a box in my pantry. It said "Best if used by [something] 2014. They tasted fine, so I stirred in about half the bag. I have the dough chilling now, and will scoop out cookies in the morning. I'll bake a few now, but most will go into the freezer, raw, for baking next week for cookie trays.

[Mike Nolan]

I tried searching for that recipe, didn't find it online, but I've never used the wayback machine.

[cwcdesign]

Mike, I think you need Mr. Peabody and Sherman for the Way Back Machine 😁

[chocomouse]

I made 6 small loaves of Lemon Blueberry bread, as gifts for Christmas.

[BakerAunt]

I looked at the recipe, and it mentions allrecipes.com
I will look to see if I can locate it there.
I printed it on 10/29/2011. Sometimes, it takes a while to get around to trying a recipe. 🙂

I checked. It is not at allrecipes.com

I'm planning on writing it up with my changes, and I will post it here when I do.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning another batch of croissant dough this week, for chocolatines. I talked about it more in the weekly 'cooking' thread.

This will be the third time I've used the hand laminator, hopefully I've got it figured out by now. The final roll-out will be 4 mm thick, because it's about a 40 layer dough and the ideal thickness for laminated doughs is 0.1 mm per layer. (Below that the butter doesn't stay a solid layer, it breaks up.)

[aaronatthedoublef]

Violet and I started a gingerbread house a couple weeks ago. The recipe was too small (and my first attempts at cut outs were wonky). I made a double recipe yesterday and will cut it and bake it with V tomorrow. I need to make some royal icing. I found a recipe that works with pasteurized egg whites. I had some meringue powder but cannot find it. The recipe I have is for flooding cookies so I think I'll need to add some powdered sugar to it to stiffen it up for mortar.

[BakerAunt]

Specialty ingredients always disappear when you need them, Aaron! I look forward to pictures of the gingerbread house.

I baked an apple pie on Wednesday with a crumb topping.

I also baked a new recipe, "Seeded Squash Breadsticks," from The Healthy Baker, an ad-free magazine I picked up in CVS last week. It seems to be assembled by Food to Love, a company that carries some specialty and organic grains and flours. What caught my eye is that the recipes do seem to be healthy and not fads.

This recipe was almost half whole wheat and used butternut squash puree. I cut the salt from a tablespoon of sea salt flakes (I assume they meant kosher salt) to 1 tsp. regular sea salt. I used the bread machine to mix the dough. After I shaped the dough, I put on the egg wash before the rise and pressed on some pumpkin seeds, although the instructions were to let them rise, brush with egg wash, then sprinkle with pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and poppy seeds. However, since there were sunflower seeds in the dough, and poppy seed does not go well with my husband, I left out the last two. Rather than breadsticks, these are more like six small, narrow loaves of bread. The dough did shrink back from the 12-inch ropes to about 10 ½ inches. Possibly, a rest period before shaping would help since bread flour is used. We split a warm one with our stew. They were good, so I expect they will be even better when properly cooled.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm blind-baking a pie crust this afternoon, to make a chocolate cream pie tomorrow. I made the detrempte for the croissant dough last night, I'll do the lamination steps this evening, then let it rest overnight before final roll out, shaping, and baking tomorrow morning.

[Author]

Posts