What are You Baking the Week of January 14, 2018?

[BakerAunt]

I'm in the kitchen baking, and I'll post about it later, but some of you may already have finished your baking, so I will go ahead and start the thread.

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[BakerAunt]

Sunday was a busy day in the kitchen for me. I baked Christmas Crispbread, the same recipe from Beatrice Ojakangas' The Great Scandinavian Baking Book that I baked on Christmas Eve, but this time, I used 1 cup buttermilk and 1/2 cup of half and half that I need to use up. (The original recipe calls for 1 1/2 cup milk.) We are finishing up the first batch, which have kept very well for three weeks. My husband requested these for our Florida trip.

I also baked a new recipe, "Lemon Walnut [Pecan] Biscotti, from Bon Appetit (April 2005), p 119. The original recipe calls for walnuts, but I have a bounty of pecans to use. I will post an addendum tomorrow after I have a chance to sample them.

I made the dough for a single batch of my Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers, which I will bake later this week. I want them for our trip, and I wanted to feed the sourdough starter.

Addendum: The Lemon-Pecan Biscotti are delicious. I think that I did not put in quite enough lemon zest, but there is still a nice lemon flavor with the 3 cups of chopped pecans. It also had an egg glaze and was sprinkled with sugar in the raw, which gives a nice crunch.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by BakerAunt.

[RiversideLen]

You can't go wrong using pecans, Baker Aunt.

[BakerAunt]

Tonight I am making the KAF Ultra-Thin Crust Pizza. As it is cool in the house, I'm giving it a longer rise than usual in a bowl on the table. I have an old, small round pizza stone that I plan to heat up along with my larger one. I'll try pulling out the small one after my husband's pizza bakes, and see if putting it on the stone and tenting with foil helps keep it warm while mine bakes.

[wonky]

Yesterday I baked 5 loaves of molasses/oatmeal bread (the favorite bread of my clients), and 4 loaves of white from my own recipe to fulfill an order. I also managed to bake a cheese cake in between the bread baking. Tomorrow I will bake 4 loaves of light whole wheat, and 4 loaves of light whole wheat with molasses, also to fulfill an order.

I really want to try the challuh that I wrote about last week, but might be able to do that on Wednesday.

[Italiancook]

I admire all your bread-baking, wonky.

The strangest thing happened when I baked Blueberry Muffins for breakfast this morning. I used the recipe in Better Homes & Gardens 75th Anniversary cookbook. I've made these before & always ended up with 12 standard-sized muffins. This morning, the recipe made only 9. I'm sure I had all the flour and liquid in the bowl, and all the sugar and blueberries. So I can't imagine why I ended up with 9 muffins instead of 12. But they're delicious.

My husband found a sale on blueberries, so I'll make Blueberry Pancakes either today or tomorrow.

[BakerAunt]

This morning I baked Gingered Lemon Barley Scones. I worked off of the recipe in the King Arthur Whole Grains Book and a recipe for Ginger Scones from Le Brea bakery that I got out of Bon Appetit. I needed to use up some lemons (done!) and some half and half, which I bought and then could not recall why I had bought it (sigh). They came out pretty well. I need to play around with the recipe a bit. I do like crystalized ginger with lemon, and with two-thirds of the flour being barley flour, there is a nice whole grain taste.

[BakerAunt]

Italian Cook: Were the blueberries smaller than usual?

[skeptic7]

BakerAunt;
The lemon-pecan biscotti sound wonderful! I had hoped to cook yesterday but I didn't have time.

[Italiancook]

BakerAunt, the blueberries were large.

[BakerAunt]

Italian Cook--maybe there are more small blueberries in a cup when you measure them than large blueberries? I'm giving my best guess as to why it made fewer muffins.

[RiversideLen]

Today I made sandwich buns, the same recipe I used last week to make the basket weave loaf. Except I subbed a little rye for the white flour (1/2 cup). I also wanted to try to make the basket weave for the buns. So I tried it for 2 of them to see how it would turn out. The challenge was to coax 95 grams of dough into 6 ropes. As I expected it would be, it took a little effort. But here is the result.

Of course, it would be easier if I made larger buns. If I do this again maybe I'll make 7 buns instead of 8.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by RiversideLen.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by RiversideLen.

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[BakerAunt]

Tuesday evening I baked Whole Wheat Sourdough Cheese Crackers from the dough I made on Sunday evening.

[chocomouse]

Len, those look great! Making buns is time-intensive anyway, compared to shaping a loaf of bread, and I can understand why you made only 2 basketweave. Your buns are big; mine are around 71-73 grams each, which are plenty big for our "mature person" appetite.

[BakerAunt]

I have spent Wednesday afternoon baking. I baked Cherry Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies, a recipe that first appeared in Bon Appetit in February 1998. The original recipe calls for slivered, toasted almonds, but I used chopped pecans instead, which go nicely with the dried cherries and Ghirardelli dark chocolate chips. I deleted the almond extract and used a 1 rather than a 2 Tbs. cookie dropper, so the recipe yielded just over three dozen. I then baked my Oatmeal and Cinnamon Chip Scone recipe. The last project was to make Ellen's (formerly Moonie) buns as a dozen rolls. No, I did not try braiding them. 🙂

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