What are you Baking the week of November 24, 2019?

[Mike Nolan]

Holiday baking plans? I've got several breads to make over the next few days.

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[BakerAunt]

I have two baking project this Sunday morning. I used the bread machine to knead dough for a single loaf of a Five-Grain Buttermilk-Wheat-Rye Bread, which I hope will get us through Thanksgiving, when there will be rolls. I don’t want to bake two, since freezer space is a bit limited at the moment. I tried adding 2 Tbs. oat bran just to see what happens, along with the usual 2 tbs. flax meal.

While the bread was rising, I baked a new recipe, “Apple-Maple Snack Cake,” from Better Homes & Gardens Fall Baking (p. 29). I made a few changes in that I replaced ¼ cup melted butter with 3 Tbs. canola oil, and I cut the vanilla from 2 tsp to 1 tsp. I used two Jonathan (they say Braeburn or other cooking apples) and did not peel them. I probably had about 2 cups rather than 1 ½ cups diced apple. I added 1 Tbs. milk powder and 2 tsp. flax meal to increase nutrition. We will have it for dessert tonight.

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by BakerAunt.

[BakerAunt]

Just a note to say that the maple-apple cake is delicious. I will never understand, however, how the recipe authors think that an 8x8 pan can serve sixteen people. Get real.

[aaronatthedoublef]

We made cookies Saturday and Sunday. My daughter wanted to make gingerbread men but my wife wanted molasses cookies so we tried to make rolled cookies from the molasses cookies which were way too soft.

Sunday I chilled them before we cut them then chilled them again before baking and it was better but not stiff like gingerbread. I'll experiment some more.

But today is pie crust day!

• This reply was modified 5 years ago by aaronatthedoublef.

[skeptic7]

I did a yeasted cornmeal-wheat bread with sage and thyme and rosemary. I made this last year with whole wheat flour and cornmeal and thought it was rather flat. So this year I used 1 cup of cornmeal and 3 cups white flour and found it was still flat. Now its also a pasty white color and boring.
Here is the recipe -- I've changed it enough that its not much like the original which was the KA stuffing bread bowls recipe.
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup boiling water
1/4 cup water
1 teaspoon yeast
3 cups sifted white flour
2 tablespoons potato flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup oil
1 teaspoon dried thyme
2 teaspoons dried sage
rosemary -- about 1 8 -12 inch branch.

Mix the cornmeal and the boiling water in a small bowl. Set aside and let sit until cool. Warm the 1/4 cup water until a little above room temperature. The water should be warm but not hot. Mix the 1 teaspoon yeast in the 1/4 cup water. When the cornmeal mush has cooled to luke warm, mix in the yeast mixture. Let sit until the mush in noticeably looser and softer. Its not likely bubbles would be visible, but some change should be seen. Perhaps an hour.
Mix the white flour, potato flour and salt together. Put aside.
Beat the eggs and oil together in a large bowl. Mix in the cornmeal mush. Mix in the flour mixture. Stir together. Add a tablespoon or two of water if needed. Turn out on a board and knead for 10-15 minutes. It will never be stretchy like a all wheat flour dough, but it will be more bouncy and coherent. flatten out and sprinkle the dried sage and dried thyme o n the dough. Roll the dough up and then knead until the dried herbs are well distributed.
Flatten out well and place in a parchment lined 9x13 pan. Let rise -- I let it rise overnight in a plastic storage box with a jar of hot water to add moisture. Tear the rosemary leaves off the branch and sprinkle the leaves and springs on top of the bread. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake for 20 minutes or until 190 degrees.
Its tasty enough with a little cheese, probably do well with olive oil and pepper.

This is sort of designed for Thanksgiving Sandwiches or Turkey stuffing and I've done variants of it for years. I've done whole wheat without cornmeal, cornmeal and whole wheat, and now cornmeal with white flour. The cornmeal variants are the tastiest but rather heavy.

[skeptic7]

Baker Aunt;

The apple maple snack cake sounds great. You could cut an 8 x 8 pan into 16 pieces, only everyone would want to eat two. Maybe if served after a heavy meal with ice cream, it would make 16 servings.

Everyone;
I am definately going to bake pumpkin cornbread as its fast and easy. I'd really like to try pumpkin rolls but I don't know if I will have time. I'll bake an apple slab pie on Thanksgiving day.

[Mike Nolan]

I made grissini (thin crisp breadsticks) today, I may make a second batch with parmesan cheese in them. This evening I'm going to make a cranberry walnut bread, probably as mini-muffins.

[chocomouse]

I made two loaves of pumpernickel today, with "the works": dried onion, caraway, mustard, and dill seeds. The smell as they bake is amazing!

[Italiancook]

I tried a new recipe for chocolate chip cookies. The blurb promised chewy cookies, which I took to mean soft. They turned out crispy. I really want to find a recipe that makes soft choc. chip cookies. Maybe I'm baking them too long. I worry about the egg being fully cooked.

[Mike Nolan]

The questions to ask when making cookies and the texture isn't what you expected:

1. What's the sugar to fat to flour ratio in those cookies? (A classic sugar cookie is 1-2-3.)
2. What kind of sugar is it using (white vs brown)?
3. Is the fat liquid or hard? (If you cream butter and sugar, it's still considered hard, Shortening is also hard, but if you melt the fat or use oil, it's liquid.)

I wouldn't worry about getting eggs fully cooked, by the time the cookies are edible, even soft ones, the eggs are way past the point where they're safe.

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up subbing hickory nuts for walnuts in the cranberry nut recipe, because I couldn't find any walnuts in the freezer and I had a bag of hickory nuts I got from the Nebraska Nut Growers Association a while back.

The two go together well, and hickory nuts would have been readily available 100 years ago, before the hickory nut canker wiped out much of eastern America's hickory forests, so this is a classic throwback pairing.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Shaping has some effect on the chewy-ness of the cookie. If cookies spread they are flatter and tend to bake through faster. If they stay as blobs it takes a bit longer for the middle to cook through so you can cook for the same amount of time as flattened cookies but still end up with a soft (or even uncooked) center. Much of this relates back to Mike's point about hard and soft fats. And you can chill or even freeze things before putting them in the oven and this will also affect the cooking time and the doneness. When I made cookies in the bakery we would drop them with a scoop, then flatten them, then chill them. So we had a medium thick cookie with thick edge that did not spread as much.

And then there is carry-over baking time so remember that things keep baking as they are cooling - cookies less than something thick like a loaf of bread. I realized I was over-baking my scones recently because of the carry over baking and my brownies need to come out of the oven a little before they are completely set or they will be overbaked.

It's interesting that people still freak out about raw eggs and NO ONE (at least in my small patch of New England) worries at all about raw flour despite warnings in the newspaper and on flour bags.

[BakerAunt]

Hickory trees are abundant in the Midwest and the southeast part of the country, in part because the deer don't eat them. So, we can have push-back against the tyranny of the northeast Thanksgiving menu! 🙂

Currently, the problem here is with Butternut canker.

[Mike Nolan]

This morning I'm making challah, still trying to decide what braid to use, I may try the single strand braid in Clayton's Breads of France book, it is one I've not done before. There will be about 20 of us at at least 4 different tables, it'd be nice to do 4 or 5 smaller loaves.

[Mike Nolan]

I made two batches of grissini breadsticks from Carol Field's book yesterday, the second batch had parmesan cheese in them.

These are fast to make and kind of fun, you cut them then stretch them to the width of your baking pan. I did a better job keeping the thickness more uniform with the second batch than with the first one.

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