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If the dough works for cinnamon rolls, it should work for a jalousie (filled braided loaf). I've made one with a REALLY soft dough, almost like a ciabatta dough, and it worked just fine though the braiding was a bit tricky.
I picked about a 12 ounce cup of black raspberries today, about enough for a good snack or two.
Probably would have gotten more if I'd picked over the weekend, the ones on the east side up close to the house are well past prime, but they are always the first to ripen because they get the most sun and reflected heat off the bricks.
In pastry school, they called that kind of braided sweet bread a jalousie. (The term refers to horizontal shutters or window blinds, which the alternating layers of the braid resemble.)
In school we made it with puff pastry, but almost any pastry dough that works with a sweet filling would work.
We had takeout.
CSAs are popular here, too, and we've even been in a couple of them, but found the variety of produce didn't really work for us. And now that I can grow more lettuce in the Aerogarden than either of us can eat, 12 months a year, there's even less need for being in a CSA.
My son's CSA (in Pittsburgh) tend to have good deals on black raspberries and strawberries, he'll often order several extra flats of them, we haven't found a comparable CSA here.
I made honey wheat bread on Sunday using the whole meal semolina/durum instead of whole meal hard red wheat. It has a lot of similarities with the original, but the fact that the durum has been ground into a uniformly fine flour makes for a different texture and mouth feel, normally when I mill wheat berries I use as coarse a setting as I can get on my Nutrimill, so yesterday's bread is less toothsome. (I sometimes add a quarter cup of cracked wheat to the honey wheat bread, I think that would have helped here.)
I also think the bitterness of the bran permeates the bread more this way. I don't think it'll replace either the semolina bread made with mostly endosperm semolina or the original honey wheat bread in the repertoire here, but I may make it from time to time. It may be better with a little peanut butter on it or with other sandwich fillings.
These were finished cakes, you just put it in the oven for 15 minutes. Some Sams Clubs have a mix for making lava cakes, others have frozen ones ready to go in the oven, I don't think our club has either of those.
I haven't made lava cakes, but the proper way to do them is to make ganache, form it into balls or cylinders for the center, freeze them and put them in the batter for the cake just before it goes in the oven. That way the center thaws and liquefies as the cake bakes without much of the liquid being absorbed into the cake. So freezing the whole thing is a bit of a shortcut. (If you've seen the film Chef, making lava cakes is one of the early plot devices. The chefs I know LOVE this movie!)
In most ovens the heat source (gas or electric) is at the bottom, so the heat rises and there's a convection air flow in the oven. You can test your oven for hot spots (every oven has them) using the bread test: Put slices of bread on a shelf, run the oven to toast them, and you'll get a pretty good visual picture of where it is hottest on that shelf. Done properly this has to be done shelf by shelf at several different temperatures, though testing several shelves at once is also useful if you bake multiple pans at a time. (A chef friend told me this was the first thing he does in a new kitchen, using several loaves of bread.)
It is often hottest on the bottom rack because that's closes to the heat source, but it is also generally hotter at the top than in the middle. Something on the bottom shelf gets more heat on the bottom than the top, the reverse is true for the top self. If there's a convection fan, then the heat is a bit more even throughout the oven. (In the really fancy convection ovens, the heat source is at the back and the air flow is how the oven gets heated.)
I've often wondered just how profitable farmer's markets are, given the time investment. Some of the vendors at the Sunday market here come from 100 miles away.
Nice work, Chocomouse!
I'm doing a chocolate lava cake from Trader Joes for dessert tonight.
Followup: The lava cake was good, nice dark rich chocolate, like a devil's food cake; the 'lava' sort of leaked out one side but that didn't really hurt the flavor.We shared one, that was plenty for each of us.
I'm getting ready to boil and bake the bagels, but first I'm making another batch of peanut butter cookies.
The WSJ says that the wheat harvest in the great plains might be the worst in over 60 years, due to drought, with more abandonment of acres planted than in any year since 1917.
I thought we were going to get some rain around suppertime, but if the area got any it was north of us. Still some possibilities for tomorrow, though.
I made bagel dough tonight, I'll shape them tonight and let them rise overnight in the fridge. I haven't done them that way for a while.
I put in about a half dozen broccoli plants that I had started indoors around the end of March, I think some critter ate one of them down to the ground, the others are growing but showing signs of bugs eating them. There's another broccoli that is in a cage with a 4th of July tomato plant, I must have spilled a broccoli seed when I was putting them in the starter pots. Interestingly enough, both the tomato and the broccoli seem to be doing well, with less bug damage to the broccoli than the others.
I tried starting some melon seeds, they didn't sprout, so I bought two melon plants at the farmer's market, so far they're doing OK but not really taking off yet. The spaghetti squash plants I put out a few weeks ago died, I've got one more indoors and I think I'm going to just plant a couple of hills of the seeds to see if they'll germinate and survive.
The hot weather has hit, it was in the mid 90's today.
I picked two big bowls of salad from the Aerogarden today, so we're having salads and burgers on the grill tonight. (No bun for Diane.)
I sprouted some peapods and then put them in the Aerogarden, 4 of 6 are doing fine, I'm sprouting some more to replace the two that didn't take. Somewhere I think we've got some inoculant but I haven't found it yet, and for the amount of peapods I'm growing at a time it is kind of expensive (and I'm not sure how to use it in hydroponics.)
I picked a handful of black raspberries today, not enough to do anything with but a nice afternoon tidbit. Should be more available in a day or two, doesn't look like it is going to be a huge crop.
The elderberries bloomed last week and the birds have already started eating the berries, even though they're green and tiny. We'll never get any elderberries from our small patch, but the birds do love them.
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