The year 2011 is already nearly gone. I still wonder how fast time flied this year. The last year brought many good things, some sad ones and always a lot of baking. And while I am sitting here and try to remember all the things that happened to me, let me share my favourite recipes of the past 12 month with you.Let us start in the upper left corner of the collage.
In the last weeks I was not satisfied with the flour I milled with my Home flour mill. Could it be that after 10 years often regular use my once second hand bought mill started to decrease? I decided to try an exchange of the mill stones and ordered some replacement in the internet. And already when I unpack the stones I could the that there was huge difference between the new ones and the old ones (The new stone is always on the right side in the picture.) Now I can mill fine flour again. Continue reading
Of course I did not only make a variation of Martins recipe, I although baked the dough with the orginale Orangefilling. I used the same dough as for the Saffron Stars, again with reduced sugar amount. The Orange swirls are sweet enough with all the sugar in the filling.
The advantages of the long and slowly proofing over night I explained already at the Saffron-Star post, and so I will only speak how great the Orange swirls taste. They taste very intense of Orange, with hints of saffron and caramel. Maybe the saffron is not necessary in this recipe because the orange aroma is the central taste of this sweet pastry.
In my eyes you can eat it all the time: you can eat it as breakfast, as a snack with a cup of coffee, as lunch, as dinner…
Yes, I like this orange swirls very much!
To shape little stars out of dough is very easy. I made some picture for a little “How to..”.
Shape the dough to balls. Now flatten the balls and make a cut in the middle of the dough with a knife or a credit card. Rotate the card 1/3 and cut again, repeat it for a third time, leaving six points in the middle (see picture). Turn the dough inside out, so the points are now outside, forming a star.
I was very sad when Martin from Pain de Martin posted this summer that he would stop blogging. I liked Martins Ideas very much and his recipes often inspired me to my own recipes.
And so I was very happy when I saw some days ago that he started his new blog Lite mer bröd. When I read the new entries I found directly one I wanted to try: long fermented saffron buns with an orange filling.
I decided to try a variation of this recipe for breakfast on Christmas. So I skipped the filling and reduced the sugar amount. For kneading I do it like I do all sweet dough: I knead the dough until medium gluten development without sugar and butter. Then I add the sugar gradually and at the end the butter. That yields a dough with a good developed gluten network because sugar and butter cannot interfere with it.
Because we will have no snow this year to Christmas, I want to whish all my readers “Happy Christmas” with a Snow-Picture I took last christmas. I hope you have a peaceful christmas!
The last Bread Baking Day of the year 2012 has the theme “X-mas Edition” and is hosted at Cindystar. I get the idea for a bread fitting to this theme some days ago, when I was on my way back home from work. It was already very late, I had lunch about 7 hours ago and I was hungry. So I stopped at the bakery in railway station and bought a bun called “Little cinnamon almond cloud”. That sounds good, doesn’t it? But when I take the first bite I was disappointed. The bun was not stuffed with crunchy almond pieces but with very sweet marzipan in a very sweet dough overpowering completely the faint cinnamon taste. Not what I expected when I read the beautiful name!
When I was sitting in the train I started to think about how I would do such a kind of bread. And so I used the time to develop a recipe for a sweet bread seasoned with cardamom, Cassia buds and allspice and enriched crunchy almond pieces. Its a rich bread with a lot of egg and butter and its perfect for breakfast on Christmas mornings. I achieved a cloud like look with dusting the bread thickly with powdered sugar baking.
This bread with its delicate spices and almonds resembles much more my idea of an almond cloud
I baked some Madeleines for the christening of my little niece. I posted the recipe for the normal Maeleines some time ago, but at this time of the year I had the feeling that only one sort of Madeleines would be to boring. And so I seasoned the Madeleines with some cacao and gingerbread spice.
And so I had a delicious Christmas-Madeleines.
A homemade Hot Chocolate Mix is a simple but delicious little Christmas gift. In the cookbook “Süße Geschenke aus der Küche: Leckereien backen und verpacken” I found not only nice recipes like a Hot Chocolate Mix flavoured with cinnamon and cardamom but also great Ideas for beautiful decorated glasses, bags and boxes. After I prepared the “normal” Hot Chocolate Mix, which I liked very much, too, I started to experiment with the recipe to create a orange flavoured mix.
I had this idea because some of my colleagues like an orange flavoured cacao from Quai Sud very much to flavour their coffee with it. But this cacao is expensive and hard to get. So I thought a homemade hot chocolate mix would be a great Christmas gift for them.
The best way to get the orange flavour into the chocolate mix is to grated a lot of orange peel, dry it in the oven and ground it together with sugar in a food processor.
I like the taste of the orange flavoured hot chocolate mix very much – I hope that my colleagues like them, too.
Its already the third advent and I still did not post a single Christmas cookie recipe! I have to change this immediately!
But until now I bake the traditional cookies in our family: Vanilla crescents, Liebesgrübchen, Black and white Kisses and Linzer Rings. But in the December Magazine of “Schrot and Korn” there were a cookie recipe that temped me very much. Little Plum Packets a butter cookie filled with plum butter and ground nuts.
They looked very complicated but when I read the recipe I realise that they are much easier to do the I thought. You just has to cut out stars, place a little bit of the filling in the middle and fold the pointed ends of the star over the filling and close everything with a hazelnut.
The cookies are great: a soft fruit and nut filling with hints of vanilla and cinnamon. I like them very much!