Monthly Archives: March 2012

March 31st, 2012

Seed bread with Amaranth and Polenta

Category Bread  Tags: , , , , , , ,   6 Responses

Saatenbrot mit Polenta und Amaranth

It’s time for another bread recipe after I posted so much sweet stuff in the last week. This Seed-Bread contains besides roasted poppy seeds, sesame and flaxseeds also amaranth seeds and polenta, which gave a nice aromatic taste to the bread. Amaranth is a good source for essential amino acids which are missing in wheat and corn and contains a lot of iron, magnesium, phosphorus, copper, and manganese. Its a very healthy “pseudo grain” and I try to involve it more often in our cooking.

The dough is prepared similar to the recipe of the sourdough bread with roasted oats. The gluten network is developed with folding the dough. No need for a food processor for preparing this bread.

The hot soaker I prepared with the polenta and the seeds adds moisture to the crumb and the bread stays fresh really long. But if you do not need two loaves of 1.2 kg each, it would be a good idea to half the recipe.

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March 29th, 2012

Chocolate Cherry Cake

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , ,   One Response

Schoko-Kirsch-SchnittenThe Boyfriend had his last day at the place where he worked as student help for the last five years. Next month we will begin with his practical semester. To make the farewell a little bit sweeter, we baked some chocolate cherry cake and cheese puff pastry swirls.

The chocolate cherry cake is colleague-approved, I baked them some month ago as a “Doktor cake” for my colleague Alex, too. It is a delicious but easy to prepare cake which can be transported without being damaged.

I found the original recipe on lecker.de, but I take the amount of sugar (450g!) as an suggestion and decided to use 200g less sugar then the recipe said. Even then the cake was sweet. I think, you could even reduce the sugar amount for another 50g without troubles. I used one egg less than the recipe asked for, too. This fits more to the content of our fridge :-).

The result is a delicious cake, with a lot of chocolate and fruits, a new favourite!

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March 22nd, 2012

Cheescake Squares

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags: , , , ,   6 Responses

Quark-Ecken In the next days I will post some recipes which are waiting to get on my blog since I started writing. This is the first one:

Sometimes inspiration will be followed by inspiration. That happened to me when Clair posted a comment to my almond honey crescents in which she wrote that the recipe inspired her to crescents with a cheesecake filling. This comment make me then think of this cheesecake squares.

The cheesecake squares are sweet pastry on basis of a rich yeast dough, made with a poolish for a complex flavour and water roux for a soft crumb.

The filling I used is similar to the filling of my favourite cheesecake recipe.

The cheesecake squares are a beautiful snack with a cup of coffee on a Sunday afternoons.

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March 20th, 2012

Fast Curd/Quark Rolls

Category hand kneaded, Rolls  Tags: , , ,   10 Responses

Quarkbrötchen I did it. I submitted my Ph. D. thesis yesterday. A great part of the work is now done. Now I have to prepare my defense in may. So I will prepare a talk and start reading paper and learning once again in some days. But at the moment I try to relax and enjoy the luxury of not writing 16 hours a day.

During this 16 hours-writing days in the last days before submission, baking bread had to be something fast. But to stop baking at all was no alternative, I needed it to keep myself grounded. The recipe for the Quark/Curd rolls is a fast one, at least in my eyes. It does not require a Starter, Poolish or Pâte fermentée , so you can immediately start with preparing the dough. It only require a Milk roux, which needs about half an hour for preparing and cooling down. I decided to call the Water Roux in recipes where I prepare it with milk “Milk roux”. It fits better to the ingredients used.

The fast curd rolls are very soft and stay fresh very long due to curd and milk roux. The curd give the roll a little tanginess, balancing the missing  flavours from a starter or prefement. Perfect for days with less time!

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March 11th, 2012

Roll Rustiko

Category hand kneaded, Overnight, Rolls  Tags: , , ,   12 Responses

RusticoChristine mentioned in a comment to the Overnight-Krustis, that a recipe for kneading with hand would be nice. That is true, of course and so I tested for the next rolls a variation without kneading by a machine. Really kneading was not necessary either, because the gluten network was developed by folding the dough every 30 minutes for 2 hours. After folding 3 times the dough had a nice silky sureface, telling me that the gluten network was now fine.

For Forming the rolls I tried a new Idea. After folding the dough into a square I used my dough scrapper to cut it into smaller squares. After I placed the rolls on baking tray, I used the dough scrapper again, pressing it lengthwise for about 2/3 into the roll. Then I left the rolls to proof overnight. The next morning I just had to place the tray in the hot oven without fussing over slashing rolls. They had a nice ovenspring and cracked nicely along the imprint I made with the dough scrapper.

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March 1st, 2012

Sahne-Brioche

Category hand kneaded, Overnight, Rolls  Tags: , , , , ,   27 Responses

Sahne-BriocheBrioche, that is a featherlike Breakfast pastry. The recipes vary, from rich to very rich with more than 50% Butter and Egg in relation to the flour. That tastes good, but it’s really rich. So I hesitated to bake them, but then I thought about a leaner variation. My Brioche contains 2 Eggs for 500g flour and about 20% Fat from Butter and cream. I heated the cream with some flour for a Water Roux (or more correctly Cream Roux) so I could add a higher amount of liquid to the dough. The amount of yeast is very low so I could leave the dough to proof overnight on the counter.

I do not own Briocheforms, so I bake them in a Muffin pan. I do some as typical Brioche a tête and some as bubble top like in this recipe from Dorrie Greenspan I found on Bon Appétit. To prevent the brioche from sticking to the pan I placed each Brioche on a baking paper squares and transferred them with the paper into the pans.

Due to long kneading and water roux the crumb is soft and regular and can be tore into long fibres. The taste is complex, buttery and creamy – perfect for a sunday morning breakfast.

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