April 9th, 2009

Brioche Tropézienne

Category Cake & Pastry  Tags:   6 Responses

I planed to bake brioche since months. In my new favorite baking book “Advanced Bread and Pastry” I found three diffrent recipes, using no preferment, sponge or prefermented dough. I liked the sponge most because I had not to rember to put the dough into the fridge after one hour.

While filing through the diffrent recipes I found the shaping option Brioche Tropézienne. These Brioche filled with Vanillacream and with streusel topping sounds perfect for my mums birthday. So I decided to do half of the Brioche as Brioche Tropézienne.

The look of the Brioche Tropézienne turned out not as nice as I expected. Part of the streusel topping slipped of the top. Maybe because I do not bake it in small round pans  like the recipe asked for. Maybe that is a good argument for buying a muffinform, because nevertheless they taste great! Continue reading →

April 2nd, 2009

Ciabatta

Category Bread  Tags:   34 Responses

Somewhere in germany, in the middle of the night: a dark figure sneaks out of the sleeping room and tiptoes into the kitchen. The alarm clock shows three o’clock. In the kitchen, the figure opens quietly cupboards and take out bowls, yeast and flour and prepares a poolish.

Then I tiptoe back to bed, think about if this is a case of “acute baking delirium“. But I plan to bake ciabatta this afternoon, so who  cares 😉

The Ciabatta that Steve from Bread cetera bake using the douple flour addition/ douple hydration, is very impressiv. White open crump, perfect crust, thats how a ciabatta should look like. And that exactly what I want to bake, too! I baked ciabatta maybe two or three times before, and was never satisfied.I had some biger air cells, but most of the crump was more or less dense. Continue reading →

March 27th, 2009

Pasta with mixed Nuts

Category main courses, Pasta    3 Responses

We like nuts and seeds very much. That is the reason why I collect a lot of open packages with different nuts in my cupboard. But what should I do with this very small amounts?

When I read the recipe Pasta “Cosa nostra” from Petra (Chili und Ciabatta) I thougt: Yes, that is the perfect recipe for me.

But when I checked my stock I realise, that I had everything else, but not the ingredients the recipe asked for. So I had to be creative. The result is simple but delicious. With a salad and a glass of white wine it is a perfect start into the weekend. Continue reading →

March 25th, 2009

English muffins

Category Bread    23 Responses

I ran into them twice last week: here and here. And could not get them out of my head. In germany I never found something like this, just something called Toastis from the brand Golden Toast. But I bought it just once and never again. I do not like bread that taste mostly like the plastic bag it is sold in. But the pictures in the blogs look so delcious, so I thought that it would be a good idea to give them a second try.  And the muffins turned out well, a little bit sour, a little bit sweet. The recipe is a cross between the sourdough-muffins from Wild Yeast and the recipe from Le Pètrin. Continue reading →

March 21st, 2009

Chocolate Orange Soufflé

Category Dessert    One Response

I told already last week, that I plan to bake the Chocolate Orange Soufflé from IMAfoodblog . And this weekend I had the time to do it finally. But to bad I was to slow with making a picture, so thats all I can present:

As you can see we liked it very much 😀 And because I do exceptionally the recipe without changing anything,  I do not copy Nicks detailed discripton for this delicious dessert. Just go to his side and have a look by yourself.

March 18th, 2009

Mixed Seedbread and Onion/Mushroomquiche

Category Bread, main courses  Tags:   5 Responses

Last weekend we were invited to the birthday party of a friend of mine. The evening before she called a little bit worried, because she realised that the party food was not vegetarian, except off salate and bread. I offered instantly to bring a quiche, pleased that I had a reason to bake.

But then I could not decide: onions or mushrooms? And I planed to bake bread also , for that I prepared already a preferment. So what to do?

But then I had an idea. Why not make one dough, then splitt it and make bread with two-thirds and the quiche with the other third? Continue reading →

March 16th, 2009

BBD#18: Chapati

Category Bread, Bread Baking Day    4 Responses

felt really troubled when I saw the topic of BBD#18: Quick Breads. My first though was: “But I never do quick breads. I do not LIKE quick breads.”

And the suggested variant Soda-Bread I tried once and did not like to repeat it. Bread means to me yeast and time, a lot of time! And the other recommendations like muffins, wafles and pancakes are for me no breads either, but something like cake. But this weekend I baked muffins, so I send the post to Fun & Food Blog

But then, while preparing an indian dinner, it dawns on me: chapati are quick breads! So good, that it is allowed to hand in two posts!

The recipe is in cups, what is unusual for me. But the recipe calls for cups, and that is unusual for me, too, I followed the recipe. 😉 Continue reading →

March 15th, 2009

Chocolate custard muffins

Category Cake & Pastry    One Response

I planned to try a chocolate soufflé this weekend, but I catched a mean cold (again). So I spend the whole saturday in bed, and sunday i was better, but not well enough for kitchen experiments. So I postpone the soufflé to the next weekend and choose a simple recipe instead.

I want to try the chocolate custard muffins from Dan Lepard for a long time. I just had no neutral oil, so I exchanged the oil for butter. But that did not spoil the result, the muffins are very fluffy.

Continue reading →

March 11th, 2009

Croissants and Pain au chocolate

Category Bread  Tags:   17 Responses

My Boyfrind is always very happy, when I bake pain au chocolate for breakfast on sunday. I like crossinats more, but he loves them, but – and that’s important- they have to contain TWO bars of chocolate. He looked very suspiciously at the recipe for pain au chocolate in my copy of Bertinets “Crust” and declared it as wrong, because in this recipe the pain contains only ONE chocolatebar!

Steve of Bread cetera use two chocolatebars, too and his technique to roll them into the dough seems better then the one I used untill now. I always had the problem, that some of the pain au chocolate unfold in the oven again, so I used his methode this time.

When I roll the butter into the dough, I normally give the dough one hour to rest in the fridge between two rounds of rolling and folding, but this time I had some time pressure, so I decided to follow the recipe of “Crust” and reduce it to half an hour.

Not a good idea! Although I get a light interior, it was not so nice layered like normal. Next time, I will use the one hour cooling periode between the rolling again! Continue reading →

March 1st, 2009

Ceriola – same recipe, new methode

Category Rolls    16 Responses

The Ceriola I baked last week were very good. A nice crispy crust and a airy crump, looking as nice as rolls from the bakery. The best rolls I ever bake!

But one single person testing the rolls declared, that the rolls are fine, but the rolls from the bakery are more fluffy. Ok, that arouse my ambition. The recipe itself was fine, I was sure about this. But maybe the methode was wrong? I recalled a post Steve from Bread cetera published some weeks ago. In the Post “More Musings on Mixing” he showed an intressing technique to prepare dough.

Like him, I used the whisking attachment to mix the batter consisting of the sourdough, the yeast, all of the water and a little amount of flour, untill the mixture becomed aerated. Now I changed to the dough hook to mix shortly the rest of the flour with batter. After a resting periode for autolysis, the dough was kneaded untill the gluten developed. That happend really fast, one minute after kneading the dough started to become smooth and after another four minutes the gluten was well developed. Continue reading →