Benito's blog

A friend of mine on Instagram was kind enough to share her formula for sourdough and hybrid sourdough cruffins/croissants.  My first attempt at making a laminated dough was my Danish loaf.  I unfortunately fermented the shaped dough in its pan at slightly too high a temperature so the better melted and was absorbed by the dough.  With that in mind, I chose a season with cooler weather, kept my range hood exhaust fan on, and opened my balcony door a bit to keep my kitchen temperature around 72°F.

I believe I found this recipe in Bake From Scratch if I’m not mistaken.  I love the idea of emulating a jelly filled dough in a cake.  The filling is homemade and although I increased the fruit in the recipe significantly and dropped the sugar by 50%, the filling I think could still be less sweet.  I like making extra jam for my morning yoghurt which is why I doubled the amount of fruit.  I also used frozen fruit since fresh is very expensive this time of year.  I haven’t sliced the cake yet since it is for a dinner party tonight.

I loved my last loaf but when I made it, my starter hadn’t been refreshed enough times to rev it up after my time away.  I loved the bread but thought it would be better with a more vigorous fermentation.  Things went much more as expected with this bake.  This took a total of 3 hours less time despite the same temperatures for fermentation. As well, the rise was much greater despite the shorter time, no surprise.  The final rise at the time of baking was 115%.

More Christmas baking today, I baked a pair of apple cranberry holiday cakes with lemon icing for more gifting.  I had a little extra batter that didn’t fit in the loaf pans so put that in two ramekins so we could taste this cake.

Now that I’ve finished my last locum of the year I finally have time to get some Christmas baking done for the people I like to thank each year.  Today’s bake was for the staff in our condo.

I’m using my standing sweet roll dough, which doesn’t have any added sugar to the mix other than that in the Stiff Sweet Levain.  As usual I use a stiff sweet levain in order to reduce the sourness of the bread.  The filling has cinnamon along with Chinese five spice and my homemade miso.  The frosting is a cream cheese frosting with a bit of miso for colour and umami.

I mentioned in my cake post that I was making purple sweet potato sourdough milk rolls, here they are.  Utilizing a stiff sweet levain to reduce the sour tang once again and adding a tangzhong to ensure fluffiness and to delay staling.  These turned out really well.  I love the colour of the soft shreddable crumb along with the small blisters on the crust.  For convenience I did a cold retard at the end of bulk so I could start these the day before our dinner party and then bake them the day of.

We are hosting some of our friends for dinner tonight.  In addition to the purple sweet potato SD milk rolls I have fermenting, I made this gingerbread layer cake with cream cheese frosting.  This recipe is care of Bake From Scratch.  The cake recipe that follows is for one 8” round cake, so I doubled it for this layer cake.  The frosting recipe would be more than enough for a three layer cake, so I halved it for this two layer cake.

My first fruitcake was a Bara Brith, this is a fruitcake that Southern Living says is for those who don’t like fruitcake.  I like the variety of fruit that it has in it along with the nuts.  The recipe calls for apricots, dates, raisins, tart dried cherries, candied cherries, cranberries, apples, candied peel, slivered almonds and pecans.  I used extra apricots and cranberries and didn’t use dates or apples.  

My starter was fed only once after returning from our trip to Florida when I made the levain for this bread.  As a result the fermentation was much slower than usual.  However, this bread baked up just fine.  This dough was enriched with the addition of some wildflower honey and toasted sesame oil.  I added both black and golden toasted sesame seeds, thus the triple sesame seeds.  This has 20% sprouted whole Spelt which adds a great flavour and extensibility to the dough.

I’ve seen these Dutch Babies before but never had one let alone made one.  Most of the ones I have seen are sweet, I decided to make this savory one for us tonight for dinner.  It was quite easy and delicious.  It is sort of like a pancake but made more like a Yorkshire pudding in a way.