Benito's blog

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.

We will be visiting friends tomorrow, and I wanted to bring a loaf of bread. We also ran out of bread, don’t know how that happens 😂, so decided to bake two loaves. I rarely bake more than one loaf. Since one of my Pullman pans is in Fort Lauderdale, I prepared the dough and after bulk fermentation divided it, shaped the one loaf, and cold retarded the other dough overnight to bake today. This worked out quite well.

We were out of bread again since we’ve been away so much and I haven’t had the time to bake as much as I like to.  I also didn’t have much time to plan and do something different.  When I realized that I hadn’t done a 100% whole wheat bread in a while I pulled out my tried and true 100% WW SD Hokkaido Milk bread formula which is now onto a 4.0 version.  I have to say that this is one of my best bakes in sometime.  Usually there are somethings that could have been better with each bake, some tweak that I’d so next time.

I haven’t baked in quite a while with the traveling that we have recently been doing.  I was tasked with bringing rolls for our family dinner at my sister’s new place up in the Muskokas and this was going to be our first visit since she and her husband moved there.  Everyone is a fan of milk rolls but I wanted to make them slightly different than I have for dinners past so added red Leicester cheese to the dough and the top of the rolls.  They came out pretty well although I have have underdeveloped the dough somewhat limiting the oven spring.

I just baked this today and I think it is my favourite pan bread that I’ve made so far.  I absolutely love the crumb, nicely open for a pan loaf.  The flavour from the toasted walnuts, toasted sesame seed oil, touch of honey and the 20% whole spelt are just fabulous.  There is a mild tang since I did not use a stiff sweet levain to suppress the acidity, but instead used a regular stiff levain.  This bread is so soft yet the crust is pretty thin and crisp.

I’m working on improving my spelt baguettes by slowly increasing the hydration 1% at a time trying not to overshoot and have a disaster LOL.  At only 9% of the total flour, whole spelt should give some good whole grain flavour while also helping the dough’s extensibility.  Also this should help achieve an open crumb which is quite desirable for baguettes.  I don’t think I’m quite there yet with this bake.  I also had some trouble releasing one of the baguettes from the couche causing some degassing.

I’m am behind on my posting here.  I baked this loaf a while back and it is already gone.  I recently found ground black sesame seeds at a local Asian market, this saves me the trouble of grinding the seeds myself.  I love adding the ground seeds to the dough as it gives the crumb a lovely grayish colour and a great black sesame flavour to the bread.  If you cannot find already ground black sesame seeds, then I would use my coffee grinder to grind the seeds.  You’ll just need to clean the grinder before and after use.