I wanted to do a slightly different sourdough focaccia using my homemade red miso. This bread has both miso and toasted sesame seed oil in it. I also used 10% whole kamut along with bread flour just for a bit more complexity. The toppings I kept pretty simple a drizzle of red miso with olive oil, rings of red peppers, yellow cherry tomatoes, onions and black sesame seeds.
A friend of mine has made these for us many years ago and I remember them fondly. His homemade versions were far better than any of the store bought ones I’ve ever had. I finally got around to trying to make these myself. Although they’re called cakes, they are really pastries with a pineapple jam encased in a short crust wrapping. I purchased a mooncake press/mold to shape these. I can do a better job with shaping these before pressing them as several of them had cracks after baking. As typical of Asian desserts, these are not too sweet but tasty.
I felt like baking baguettes this week and decided to do something just a bit different, so I present sourdough baguette noir. So the colour and flavour of these baguettes do not come from charcoal like baguette au charbon vegetal. No the colour comes from ground toasted black sesame powder that is added to the well developed dough at the end of mixing. This brings an interesting colour to both the crust and the crumb. The fat from the sesame seeds also cause the crumb to be softer and the crust to be thinner and super crisp compared to my usual SD baguettes.
I recently had a birthday and decided last minute to bake myself a cake since we were meeting friends for dinner. I LOVE chocolate and remembered seeing this recipe by the awesome Stella Parks (BraveTart). It turns out that this is a super easy super delicious cake that is actually vegan and almost flourless (no eggs or dairy). Also what flour is in it is all whole wheat. It is practically healthy especially for a cake. The cake is super tender but I’m still shocked that something with such a simple ingredient list can bake into a cake.
This is my take on what is apparently a traditional Venezuelan Christmas bread that turns out to be super yummy. As I said before, my various takes on Hokkaido SD milk bread prove to be so flexible. I used my 35% WW version for this bake. The dough gets rolled out and then ham, sliced green olives stuffed with pimentos and finally raisins and applied. It is all rolled up into a cylinder and then eventually baked. Did I say it is yummy, salty and a bit sweet from the raisins.
My first bake since returning home for us, although I made two, one is for a present. We love seeds and nuts in bread so wanted to have a nutty bread. I toasted the walnuts and also used toasted walnut oil in lieu of butter to maximize the nutty flavour. I also last minute decided to top the loaves with black sesame seeds because why not! I usually weigh the dough when I divide, this time I did not and obviously didn’t do a good job by eye LOL.
So I needed to bake more presents and planned to repeat my star shaped bake, but last minute decided to use a more traditional rolled bun shaping. I also made some creamed cheese icing to top these. My partner and I got to quality control this bake as I cut one bun out and can report that they are quite yummy. although you definitely get the cinnamon, the ginger carries through the finish. As expected, the crumb is fluffy, shreddable and so soft. I’ll keep this recipe for another Christmas to bake again.
I’ve wanted to make a bread done with this star shaping for quite sometime so decided that Christmas baking was the perfect time to try it out. It is fun and pretty easy overall to do. Because I needed this to be done fairly quickly I didn’t convert this recipe to sourdough and instead just used IDY.
This doesn’t quite follow the guidelines of the Infinity Bread for the Community Bake, but it is my contribution. My non wheat flour isn’t up to the 33% range that is in the write up. I chose buckwheat flour which I toasted well to bring out the nutty flavour to the maximum. I used the toasted buckwheat flour as all the flour in a tangzhong. The texture of the tangzhong is different from what I’m used it, it was clumpy in lumps rather than one big mass.
Close friends of our send us rhubarb every spring so I wanted to make something to bring them when we were visiting last weekend. I came up with a sweet bun with a sour cherry and rhubarb filling along with a lemon icing. They turned out quite well.
