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Decided to proof a little longer to see if there was a difference in crumb and taste.

As soon as it cools I will slice and taste. It is slightly darker on the outside which I like but I don't know if my sainted wife will.

Cheers,

Wingnut

P.S.

This is my last post about my trip before returning to posts about managing the site and baking, I promise! -Floyd

As far as I can recall, we ate Polish food exclusive on this trip.  Not out of necessity, mind you: at least in cities like Warszawa and Kraków you can dine on sushi, burgers, Italian food, phó, pretty much anything you like now. Chains like Starbucks, McDonalds, Hard Rock Cafe, and KFC are about as common as in the rest of Europe.  We didn’t take this trip to eat American or Italian or Japanese though, we went to eat Polish.

Today's bake was the Pain au Levain from Hamelman's Bread. It is the "whitest" bread I bake - the opposite end of a spectrum from the 80% rye I recently posted - yet I also characterize it as a "real bread." 

It took a few days to recover from bread overload I got at the Boston TFL meetup (thanks so much for organizing, Varda). Time to try something new.  Pumpkin seed bread from the Seven Stars Bakery in Providence, RI as described by MC Farine has been on the list for a while.

So today i made a Cinnamon Brown Sugar Babka. I am quite new to baking and i'm fairly certain i'm not taking the regular route a novice baker would. I've made a few loaves of regular bread, some Pita bread that was quite heavenly (along with some Pita chips), and now today a Babka. I'm thinking about a baguette or perhaps some bagels next. Anyway here are some pictures of this lovely piece of heaven! 

This is off topic, I recognize, but this was only the second time in eight years I stepped away from TFL for more than a day or two, so I hope you'll allow me to indulge in a couple of off topic posts!  Hopefully they'll be a of interest to some of you.  -Floyd

It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized how long it had been since we last visited Poland.  Seventeen years.  

After baking out take on Karin’s (Hanseata) great post with her take on Maria Speck’s Aroma Bread here:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32830/aroma-bread-love-story

One of the things I like about this nice yeasty cake is its versatility. You can fill it with just about anything you can imagine: the lazy amongst us will just spread some berry jelly or apple-sauce, the more adventurous will chop apples, grind walnuts and start mincing cloves. And on top, well, just about anything you can think of. The most popular is a streusel, but I've seen chocolate chips, sprinkles and even whole plums. Me? I like the simple elegance of a chocolate filling and sugar water on top.

I've baked this recipe twice before, but this one i wanted to exclude the yeast and extend the bulk fermentation. Actually, this bake was sort of a controlled test that was aimed at verifying whether or not i could bake during my working weekdays, which i'am happy to say: YES, it works!

First day eve, I started feeding my starter one day to creat the levain for the next day;

Second day, when i came back from work i mixed the levain into a dough and retarded the dough after 2.5 hours;

Third day after work, i preshaped, shaped and baked.