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This year I sent all my children and their families, and a couple of dear friends a loaf of sourdough, and a sampling of cookies: Welsh Cakes, Date-Nut Pinwheels--reminiscent of their great-grandmother--and biscotti, a recent discovery and new favorite of mine.

After a week of marathon baking:

10 loaves sourdough--our oven can only bake two at a time,

19 dozen Welsh Cakes,

14 dozen Date-Nut Pinwheels,

14 dozen Biscotti (Parmesan-Blackpepper, Cherry Pecan, Hazlenut-Citron, and Amaretto-Almond)

The kids no longer living with us, I get late into Christmas mode. No Adventskranz (traditional wreath with 4 candles lit for each Sunday before Christmas) on the table, no calendar window to open. Holiday baking happens usually in a rush on the 23. and 24th, but this year we are invited for Christmas dinner, and nobody's around to eat all the goodies (not counting a dog that would LOVE to help us with that task!).

This week has been the week of baking lots of Christmas cookies - this year I've been doing the cookie baking (Floyd's still in charge of supplying our dinner breads ;) Im nowhere near making those pretty sourdoughs myself!)

After my first attempt in artisan baking my family promptly volunteered me for garlic bread duty for the family spaghetti lunch Xmas eve...I figured I'd just do another batch like I did for my introduction and then garlic it but then I decided I wanted to make rolls for dinner at my father-in-law's Xmas eve and lunch at my mother-in-law's Xmas day as well.

 Yields 2 large tinned loaves @ 1064g each

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to "take it up a level."   I had hit the wall on getting properly shaped and slashed naturally leavened loaves.    LindyD's recent post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam on generating steam set off a lightbulb in my head.  The symptoms I have been trying to cure are cuts that open a little and then seal over, and a split side.   I had been convinced that this was caused by un

This is my first Yeast only miltigrain wholewheat from Hamelman's BREAD under Preferments:

I accidentally used 1T extra of sea salt. To my surprise the bread even tasted better!

Happy Holidays to everyone!

During our last trip to Portland I lured my (for good reasons) wary husband to go with me to "Rabelais", with the sanctimonious promise "just wanting to look what's new". Rabelais is cooks' equivalent to an opium den, a famous cookbooks-only store; they carry probably every English language (and several foreign language) cookbook on the market, plus many antique ones.

My second batch of pandoros came out very nice as well! I used Glezer's recipe. It was amazing how difficult it was to find cocoa-butter in this town. Especially when you know that Amsterdam is the #1 harbour for shipping the stuff around the world... In certain weather conditions we can smell the coacoa from our balcony, but for buying the cocoa-butter I ended up going out of town to a very old fashioned drugstore in a nearby city. The oddities of globalization, I guess... Anyway. here it is: my second batch of pandoros!

On X-mas we'll be having a cheese-thingie going on with friends, so I made my first 4 pounder today. It looks quite spectacular I think:

This dough is quite soft, and I forgot to fold it 3x early on in the ferment, so i did one fold and at the end of the 3 hour ferment and hoped for the best. It came out flatter than I wanted, but it did get a substantial oven spring, so I'm  happy.