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Santa....there is some kind of a mistake....when i made my list I had a 20qt mixer and not 20qts of mixer...can you swing around on your way back from the other coast and make thing right...????

HOHOHO.....

I just took my paska out of the oven to cool and snapped these pictures.  It's a traditional polish bread for Christmas Eve.  It's also enormous.  We have enough for dinner and use the leftovers for french toast on Christmas morning.

Hi to everyone of the family TFL, anyone involved in bakery or kitchen should know about mise en place (even though is not french speaking) I found somewhere a translation I really liked: "get organized"...for the newbies is having everything measured, chopped, etc in order start a recipe.

Based on the experience of yesterday, I recommend everyone mise en place: I started the 3 days long recipe of the panettone (only sourdough) and already had the first dough

We have added Irish Shortbread cookies to our collection of holiday treats, the other favorite around here being the Magic Squares - although this recipe we've also called "Zoo Cookies", because they used to have these amazing cookies at the zoo, always expertly decorated to look like various zoo animals, which I admit to having gone sometimes with the cookie being the prime attraction. Then they seem to have quit selling them there, so I had to find out what sort of cookies they were to satisfy the occasional craving.

These are the gifts we distributed yesterday and today.

The two gymnastics coaches of my daughter got these braided brioches (or Zopf):

And to our three neighbors we gave these:

I never tasted a Stollen let alone thought I would make one! I first got the notion to bake one when I was reading a blog about French folds and hand mixing of breads.

Here is my authentic Scottish Shortbread recipe which came from Margaret McLaren, a Scottish friend from when I lived near Atlanta back in 1967.

3 sticks butter (I use Challenge unsalted)room temp.

1 heaping cup powdered (icing) sugar

1 egg yolk

4 cups ap flour

Preheat oven to 300*, cut wax paper circles to fit 8"-9" cake pans. I wonder whether parchment would work?

Over the past weekend I thought I'd get into one of my books that I haven't baked from yet, "Bread" by Jeffrey Hammelman.  Being a sourdough fanatic I decided to start with a sourdough and selected the Vermont sourdough, which appears to be one of Hammelman's standbys.  I had great results with the formula and this bread may become one of my favorites if I can repeat the results.  I followed the formula fairly close, however following the mix the dough felt a bit on the dry side and I added about a tablespoon of water.  Once the dough had a chance to autolyse and I did t