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The family was in town,which meant I had two things: free babysitting and more mouths to feed. That meant it was time for a baking bonanza!

I made:

Corn Bread


Orange Oatmeal Bread

I used the scone recipe posted by qahtan recently, when my grocery store had new strawberries for 98 cents a pound over the mothers day weekend, but that's about all I've done lately. I think I'm going to work on some baking powder biscuits and try using different fats. I'm not afraid of lard, so I'll try that along with vegetable shortening and butter versions. I've been looking around at another site, and would like to throw it into the links section, but I don't know how or if I can do that.

A little bit of everything: oatmeal raisin cookies, banana bread, and pain sur poolish.

I tried baking some of the poolish bread in a ciabatta sized loaf instead of a baguette. We'll try it tonight.

I can't decide whether I am just really bad at shaping and scoring or whether my dough is too wet to score. I keep trying to score it but ending up w/ the blade stuck in the goo. So my loaves aren't pretty, but they've been tasting great.

I have always been fascinated by artisan breads, i wanted to explore the world of hand crafted breads knowing every single detaile of this art .So suddenly at age 30, i decided to educate my self by diging websites and searching through cookbooks and wishing to end with courses.
Normally i bake on weekends either for my home or familly gatherings. And the following photos shows my first attempt with pesto bread made from the (Italian Baker) by Carol Field.

My first attempt at creating a sourdough starter. I used the raisin water technique because I wasn't sure I wanted some of the other things that could be found floating in the air around here. This is approx 48 hours after I started it. It now sits safely in my refrigerator until I get past the spring allergy season LOL

While coming home from a computer conference last week I managed to hit a couple of artisan bakeries.

The best one I stopped at was Wild Flour Bakery in Freestone, California (halfway between Sebastopol and Bodega in west Sonoma County... "the wine country"... find it on my bakery finder).

I was going to make the valentine's day pain rapide au chocolat tonight because my boy wanted me to buy him chocolate chocolate chip muffins at the grocery. Well, I just couldn't see myself making mashed potatoes just for that, so I went to google and dug up two C-C-C muffin recipes and between the three recipes I came up with this. And they're quite good, like the bread recipe, not too sweet, but in the middle they have some melty chocolate chip goo that makes them just right.

I made another batch of bagels last night. My son dug the blueberry bagel we got from Safeway last week, so I decided to make a third of the batch with blueberries (bagel snobs: insert derisive comments here).

I thawed the blueberries and then tried mixing them in with the risen dough. Bad idea:



Yes, it does look like entrails. It really made quite a mess, with little strips of purple bagel dough refusing to stick together.

Here's the poolish in the AM:



According to Artisan Baking Across America, the puckering in the middle is a sign that it is ready to use.

The baked loaves:



They were acceptable, but not great, this weeknd. I think I made the dough a bit too dry. I'll try again soon.

Today's batch of Pain Sur Poolish turned out pretty good. Not as good as last time, I don't think. We left the house during primary fermentation, so I threw it into the fridge for a couple of hours. I'm not sure I let the dough warm back up enough afterward. Also, the dough was definitely drier than last time. The wetness of the dough last time was part of what I think contributed to it being so good. So, more work to be done before I've got this one down.

So, I don't forget, the recipe I used was roughly the Village Baker recipe:

3/4 teaspoon instant yeast