Blog posts

We are hosting some of our friends for dinner tonight.  In addition to the purple sweet potato SD milk rolls I have fermenting, I made this gingerbread layer cake with cream cheese frosting.  This recipe is care of Bake From Scratch.  The cake recipe that follows is for one 8” round cake, so I doubled it for this layer cake.  The frosting recipe would be more than enough for a three layer cake, so I halved it for this two layer cake.

My first fruitcake was a Bara Brith, this is a fruitcake that Southern Living says is for those who don’t like fruitcake.  I like the variety of fruit that it has in it along with the nuts.  The recipe calls for apricots, dates, raisins, tart dried cherries, candied cherries, cranberries, apples, candied peel, slivered almonds and pecans.  I used extra apricots and cranberries and didn’t use dates or apples.  

I first had these spinach pies (or pita, as it's called there) when hiking near Ljuboten a couple of years back. A very old lady invited us to her hut for a pita made with nettles and cheese. That was the best pie I've ever eaten. Since then, I've tried to replicate it at home with spinach (no success with Belgian nettles - tasted very grassy).

The pie uses a dough that is just a little thicker than phyllo. 

Dough for one pie

My starter was fed only once after returning from our trip to Florida when I made the levain for this bread.  As a result the fermentation was much slower than usual.  However, this bread baked up just fine.  This dough was enriched with the addition of some wildflower honey and toasted sesame oil.  I added both black and golden toasted sesame seeds, thus the triple sesame seeds.  This has 20% sprouted whole Spelt which adds a great flavour and extensibility to the dough.

Panettone season is starting up again --- exciting, huh? I know some people bake it year-round, but I think my last one this year was last January and one colomba in the spring. It's a multi-day project, so for me, I need to be able to shoehorn it into my schedule and this year it didn't happen. But this week that finally changed and I tried something new that worked so well I thought I should share.

Today's bake: Pumpkinseed Rye   Kurbiskernbrot (Germany)

Source: The Rye Baker by Stanley Ginsberg

Notes: Increased dough to make 3 loaves @ 721gr each.

Substitutions: None

I’ve seen these Dutch Babies before but never had one let alone made one.  Most of the ones I have seen are sweet, I decided to make this savory one for us tonight for dinner.  It was quite easy and delicious.  It is sort of like a pancake but made more like a Yorkshire pudding in a way.

Every now and then I go after open lacy crumb in my breads. Now, I'll be first to admit that I love my bagels, flat-breads, whole-wheat and all rye breads too! So, a lot of the time I'm not interested in open crumb at all. But, the first time I made a sourdough bread that had a dark, almost-burnt crust, and a light interior that was like a "web of crumb" held up by the crust, it was a bit of an "aha" moment. So, that's what other bakers were going on about, it isn't only an Instagram thing!

Not a misprint, but I thought why not use two bigas? One yeasted for loft, one SD for flavour. Both in the same tub, to save space and washing up. So that's how it went!

 Both bigas made in the kenwood with K beater. I refreshed my SD starter prior to use at 100% to make mxing it into the biga easier.

Overall dough hydration was 69%.

I'm beginning to wonder whether I bake better when the weather is cool.  This is the second bake in a row to turn out very well.

The bread is based on a rye levain that matures overnight.  It also has a hot soaker that consists of cracked rye, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, oats, and all of the salt for the formula.  For this bake, I subbed bulgur wheat for the cracked rye since I have more on hand than I can easily use up other ways.  The soaker is allowed to rest overnight.