Email Me Subscribe to the Feed

BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah

Posted by Emily Tags: , , ,

Poor Man's Brioche

So I’m still going at a normal pace for the BBA Challenge, but I’m behind on actually posting about it. I keep going back and forth about whether I even want to post about every single bread and that leads to more procrastination. But I think ultimately, I do want written and photographic evidence that I did in fact bake every single bread in this book, in order. I may do these combo posts for bread I have less to say about, but for instance, I have LOTS to say about the Ciabatta I did this week, so that’s going to be it’s own post (hopefully next week).

Continued

bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark   

1 Comment
      Most Popular Recipes Recipe Photo Gallery      

Molten Chocolate Cakes

Posted by Emily Tags: , , , , , ,

Molten Chocolate Cakes

I love chocolate cake. It’s one of my biggest cravings, one that pops up over and over again (almost always late at night). But in the last few years, I’ve noticed something disturbing (to me, at least): I don’t seem to be able to eat it anymore. Take last month, for instance:

Brandon was out with some friends so I was home alone. For some reason when I’m home alone I always want to bake so I decided I would finally indulge my chocolate cake craving and make a cake. After looking though my delicious account, I decided to try Smitten Kitchen’s Peanut Butter and Chocolate cake. So I went to all the trouble of making the cake layers and the two different kinds of icing and after a couple hours finally sat down with a delicious looking piece of it to eat. I took two bites, two bites, and I had to set it down. I couldn’t eat anymore. It’s not a bad cake, in fact, it’s a wonderful cake but it was just so rich that it was too much for me. I thought maybe the peanut butter and chocolate icings were the problem but when I took another bite of just the cake it was still too much.

Continued

bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark   

5 Comments

BBA Challenge: Artos and Bagels

Posted by Emily Tags: , , , , ,

I’m still chugging along with the Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge. So far I’m (mostly) having fun and learning a lot.

Christopsomos

Christopsomos The second week bread was Artos or Greek Celebration bread. I really didn’t have any trouble at all with this bread because it was really similar to my King Cake except that Artos has a lot more spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice and cloves. The only trouble I had was the shaping, of course. I can tell it’s going to take a lot of practice to get good at shaping things because I’m just not good at that at all. The version of artos I did was called Christopsomos (though I made it plain, it’s technically supposed to have nuts and dried fruit in it), which is shaped into a boule (an oval, the only shape beside a loaf that I can do without much trouble), but then you roll out two strips of dough and lay them on top of the boule in a cross and then you split the ends and roll them up into curls. Why did I even attempt this?! I’ll fully admit to being an underachiever, but that doesn’t seem to apply to baking. I could have just shaped it into a boule and been done, but no I had to go overboard. The main issue was the curly parts at the end. I guess I didn’t stick them back into the dough well enough, so some of them unrolled while they were baking and well—I’m just gonna say it—they looked like little penises. Sigh. My artos was NSFW. You can sort of see it on the left side in this picture, otherwise I tried to take pictures of the bread’s “good side”.

Continued

bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark bookmark   

4 Comments
Fresh Recipes
  1. Pink Grapefruit and Strawberry Granita
  2. Lemon Glazed Strawberry Tart with Pastry Cream
  3. Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge: Anadama Bread
  4. Oatmeal Cream Pies
  5. Bacon and Rosemary Chicken with Maple Mashed Sweet Potatoes
  6. Chicken a la King
  7. Quickie: Whoopie Pies
  8. Chicken Adobo
  9. Mardi Gras King Cake
  1. Pink Grapefruit and Strawberry Granita
  2. Lemon Glazed Strawberry Tart with Pastry Cream
  3. Anadama Bread
  4. Oatmeal Cream Pies
  5. Bacon and Rosemary Chicken
  6. Chicken a la King
  7. Whoopie Pie
  8. Chicken Adobo
  9. Mardi Gras King Cake
Browse Tags