Back to the Cutting Board

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

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BBA Challenge

June 8, 2009

Posted by Emily Tags: bagels, BBA, bread, Bread Baker's Apprentice, dough, glaze

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

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”.

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Susie: WOW what a great line up of breads. Your brioche, casatellio, and challah turned out great. Your braid is super. I loved the casatellio but the other two were just...