I’m still here! I just looked at the date on my last post and realized I haven’t posted anything since Sept. 1 and I can’t believe it’s been that long. This month has been a wash due to the fact that I’m moving. Again. Less than a year after I moved back to Orlando. Ugh. But I’m moving to the literal greener pastures of Virginia, which I’m extremely happy about it because it suits me much more than Florida ever did. We weren’t planning to move but my boyfriend found a new job in Charlottesville and we both hate Florida, so it seemed like the best decision for us, despite being incredibly inconvenient. We’re moving up there next week and once I finally get settled in my new apartment — which I chose entirely because of it’s large, well lit kitchen — I’ll be able to start cooking again and posting regularly.

But first I thought I would give an update on the BBA Challenge since I haven’t posted about it in forever. I’m still plodding along with it, though most people are WAY ahead of me. For awhile I was keeping up with our fearless leader,Nicole but then I got behind since I haven’t had the time to bake in a few weeks. I’ll have to catch up next month.

For now I wanted to post about the three recent breads I made, which I’m calling The European Trifecta (because I think that sounds cool). They are: French Bread, Italian Bread and English Muffins. I’ll also mention the other previous breads, some of which I don’t have too much to say about, but I wanted to make sure to post about each of them anyway.

Most recently I made French Bread and Italian Bread. I was really worried about getting the French Bread right, but ultimately I didn’t find it terribly hard to make. It was the first time we’ve had to shape the dough into baguettes and since I always seem to have issues with shaping, I thought I would mess it up, but they turned out pretty good. You have to be very careful because you have to shape the loaves in a pretty specific manner (rolling back and forth to stretch them out) while still being very gentle so you don’t degas them too much. I thought my bread turned out to be fairly holey, so I think I did an ok job of that, though I know it’s definitely something I’m going to have to practice to get really good at.

It was also a return to hearth baking, which we haven’t done since Ciabatta and that whole process makes me really nervous. I’m always scared to death I’m going to burn myself or catch the house on fire. In fact, I was so nervous about making sure that my oven was set up right that I forgot to score the bread. See how mine is completely smooth? Well, it’s supposed to have marks in the crust. Oops. Despite that, I thought the bread turned out fine and tasted great.

Italian Bread (pictured at the very top of this entry as well) is basically just sub bread. It’s more moist and has a tighter crumb than french bread, but honestly I didn’t think there was that much of a difference. It’s also made fairly similarly, hearth baking and all. I shaped it into smaller hoagie rolls instead of big loaves and it made for some really great sandwiches. And I actually remembered to score the bread that time, though I was so scared I was going to mess it up! I think I just need to buy one of those special scoring knives or a straight razor because none of my knives really worked. They caught on the bread a bit too much and pulled, whereas the knife is supposed to slice cleanly through. I did ok on some of the rolls, but other ones I didn’t cut enough and a few I cut too deep and they started deflating. So that’s another thing I will have to practice at. I think the key is making a confident slicing motion with your hand, if you go too slow or are too light it’s just not going to work. It almost felt like surgery at times!

English Muffins were definitely the easiest of the bunch to make. I think they might have been one of the fastest breads we’ve made so far. I’m not entirely sure how this recipes compares to the kind you buy at the store, though. The big thing about english muffins is that they are supposed to have all those nooks and crannies and I made these twice and I didn’t really have much in the way of nooks or crannies either time. Though I fully admit that could be my fault. Either way, they tasted really good, so I didn’t mind. And the fun thing about english muffins is that you actually cook them on your stove top or on a griddle to get that nicely browned flat top and bottom. I will be making these again.

Also fun to make was Foccacia. It started out similarly to Ciabatta as it’s a very wet dough that needs to be stretched and folded multiple times. But then comes the fun part where you get to pour herb oil all over it. I made the oil by heating up olive oil and throwing in tons of chopped up fresh herbs and letting it steep. I pretty much used everything I had plus garlic and it was a bit of overkill. Next time I’ll limit it to 3 or 4 things because I think less is more with the herb oil. And I’ll pour on less oil, as well. The dough absorbs all the oil, but I thought it was a bit too oily in the end, though it tasted very, very good. Foccacia is really versatile and you can put pretty much any kind of topping on it, so I’ll definitely will be making this again and trying out different combinations of cheese and vegetables.

The Cranberry Celebration Bread was fine, but I’m not sure I’d make it again. It was supposed to have walnuts which I omitted, so maybe if I liked walnuts I’d like this bread more. It was fun to shape it into the double braid, though. But I totally screwed it up by placing the smaller braid off center of the larger braid, so as it rose it started leaning more and more to one side and it turned out extremely lopsided. Oh well!

The cornbread was surprising because I was not expecting to like it at all and actually kept putting it off because I was so not looking forward to eating it. As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of southern-style cornbread. I figured this was going to be same kind of cardboard and sand textured bread that I hate, but it turned out really moist and sweet enough to give it a nice taste, but not be overpowering like a dessert bread. Brandon declared it his favorite cornbread ever and I did like it better than my previous recipe mainly because while that recipe tastes good, it falls apart really easily. I made these into muffins instead of making a big dish and they stayed together nicely while still maintaining that melt-in-your-mouth-ness. I did omit the bacon topping mainly because I was weary about bacon in bread after the Casatiello which I did not like at all. I wound up accidentally omitting the corn because it was the last step and I just plain forgot. But I told that to Brandon and he said that sounded gross anyway, so I guess it’s good I forgot or he probably wouldn’t have eaten any. Sometimes I think he’s an even pickier eater than I am!

Despite the fact that I’ve slowed down in the challenge lately, I’m having fun making these breads and I’m still motivated to keep on going. I’ve finished 15 recipes already and am excited for more. I can’t wait for this move to be over so things can get back to normal again.

Related posts:

• Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge: Anadama Bread
• Quickie: Whoopie Pies
• BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah
• BBA Challenge: Cinnamon Rolls and Raisin Bread

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It seems like every week I keep saying “this is my favorite”, but hands down, these two breads are my favorite from this challenge. A couple of reasons for this:

1. Both recipes were extremely easy. No waiting a day for pre-ferments, just mix up the ingredients, knead, shape, proof, bake and boom: you have yummy bread in about 4 hours.

2. They’re just good. Period. The raisin bread tasted just like the raisin bread you buy at the store. The cinnamon rolls were just amazing. I could have eaten about a million of them. In fact, after picking out the photos for this entry (it’s been a few weeks since I actually made them), I got such a craving for them that I had to make another batch.

I had no issues with the cinnamon rolls. They were fun to make and I think they came out perfectly. I will be making them again (…and again and again. Seriously you should buy this book just so you can make these cinnamon rolls, you will not be disappointed.)

The cinnamon raisin bread was another story. First of all, it’s supposed to be raisin walnut bread. But I don’t like walnuts (or any kind of nuts), especially if they are baked into things, so I omitted that ingredient and added golden raisins along with the normal raisins. Secondly, Rinehart gives the option of making cinnamon-swirl raisin bread so of course I wanted to make that because it sounded more fun. Unfortunately, my first try was a disaster. Everything seemed good until I put the loaves in the oven and when I checked back a little while later, they had completely deflated. They were sad and lumpy and tasted kind of dry as well. At first I didn’t know what went wrong, but after some googling I figured out I had over-proofed them. When I tried the recipe again I figured out why: my loaf pans are about 1 inch larger (length and width-wise) than the size he says to use. I thought I had standard sized pans, but I guess not (that or he specifies smaller pans?). The problem came about when I had let the dough rise for more than an hour longer than I was supposed to because I was trying to get it to rise above the top of the pans (which it never really did). I didn’t realize that over-proofing could cause such problems, but I’ve more than learned my lesson on that one.

My second try was much more successful. The loaves were still kind of flat because of the big pans, though. I’m going to buy some loaf pans in the size he says to use (8-1/2 x4-1/2) and hopefully then I’ll get the height I want. I made one plain loaf and one cinnamon-swirl loaf and the plain loaf rose a lot more, so that also seems to be a factor. But despite that, both loaves tasted great, not dry this time. Of course, I liked the cinnamon-swirl more than the plain, but how could you not? I slathered the tops with butter and sprinkled on cinnamon-sugar, which made them even better.

I usually buy raisin bread from the grocery store, but now that I see how easy it is to make, I’ll be baking it myself from now on. That reason alone is why I’m so glad I’m doing this challenge. A few months ago, I would never have described making raisin bread or cinnamon rolls as “easy” and it’s been really great discovering that bread baking is not nearly as complicated or intimidating as I thought.

Related posts:

• BBA Challenge: Artos and Bagels
• Orange Cinnamon-Raisin Swirl Coffee Cake (AKA The GIANT Cinnamon Roll)
• Giveaway Winners! (and my favorite recipes)
• BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah

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The seventh recipe for The Bread Baker’s Apprentice Challenge was Ciabatta. This was one I was really excited about attempting but also pretty apprehensive. It’s probably one of the most complicated breads we’ve done so far and from surveying other BBAers on twitter and the forum it was pretty apparent that “results may vary”. Good Ciabatta is full of big giant holes and that involves having a very wet dough, which you can imagine, is hard to work with. In addition to working with the very wet dough for the first time, making this bread involves some special tools as well as setting up your oven in a very specific way, so there’s quite a bit of prep involved.

There were two different versions, using different kinds of pre-ferments: poolish or biga. These are just mixtures of bread, water and yeast that sit out for a certain amount of time to develop flavor and texture. Later you add the rest of ingredients to make the final dough. I chose the biga because the consensus seemed to be that it resulted in bread with bigger holes. I also switched bread flour for regular AP flour as I read several accounts saying they got better results that way as well.

I honestly thought I screwed the bread up several times. First I let the biga ferment for way too long (it was supposed to be 2-4 hours, I accidentally let it go past 6). Then the next day I measured out all the ingredients for the poolish formula instead of the biga formula, though luckily I caught myself before doing too much damage. When I finally mixed everything up correctly, I added the maximum amount of water called for to create a very watery, sticky dough. It seemed like it would be really hard to handle, but I didn’t find it that difficult. It was sticky but it still stayed together for the most part. I laid it out on a very floured surface and proceeded with stretching the dough out and then folding it over on itself. You do this several times and I actually added a few more as again, my research had said it produced better results. Then I used my homemade couche which was just a bunch of large cotton cloths I had gotten at Target and sprinkled well with flour. I divided the dough in three and placed them on the cloth and bunched it up around the sides of each piece to give the dough support so it wouldn’t spread out while it proofed. Ciabatta means slipper, so that’s the shape I was are going for.

This is the first recipe from the book that involved special preparation of my oven to make it behave more like a real hearth. I already bought a baking stone a few months ago and this was the second time I used it after a disastrous first time, trying to bake a pizza and putting too much cornmeal on the stone (which the directions told me to do) which burned up and starting smoking in the 500 degree oven. I was careful not repeat that again. But in being fearful that would happen again, I really didn’t put enough cornmeal on the pan I used to transfer the loaves from the couche to the oven. You have to be very gentle in handling those loaves or all the gas will come out and you lose your big holes. One of my loaves definitely deflated a lot because I had a hard time transferring it. I think next time, I’ll try lightly oiling the pan instead of putting cornmeal on it. Hopefully that will help them slide off easier.

Beside the stone, I also needed to have a pan in the oven. Right after the bread went in I added hot water to the pan to create a big burst of steam. After that I used a spray bottle to spray water into the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to create even more steam bursts. The whole thing sounded really complicated when I was reading the instructions beforehand, but actually doing it wasn’t so bad.

As you can see from the pics, I did wind up getting some fairly large holes in my loaves. Nothing like the pic in the book and there were still parts of the loaves that had tight crumb (which I think was all due to degassing in the transfer to the oven), but I’m very happy with my first try. It turned out a lot better than I thought it would. All-in-all, Ciabatta was to easier to make than I was expecting after first reading through the instructions but it’s definitely not a simple bread to make. I’m glad we had the six other breads to prepare us for this one! I can’t imagine that I’ll be making it regularly, but it did come out tasting great (It was a little sour almost like sourdough and I’m not sure if that’s because I had accidentally let the biga ferment for so long or if it’s just supposed to taste that way?), so I’m definitely going to be making it again, if only to try for bigger holes!

Related posts:

• BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah
• BBA Challenge: The European Trifecta (and some other stuff)
• BBA Challenge: Cinnamon Rolls and Raisin Bread
• Homemade Buttery Croissants

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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).

First up, Brioche. This is an uber-rich and buttery french bread. The book has three different versions of it, the main difference being the amount of butter each one has. I tried the Rich Man’s version first, which has two cups of butter in it. I kind of screwed them up, though. First of all they have this weird shape that is sort of like a cupcake or roll but with a little “head” sitting on top. I didn’t so great with the shaping and then when I was just about to put them in the oven I tripped and almost dropped the pan and they kind of deflated. Blah. So they were pretty sad looking, I didn’t even bother taking pictures. They still tasted good, but it was really too much. To me, they tasted like a cross between a croissant and doughnut. But if I’m going to eat something that is that bad for me, I’d choose a croissant or a doughnut before I’d make/eat this version of brioche again.

Since my first effort was a bust, I decided to try the Poor Man’s version which has the least butter, only 1/2 cup. These turned out better. My shaping still didn’t really work, the heads just sort blended in the with the rest of it making a cone shape, not a distinct ball like you’re supposed to have. Plus I cooked these a few minutes too long, so they were a bit dried out. Compared to the Rich Man’s version these were pretty bland, though they were good with jam. I think if I ever make brioche again, I’d do the Middle Class version which has 1 cup of butter. Rich Man’s was too much and I think Poor Man’s was too little, so maybe those would be perfect. I think this would be a really good kind of dough to make cinnamon rolls with–I saw a few other BBAers that did this–so I may try that some day, but otherwise I doubt I’ll be making brioche in this form again. I’m glad I did it, but there are breads I like much more (and feel less guilty about eating).

Next was Casatiello. I noticed a lot of people on twitter saying how great this bread was, so I was pretty disappointed with it after I made it. It’s a form of brioche, but with cheese and meat added. The provolone cheese I didn’t mind (though it’s not my favorite), but I guess I’m just not into meat in bread. The recipe called for salami, but I HATE salami, so I substituted bacon, which Reinhart noted is also good. But cheese and bacon in an already buttery bread? Ultimately, I just thought it was too much and the bacon really overpowered it. I wish I had just omitted the meat altogether and I think I would have liked this much more. My cats LOVED this bread, though. I accidentally left a piece sitting out and found them going nuts over it. I wound up feeding a lot of it to them and eventually just threw the rest away as I had no desire to finish it. It was a pretty looking bread, though, and was easy to make so I may attempt this again in the future without meat and maybe a different cheese like Cheddar or Swiss.

After my somewhat disappointing adventures with brioche, I wound up taking a week off from bread baking. Last week, I started back up with Challah and that was not disappointing at all. It was fun to make and I was really happy with how it turned out. I had a slightly hard time trying to pass the window pane test with this dough, but really didn’t have any other issues. I was apprehensive about the braiding since I always seem to have a hard time with shaping, but it wasn’t too bad! Reinhart says the shape should be big in the middle and taper down to the ends and I think I did that pretty well. This wasn’t my favorite bread ever, but it tasted fine, if a little boring. It might be fun to make as a gift since it’s such a pretty looking bread. There was another variation called Celebration Challah with a double braid which is a big braid with a smaller braid sitting on top so I’d love to attempt that some day, maybe after I’ve had a bit more practice with shaping dough.

Like I mentioned, I finished Ciabatta earlier this week, but that’s going to be it’s own post. This weekend is cinnamon rolls which I am so excited about. I’ve been looking forward to those for quite awhile. Since I’m almost caught up with posting now, hopefully I can get on a better schedule of updating soon after I actually make these instead of waiting weeks. Also, stay tuned for some other stuff coming up this month. It’s my 1 year blog-iversary so I want to make something fun, plus I have quite a few recipes in the pipeline that I have yet to post.

Have a great 4th of July weekend (or if you’re not in the US, then have just have a great regular weekend)!

Related posts:

• BBA Challenge: The European Trifecta (and some other stuff)
• BBA Challenge: Artos and Bagels
• BBA Challenge: Cinnamon Rolls and Raisin Bread
• Homemade Buttery Croissants

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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”.

Oh, well, at least it tasted good. It was spicy, but not overpowering. I put on a sweet glaze, which I thought was a bit too much at first, it was way too thick and sticky, but the next day the bread had absorbed most of glaze; it still had a nice satiny sheen to it, but it wasn’t sticky anymore. I think this would be a great bread to give to friends during the holidays, but next time I’m just going to be shaping it into a boule.

Next was bagels. Now, if you had told me a year ago that I would be making bagels from scratch, I wouldn’t have believed you for a second. I know, logically, that people do make bagels, but that just seemed like such an esoteric thing to do, that I couldn’t even imagine it. So what really surprised me was how freaking easy it is to make bagels. I still can’t even believe how easy it is and I’ve already made two batches. It does take two days, but really that’s for the best. You make and shape the dough, then put them in the fridge overnight and the next day you just boil and bake them which takes less than 30 minutes. You can’t beat fresh, warm bagels.

The dough was really stiff, I was actually a bit worried for my mixer, but it made it through. A lot of other BBAer’s seemed to mention having trouble kneading the dough to the point where it passed the windowpane test (so it stretches thin enough that you can almost see through it), but I didn’t have trouble with either of the batches I did. In fact, of all the breads I’ve made so far, I passed the windowpane test the easiest and fastest with the bagel dough. But it was not without trouble at all and I bet you can guess where I had problems…the shaping. There’s two shaping methods: the first is to shape the dough into a ball and punch a whole through the middle, the second is to roll it out into a string and the press the ends together so it makes a circle. The first batch I did I used the punching method because it seemed much easier, but in the punching process I guess I degassed the dough too much which resulted in really flat, sad looking bagels. The second batch I did, I made cinnamon raisin bagels instead of plain and I used the circle method and those turned out much better. They looked like real, actual bagels that you buy at the grocery store!

The only other thing I screwed up on was that you are supposed to add baking soda to the water that you boil the bagels in and I somehow forgot that step in both batches that I did. I have no idea how I missed it two times, but I did. From what I can figure, the baking soda makes the outside of the bagels look more smooth and brown more evenly. Oh well, next time! They still tasted damn good on the inside (even the first sad-looking batch). I especially loved the cinnamon raisin and I know I will be making them a lot.

Next up is brioche. I’m not sure I had even heard of this bread before, but it’s like an uber buttery, rich bread. I actually already started this past weekend, but it was kind of a disaster, so that will be a whole new post because I’m going to attempt at least one of the other versions of it later this week to see if I can get a better result.

Related posts:

• Bread Bakers Apprentice Challenge: Anadama Bread
• This weekend in food
• BBA Challenge: Cinnamon Rolls and Raisin Bread
• Homemade Buttery Croissants

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So I decided to do something a little crazy. The awesome Nicole at Pinch My Salt started a group to make every single recipe in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice by Peter Reinhart. When she first announced it on Twitter, I was interested but ultimately decided it would be too much work. But then more and more people started joining with her and I kept thinking about it until she announced she was closing the group to new members. As soon as I heard that it made me realize how much I wanted to do this, so I emailed her immediately to join the group.

I would definitely call myself a bread person. The only reason I like pizza is because of the crust, most of the time I even take all the cheese off before I eat it (I HATE greasy cheese). My favorite restaurants are the ones that give you bread and if it’s a choice between finishing that bread and finishing my entree, well, I can always get a doggy bag. I gave a waiter a HUGE tip a few weeks ago just because he gave me a whole new loaf of bread to bring home with my leftovers.

Despite my love of bread, I’ve never done any bread baking. I’ve always loved baking cakes and cookies, but yeast bread just seemed so complicated. Anyone can make a cake, but to me, bread always seemed like something only trained professionals could do: the kneading and rising and all that. And the yeast! That word is just scary. Plus I take almost all of my cooking cues from my mother and I can’t remember her ever making bread. Quick bread like banana bread, yeah, but never any kind of yeast bread. I don’t even remember either of my grandmothers making fresh bread. We were definitely a frozen roll kind of family.

But I decided to take the plunge last Thanksgiving and I made fresh rolls and discovered that bread baking really isn’t that hard. I made some more rolls at Christmas. Then there was the King Cake. A few months ago I attempted a sour dough loaf, which was pretty good (though I never posted it here because I thought I could do better) and a few weeks ago I had a lot of fun making Smitten Kitchen’s Black Bread. Had Nicole started this challenge last year, there’s no way I would have attempted it, but I felt I had learned enough basic knowledge of bread baking to do it. And I definitely like the challenge aspect of it. We’re not competing with each other or anything like that, but how great will it feel to say I made every recipe in the book? And how much will I have learned by the time I get through the whole book?

Just from reading the first few chapters, I feel like I’ve learned a ton already. I highly recommend it for bread baking beginners like me. Peter Reinhart goes through the entire process of bread baking from beginning to end in amazing detail and he explains the science behind what is happening in each stage and why kneading and rising and all that other scary sounding stuff is necessary to create amazing bread. Plus there’s tons of great tips and tricks and a helpful list of tools (I just bought a baking stone and kitchen scale).

The first recipe in the book is Anadama Bread which is a really delicious sandwich bread. It takes two days, but the first day was just mixing some cornmeal with water and letting it sit overnight, so it’s only one day of real work. Then you mix that, which is called a sponge, with flour and molasses and other stuff. It’s all about the molasses. That gives the bread a nice color and a slightly sweet taste. It’s so good. Especially toasted and slathered with butter or jam. It’s my new favorite bread.

I’m letting my wonderful kitchenaid mixer do much of the mixing work, but I’m doing all the kneading by hand. I wound up having to knead this dough for 15 minutes before I passed the “windowpane test” (where you can stretch out the dough enough to create a thin, almost see-through surface) and if you’ve ever kneaded dough for that long you know that can work up a sweat. I honestly never understood why “no knead bread” was so popular until that day.

If you are interested in this book and want to make this bread, the first few chapters up to this recipe are available for preview on Google Book Search (though a bunch of the pages are obscured, maybe on purpose?). Here’s the Anadama Bread Recipe. If the first (and probably easiest) recipe in the book is this good, imagine how good the rest must be?

So. The goal of the group is to make one recipe per week (and even at that pace we won’t be done until next Spring!), but we’re all free to work at whatever pace we want. The main goal is just to finish the book, no matter how long it takes. I’m going to try to keep up with the one a week as best I can, though. Nicole has asked that we not post the recipes on our blogs, which I understand because hundreds of people posting all the recipes in the book is pretty unfair to the writer. I’m not sure I’ll be posting about every single bread I make here, but I will definitely be updating regularly with my progress and what I’m learning, what I’m struggling with, etc.

If this challenge sounds like fun to you, too, buy the book and bake along with us! While Nicole isn’t adding new members to our group (it’s already past 200 and she doesn’t want it to get unmanageable), she’s inviting anyone who wants to to participate with us. There’s a flickr group and a facebook group and a bunch of us are on twitter, so there’s lots of ways to participate and to see what everyone else is doing.

Next up is Artos bread, which looks pretty similar to my King Cake recipe so it shouldn’t be too hard. I’m going to be trying my hand at dough shaping again, which if you look at my lopsided King Cake, you’ll see is not my forte. Practice makes perfect, right?

Related posts:

• BBA Challenge: Ciabatta
• BBA Challenge: Artos and Bagels
• BBA Challenge Catch-up: Brioche, Casatiello and Challah
• BBA Challenge: The European Trifecta (and some other stuff)

Do more:

If you like this recipe, please share it: