Well, time passed in that way it does and soon I had two loaves ready for the oven: 

I trimmed the parchment paper (which burned to a crisp, by the way, any tips on avoiding that in the future?), wished them well, and gently slid them on the stone. 

Twenty minutes later, I pulled out these: 

As you can see, they were far darker than I'd wanted. The recipe stated they should be a "pale golden," and I got, well, flour-ed brown. They came out crispy enough and the crust had some crackle, and the bottom sounded hollow enough. 

But alas, it wasn't long before they were soft. I wondered if I shouldn't have tried spritzing them or something. 

Still, when it came time for stew, the crumb was ok in the loaf we ate (haven't tried the second one yet), though not as bubbly as I had expected: 

So, that's my ciabatta adventure. I'll definately try again, as I'm a tad disappointed in these loaves. Any tips for next time would be greatly appreciated. 

Not in the mood to spend hours in the kitchen, or feeling confident yet enough to tackle an authentic italian panettone, but want a lovely festive tasty panettone!  Mix it up tonight, bake it tomorrow!  These are festive little Panettone's and perfect for the Christmas Caroler's along with cup of hot coco! 

This is a feature recipe from http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/cherry-almond-panettone-recipe .  I did my version of mixing and ingredients, using fresh potato, pecans, extracts, chocolate, almond paste meringue topping. 

You can mix up the poolish tonight and bake it tomorrow! Instead of using the large mold...I used the small single serve size..I just eyeballed the cuts of dough into 9 perfect for the single serve molds.

                                                        " The Sampler "

                                                           Very light, shreds apart, and moist, melt in the mouth creamy crumb!

                                                 No little elf is going to turn their nose up at these!

                                        Submitted to yeastspotting

Every 2 or three years I like to make a Yule Log for our family, relatives or friends , but in this case it was a request from one of my wife's colleagues. Sometime back in November my wife Marie was chatting with one of the other staff members at the college where she works about their respective plans for the Christmas season. Her friend Wendy mentioned that one of the things they always like to have on Christmas Eve is a Yule log, but that she'd been disappointed with the ones she's had over the last few years because they'd been so plain and ordinary. What she was looking for was one that had all the whistles and bells so to speak, but just couldn't find a local bakery that made them that way. When Marie asked her what in particular she wanted on it, the reply was “those cute little meringue mushrooms and maybe some marzipan holly ...or something”, to which Marie replied “oh...my husband makes them like that. I'll see if he'll make you one. I'm sure he'd love to” Does this sort of thing sound familiar to any other husbands or wives here on TFL?

Don't get me wrong. I enjoy making these cakes every so often, but they do take a fair amount of time in order make all the various components for them, and time has been a precious commodity for me this month for some reason. However, I thought it'd be fun to do one, and if it turned out the way I hoped, thought it might make a good blog post to TFL.

The cake itself is a chocolate sponge baked in a 20x14 sheet pan, cooled, then brushed with a flavoured simple syrup, in this case Kahlua, then layered with a custard buttercream flavoured with hazelnuts and rum. This is rolled jelly roll fashion in parchment and tied with string then kept in the fridge for a night or two, until it's tight and sealed. The day before doing the final decorating I made the meringue mushrooms, in addition to some coloured marzipan holly leaves and berries, as well as shaping small pine cones from chocolate plastique. The meringue is a typical all purpose type that can be made either cold or with the hot Swiss style method. The caps and stems of the mushrooms are piped on to a sheet pan and baked at 225F for an hour then left in the oven for another hour with the heat turned off and the door slightly open, then left to cool for at least several hours or overnight. Assembly is done by taking a sharp paring knife and rounding out a hole in the base of the cap, dipping the stem part in melted chocolate and inserting into the hole in the cap. Very easy and quite realistic looking!

On decorating day I made French style chocolate buttercream for the icing of the log and some chocolate curls or 'bark' to lay on top of the buttercream to add a bit more realism. Next I cut off diagonal sections from each end of the roll, iced them and placed one on the top ,slightly off to one side and the other on the rear lower side of the log, securing them with bamboo skewers to the body of the cake. Then it's just a matter of adding all the other decorating components to make a nice presentation. I had planned to add some spun sugar angel hair to drape over the log, or maybe a white chocolate spider web, but simply ran out of time to get it all done before going to bed for my workday start at 2:00AM the next day. It's probably just as well I didn't do the spun sugar anyway, since it's not to be eaten till the 24th and doubt it would hold up properly over that period of time. When I was taking my training in trades school in Vancouver, my cake and decorating instructor Mr. Knoss, a Swiss master, used to say “one of the most important aspects of cake decorating is knowing when to stop” . It's very easy to get carried away with decorating and end up with something that's over decorated and busy, so I think in this case, necessity forced me to stop at a good point.

Unfortunately, necessity has also been a factor in me having to leave out all the recipes and most of the procedure for making the various components. It would take pages of typing to write up, and for a hunt & peck typist like myself, would take till sometime in the New Year to finish I reckon. For anyone who might be interested in any of the recipes or procedure used in this cake I plan to write them up over the next few days....week or two?, and have them available for anyone wanting them.

Now it's time to get some family Christmas baking done.

Merry Christmas and best of the Season to everyone on TFL!

Franko

this loaf came together GREAT, following my old standard 1,2,3 sourdough bread recipe here but using 1/3 whole wheat flour.  

9 oz starter (rejuvenated after a several week hiatus)

18 oz water

18 oz bread flour + 9 oz whole wheat flour

1 Tbsp salt

I mixed and kneaded for about 2 minutes, then did 2 stretch and folds. The dough behaved very well;  not too wet, and it held its shape.

I left it out on the counter overnight and it about doubled in size in 11 hours (cold kitchen, but that seems slow).  I divided and made 2 round boules, let it rise for about 2 hours, slashed with tic-tac-toe, and baked on my stone with steam (500 °F for 2 minutes, 450°F for about 40).  It smelled GREAT.

Here is the loaf shot:

and here is the crumb shot.  Nice even crumb.

What doesn't come through the web is the nice nice flavor.  Yum.

I posted yesterday about making gift certificates for Christmas presents.  I was able to find an editable (MS Word) document and I included some loaf shots. I'll be giving these out to a bunch of people. Here is the certificate I made:

1:52 p.m.:

Well, the dough has risen once and, as instructed, I have shaped it into two "irregular ovals," or at least what I hope are irregular ovals. Now they are sitting atop parchment paper, hopefully doubling in size again, waiting to be transferred to my pizza stone on the bottom of rack of the oven, which I will turn on to pre-heat in about 10 minutes. Here they were, just before I covered them:

So, there they are. I've never baked bread on parchment before, so here's hoping I can slide these on to the stone and not ruin the shape.

Niggling worries: The dough did have some bubbles, but I don't know that I would call it "bubbly." It is elastic, certainly, but awfully sticky. Since the recipe says the dough will be sticky, I suppose this is alright, but I am a bit worried. Ok, time will tell.....literally.....

Update to follow!

Last year I spent nearly 90 hours to make sourdough pandoro. Twice (one failed attempt, one delicious success). And thought it was worthwhile. I must be crazy.

This year, I spent 90 hours to make sourdough panettone. Twice (one test run, one massive batch for gifts). Still think it's fun. They are coming to take me away anytime now.

Recipe is based on foolishpoolish's wonderful creation (here), with techniques from "AB&P", Wild Yeast, etc. Two days to re-activate my starter, one more day to convert to "Italian sweet starter", 12 hours for rising first dough, 19 hours for rising final dough. Up at midnight, then 2am, to check on the dough, finally at 3:30 to start baking. Like I said, who needs sleep when it's holiday season?!

Some notes:

- For some reason, no one, not even one source on this whole wide web, can tell me how much dough I should put in my paper mold. Most recipes would tell me how much dough to use, but not the mold size. Some tell me the diameter of the mold, but not the height. My molds are from here,  6.75inch in diameter, 4.25inch in height, and is supposed to be for "standard size, 2lb loaf". I know 2lb is 900g roughly, but that's after baking, how much dough would that be? Finally I found answer in "AB&P", for their 5.25X3.25inch mold, they use 500g of dough, which means I need 1080g for mine. Too bad I found that AFTER my first batch, so my test loaf (950g of dough) came out a bit short, but for my real batch, I used 1050g of dough and they came out perfect (as shown in the pictures above).

- Since my husband really loved the sourdough pandoro last year, he made me a "proofing box" using insulated foam boards, a pet temperature regulator, and a light bulb. Really helpful for keeping Italian starter and proofing the loaves! EXCEPT, when the regulateor's setting was messed up and it stayed at 70F , rather than the 85F I set. Ugh, messed up my whole timing.

- All sources say to simply mix the first dough until even - no mention of developing any dough strength. However, I do find if I mix first dough with KA mixer, paddle attachement, until it clears the bowl, the final dough would be MUCH easier to mix. However since the first dough is very wet, the kneading took a while

- The mixing of the final dough was easier than last year's pandoro, could be that I have more experience this time. It was lilke liquid silk by the end, VERY STRONG liquid silk glove.

- I used glaze for the gift loaves, and the "tuck in a pat of butter" method for the test loaf, both works great.

- I had 800g of extra dough left after making the gift loaves. Don't want to use another paper mold, I dumped it in my new kugelhopf pan, it was only 1/4 full, but the amazing power of italian sourdough starter raised it just fine.

- However, I couldn't hang the Kugelhopf loaf upside down, so I just cooled it upside down on the rack, judging from the crumb, the bottom layer got compressed/squished a bit.

While the crumb of the test loaf was even and fluffy, and I expect the gift loaves to have the same crumb. Lesson: don't skip the step of hanging upside down to cool!

- It took my dough 19 hours at 85F to reach the rim of the mold (as supposed to  12hrs in the recipe), and I got awesome ovenspring, so they weren't over-proofed. I guess my starter likes to take its sweet time. And doesn't care about my sleep time.

- I have made BBA panettone before, no comparison, the flavor and velvety texture of this sourdough version is a whole new level.

- The gifts are all packed up and mailed out, the leftover loaves have been mostly devoured, now I just need to catch up on some sleep. Happy Holidays! ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Submitting to Yeastspotting.