Benito's blog

The can of pumpkin purée that I bought was huge, the grocery stores here only seem to carry a very large size can of it.  So having a ton left I decided I’d see what it does to bread.  I treated it similarly to how I’d treat adding mashed potatoes.  Given how mild pumpkin flavour is, I cooked the purée down a bit to bring out the flavour.  Because I wanted a savory bread and not something that would be sweet, I didn’t add spices to this.  I’m quite pleased with how it baked up.

I found this recipe in the Globe and Mail.  I’ve never been a huge fan of cheesecake, it always seems like a nothingburger to me.  I was hoping that the pumpkin might make it more interesting.  I think this cheesecake would benefit from spices myself.  This is a Basque style cheesecake in that it has a caramelized top, however, it has a cookie crust as a base which Basque cheesecakes don’t usually from what I understand. 

I’ve been away in Vancouver for 11 days and back to doing a locum this and the next 1.5 weeks so haven’t really had time to bake.  But I carved some time out of my afternoon and evening to bake some Taiwanese Pineapple cakes for my second time.  I’m made improvements on the last batch I made more than a year ago.  

This is the dessert that I decided to make for tomorrow night’s dinner.  I like to prep as much as I can the day before to make the day of the dinner party less stressful.  In fact, the main course is marinating overnight to be baked in the oven at dinner time.  This recipe was by Nadia Hussain from the Great British Bake Off.  She calls it a Pineapple Bundt, but given the ingredients I’m calling it a pina colada bundt since it has pineapple, coconut and lime in it.  I hope everyone enjoys it.  Surprisingly I’ve never made a drizzle cake before.

We are hosting a group of friends for dinner tomorrow night and wanted to bake a focaccia again to have with our chicken Marbella with peaches.  I haven’t made a focaccia with potatoes yet so decided on this one adding the usual red onions, rosemary and cracked peppercorns to it.  Nothing fancy but hopefully good.

I hadn’t baked a Hokkaido Milk Bread in a long time since I’ve been playing around with high pff loaves which have been largely lean doughs.  We have guests staying with us a few days so wanted to baked something delicious and pretty.  I decided to bake a 100% organic stoneground whole wheat black sesame sourdough Hokkaido milk bread using ground black sesame seeds.  This is the first time I’ve used flowers on a milk bread, I wasn’t sure how the flowers would do with an egg wash, but they did well.

For our dinner party tonight we will be seeing from friends from Fort Lauderdale Florida who we won’t see very often anymore since we sold our apartment there.  So I had a busy baking weekend to ensure that they have a good meal at our place.  I have made this cake once before, but having made this once, I made some improvements on it.

This is the best sourdough focaccia that I’ve baked.  Over the years the few times I’ve baked focaccia, a majority of the time I’ve either had too much or too little dough.  In retrospect, I think I’d been underfermenting as well.  For my 9x13” pan I made 750 g of dough and allowed it to ferment until it had a total rise of 170% which is far more than I have in the past.  Without having sliced it to peer at the crumb, this is the best looking focaccia out of my oven with nice big bubbles and I think the right thickness.

I was once again out of bread so needed another loaf.  I decided to work on my 50% whole wheat sourdough pan loaf again but increase the hydration to 81% which is higher than I usually go with a loaf of this composition.   I’m not sure it made any difference to the crumb, but I’m happy with the loaf nonetheless. Now I don’t know about you, but I find it challenging to score a pan loaf so I tried something a bit different.  I did the usual of brushing water on the top and applying the pansies.  I then baked it without steam for 5 mins.