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One of the things I like about this nice yeasty cake is its versatility. You can fill it with just about anything you can imagine: the lazy amongst us will just spread some berry jelly or apple-sauce, the more adventurous will chop apples, grind walnuts and start mincing cloves. And on top, well, just about anything you can think of. The most popular is a streusel, but I've seen chocolate chips, sprinkles and even whole plums. Me? I like the simple elegance of a chocolate filling and sugar water on top.

I'm not really sure about the origins of this recipe. I got a recipe from my mother who had gotten it from some cooking book. But it doesn't really matter, since I made drastic changes to the original recipe. I altered all of the amounts, and most of the ratios as well. There were some steps that I omitted entirely, and some that I added, and the bake time is about half of what the original recipe called for.

 Day 1

Sponge

• 1/3 cup lukewarm water.
• 1 cup flour
• 1 Tbs yeast

Combine and let sit for 1 hour.

Dough

• 2 cup flour
• 1/3 cup margarine
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 eggs
• 1/2 tsp vanilla

Cream the margarine with the sugar. Add the sponge, salt, eggs and vanilla. Mix on low for 2-3 minutes. Gradually add flour until you get a good dough. Mix on medium for 10-12 minutes.
Remove dough, dust  with flour, cover loosely with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge.

Day 2

Take your dough out of the fridge, and let it rest for twenty minutes while preparing the filling.

Filling

• 1/2 cup margarine
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 3/4 cup white sugar

Combine. I had to use my mixer on fast to get the margarine to blend nicely with the other ingredients.

Split the dough into two equal halves. Do the following for both halves.

Roll it out rectangle, about that big. It really depends on the size of your loaf pans. Then spread half the filling over the dough, leaving some edge. I keep trying not to leave any edge at all, but the filling is really hard to work with, and I give up.

Roll your dough up like a jelly-roll, from the short side.

Then twist it around in your hands a couple of times. You need to do this gently but firmly, since you don't want to tear the dough. Put it in a loaf pan and move on to the second piece of dough.

Let the cakes sit while you preheat the oven (350F/180C) and prepare the topping.

Topping

• sugar
• hot water

Mix the ingredients together until all the sugar is disolved, then brush it onto the cakes, covering the top and sides liberally.

Bake for 30 minutes, maybe less. The top of the cake should be hard. Baking it for too long will dry it out, but it's still good.

I took one of these to my parents' house for a family dinner one weekend, and got two of the best compliments a home baker can get:

1. When I brought it in people asked  "You made that? I thought you had bought it!"
2. It was devoured instantly. Everybody took seconds, and some people took thirds.

I've baked this recipe twice before, but this one i wanted to exclude the yeast and extend the bulk fermentation. Actually, this bake was sort of a controlled test that was aimed at verifying whether or not i could bake during my working weekdays, which i'am happy to say: YES, it works!

First day eve, I started feeding my starter one day to creat the levain for the next day;

Second day, when i came back from work i mixed the levain into a dough and retarded the dough after 2.5 hours;

Third day after work, i preshaped, shaped and baked.

i'll have to admit, though, i don't like to split the joy of baking into several days, but the convenience of having bread anyday of the week was my incentive.

One thing worth mentioning: i added 1/2 tsp of diastatic malt to compensate for the extended refrigeration of the dough (21 hours).

Flavor wise, there was no noticeable sourness to this bread, though the sweetness of the raisins may have masked it. It was a good basic bread with sweet pockets of raisins, but nothing more. Could i be too accustomed to wholegrains that i can't appreciate delicate flavors of white-ish breads anymore? Could it be the malt? All i know is that the original recipe with the yeast added had a better overall flavor.

Still, though, i like this bread and loved the idea of being able to have bread almost any day of the week.

Khalid

Made some Italian Easter bread and everybody helped shape it. I'll have to check on revealing the carefully saved family recipe from a likely long out of print cookbook. I can reveal that it has a nice mix of fennel seeds and lemon zest that I haven't seen in other Easter bread recipes making the rounds.

Easter was great visiting with family, but I got home and there was a washer to be fixed and plenty of clothes to be washed. Since I wanted to watch the washer while running a test load I made sure I had everything I needed to pass the time, fresh coffee, and a copy of Clayton's Breads, recently snagged at a library book sale:

  After returning from a great weekend at the first ever The Fresh Loaf get together just outside of Boston I ended up with some left over starters that I had brought with me.  I decided to use most of the corn flour/AP starter along with some AP starter to make my next bread.

Now that Spring has arrived I wanted to get into the mood so I used some chopped tomatoes in this one along with some cilantro roasted onion olive oil, Kamut flour and Turkey Hard Red Wheat flour and some Spelt flour.  I added some mashed potatoes to add some extra softness to the crumb.

I followed my normal procedure below for making the bread and I must say I was very happy with the results.  You can really taste the tomatoes and the specialty olive oil I added.  The nuttiness of the Kamut, Spelt and Turkey flour really combined to make a nice complex flavored bread.  The crumb was nice and open for such a whole grain bread and the potatoes really did help make the crumb nice and moist.

Directions

Starter Build 1 (Corn/AP Starter)

95 grams AP Flour (KAF)

55 grams Corn Flour (Bob's Red Mill)

50 grams Seed Starter at 65% hydration (If you use a 100% hydration starter you need to adjust the water amount and flour amount to compensate)

90 grams Water at room temperature.

Mix all the above ingredients together for about 1 minute and cover with plastic wrap.  Let it sit at room temperature for around 4-8 hours or until the starter has doubled.  I usually do this the night before.

Starter Build 2

75 grams AP Flour

25 grams Corn Flour

75 grams Water at room temperature

Mix all the ingredients into the starter from step 1 until they are incorporated.  Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit for 4-6 hours or until doubled.  You can then refrigerate for up to 1  day or use in the main dough immediately.  Note: You can either use all of this starter or per the recipe below use only 300 grams and combine with 125 grams of a AP starter at 65% hydration.

Main Dough Ingredients

300 grams Kamut Flour

150 grams Turkey Red Hard Wheat Flour

130 grams Whole Spelt Flour

200 grams Mashed Potatoes

130 grams Diced Tomatoes Drained (I used a can and drained very well)

18 grams Seas Salt

28 grams Cilantro, Roasted Onion Infused Olive Oil

415 grams Water

Main Dough Procedure

Mix the flours, and 365 grams of the water together in your mixer or by hand until it just starts to come together, maybe about 1 minute.  Let it rest in your work bowl covered for 20-30 minutes.  Next add the salt, starter (cut into about 7-8 pieces), oil, and tomatoes and mix on low for a minute.  Add the rest of the water unless the dough is way too wet.   Mix on low-speed for another 3 minutes.  Remove the dough from your bowl and place it in a lightly oiled bowl or work surface and do several stretch and folds.  Let it rest covered for 10-15 minutes and then do another stretch and fold.  Let it rest another 10-15 minutes and do one additional stretch and fold.  After a total of 2 hours place your covered bowl in the refrigerator and let it rest for 12 to 24 hours.

When you are ready to bake remove the bowl from the refrigerator and let it set out at room temperature still covered for 1.5 to 2 hours.  Remove the dough and shape as desired.  Place your dough into your proofing basket(s) and cover with a moist tea towel or plastic wrap sprayed with cooking spray.  The dough will take 1.5 to 2 hours depending on your room temperature.  Let the dough dictate when it is read to bake not the clock.

Around 45 minutes before ready to bake, pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees F. and prepare it for steam.  I have a heavy-duty baking pan on the bottom rack of my oven with 1 baking stone on above the pan and one on the top shelf.  I pour 1 cup of boiling water in the pan right after I place the dough in the oven.

Right before you are ready to put them in the oven, score as desired and then add 1 cup of boiling water to your steam pan or follow your own steam procedure.

After 1 minute lower the temperature to 450 degrees.  Bake for 35-50 minutes until the crust is nice and brown and the internal temperature of the bread is 205 degrees.

Take the bread out of the oven when done and let it cool on a bakers rack before for at least 2 hours before eating.

Lucy hard at work

This one isn't very seasonal at the moment, but I love eating it for breakfast. It's so buttery and soft that I really don't think it needs an accompaniment. The recipe is taken from "non solo zucchero vol.II" where it is called pandoro evolution, but it is very similar to the pandoro a sfoglia from Cresci. 

Main impasto - in grams

sweet starter (50% humidity) 45

dry active yeast 3

very strong flour 179

sugar 36

unsalted butter (soft but not melted) 27

egg 107

salt 3.5

half a vanilla pod 

melted butter flavour 0.3 (I've made this before without the flavouring and it tasted exactly the same - but it's in the recipe so I've included it here).

mix all the ingredients together and work it until it forms a smooth, elastic dough. It should be strong and windowpane, but still very slightly sticky. Wrap it in plastic and put it in the freezer. I left it in there for an about an hour, but the book actually recommends overnight at -10C. While this is firming up, I worked on the butter for lamination:

softened unsalted butter 147

icing sugar 39 

mix the two ingredients together thoroughly, then pat into a square, wrap, and put in the fridge to firm up. When both parts are at the right consistency, take 362 of the dough and laminate it as if you were making croissants - 3 simple turns in total, with at least half an hour between each turn. It ought to look something like this when you've finished:

the total weight is 550g.

The difficult bit is then forming this into a ball without breaking the laminations. The book gives absolutely no guidance here whatsoever! I usually fold the ends underneath and then roll it around until it looks more or less spherical. I doubt very much that this is the best method! The dough by this point is really quite resistant to being shaped. 

It looks so tiny in the tin - it's hard to believe that it can possibly fill it!

Leave it to prove at about 27C and at least 60% humidity for about 10 - 12 hours. I left mine for 10 hours. 

I think it could easily have grown even more than this, so next time I might put less dough in the pandoro tin. As it was, it was just about to start spilling over the edge. If my shaping of the ball had been better then I also think this might have helped.

Leave it in the open air for about 30 minutes in order to form a skin on the dough and then it goes in the oven for 30 minutes at 170C. Leave it in the tin for a few hours after cooking before turning out. Mine stuck a little bit - I should have used more flour and butter to grease the form. 

When it's ready to eat (after a few days), dust it in icing sugar and enjoy! 

I was very happy with the crumb on this one - really light and shreddy, with a wonderfully complex buttery taste. It just fell to pieces as I was cutting and eating it. 

David

Compagne is another bread I am recently into...

I just feel so happy when those coupes opened up nicely!!

This is round campagne, and I sprinkled mealy graham flour on the outside.

They gave extra crunchy texture and savory flavor to the crust which I really enjoy.

Here is the oval one!  I like this shot because it looks like A big smile!!  :)

For this oval one I've tried to make it little softer crumb...

whith some cheddar cheese!!

Had a request from my wifes co-workers for some treats so I made some coffee cake with blueberry and and lemon zest.

Cheers,

Wingnut

It has been almost a year since I last baked this bread. (See Three-Stage 80% Sourdough Rye Bread from Hamelman's "Bread" for the formula and method.) It is very similar to the 70% rye in Bread and to "Hansjoakim's Favorite 70% Rye," both of which are delicious. I do believe that this bread, which uses the "3-stage Detmolder" technique for elaborating the rye sour, yields a slightly better flavor than any other high-percentage rye breads I have baked. The Brød and Taylor Proofing Box makes the necessary temperature control easy. 

I slightly over-proofed this loaf. By time I transferred it to the peel for loading, some of the dough stuck to the bottom of the brotform. The dough had a consistancy reminiscent of chocolate mouse. For fear it would stick to the peel, even with a heavy dusting of semolina, I transferred it to parchment paper. Miraculously, the loaf kept it's shape. It didn't have much oven spring, but it didn't collapse. I baked this 1800 g loaf at 490 dF for 10 minutes, the first 5 with steam. I then lowered the temperature to 410 dF and baked for another 60 minutes. This resulted in a darker crust than my previous bake and a better crust consistancy and flavor, to my taste. While the profile was lower than my previous bake, the end result was more than satisfactory.

After cooling for 4 hours, I wrapped the loaf in baker's linen and let it cure for about 40 hours before slicing it.

The crust was chewy and the crumb was tender and almost creamy. The flavor was sweet and earthy with the barest sour tang. It was just delicious plain and with a thin spread of sweet butter. I'm hoping I can get some cold smoked salmon to go with this tomorrow, if not, it's pretty darned good with pickled herring too.

I know the recipes for 3-stage Detmolder rye breads look rather formidable on first reading, but they are really not too demanding, if you plan the schedule of rye sour elaborations to fit other demands and you can get comfortable handling high-percentage rye doughs. (Shaping with a wet board and wet hands is highly recommended!) The results are certainly worth the challenge. If you asked for a few examples of "real bread" - the antithesis of supermarket, cotton wool, pre-sliced, packaged in plastic white bread - this would certainly be among them.

Happy baking!

David

After seeing Karin’s (Hanseata) great post with her take on Maria Speck’s  Aroma Bread here:  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/32830/aroma-bread-love-story

We knew that we would have to move it to the top of the baking list before anything else got baked.  My apprentice immediately knew this was her kind of bread – 100% whole grains, soakers for a majority of the flours, includes the oddball cornmeal and some Toadies, a scald for the whole berries, seeds galore with multi-versions of SD starters and commercial yeast.

We, of course, decided to go all with the seeds getting around to 11 different ones not including the 3 whole grain seed soaker (making a total of 14).  Some seeds like the coriander, anise, brown and black caraway and fennel were aromatics to spice the bread.

Other seeds like; cracked brown and golden flax, black and white sesame, pumpkin and sunflower seeds make the bread healthy and meaty when combined with the spelt, whole wheat, and rye scalded whole berries.

We strayed from Karin’s bake in some minor ways.  We used the berry soaker water for much of the liquid,  had a few more and different seeds here and there.  We added our new very vigorous WW starter in place of rye sour one Karin used and used a poolish in place of the commercial yeast.  We added WW to the scald, tossed in some toadies and VWG since these flours have so little and also used more rye in place of some of the spelt. 

We did 10 minutes of slap and folds after everything except the sesds and scald came together to work up the gluten and then did (4) S&F’s on 15 minute increments ,to incorporated the seeds and scald.  After 1 hour of fermentation on the counter we bulk retarded the dough for 8 hours in the fridge.

After warming up again on the counter for 1 1/2 hours the next morning and using the time to soak the clay baker, we shaped the loaf to fit an oval  Romertopf and let it proof for 2 hours until it more than doubled.  You might want to let yours be slightly under double so you get the oven spring we didn’t get.  Well, at least it didn’t collapse.

We warmed the oven to 450 F with a stone below and above the rack that the cold clay baker would do its thing on.  We covered the top of the loaf with our tri colored, poppy seeds for a final touch, covered with the lid and steamed the bread for 25 minutes,  We then removed the lid, turned down the temperature to 425 F convection and let it bake another 20 minutes rotating the Romertopf every 5 minutes.

At the 45 minute mark the bread hit 200 F and we turned off the oven, leaving the bread inside, until it hit 205 F - 5 minutes later, when we removed the bread to a cooling rack.  It was very aromatic, boldly brown., crispy but not sporting a blistered crust.

We can already tell that we will love this bread and will know for sure as soon as we can cut into it and give it a taste.  It has another top 5 rating hanging over it I’m guessing.  As a side note we have another nearly identical bake planned with the exception that; we will bake it like a pumpernickel to see which one we like better and it will have yeast water  and Rye Sour levain in place of the WW SD and poolish used for this bake.

I can't stop eating this bread.  Plain or toasted with butter  - just fantastic.  We love the deep flavor, the aroma of the toasted spice seeds,  the nuttiness of the toasted more meaty seeds that give the soft crumb its chew.  This is a great bread adn one i am so glad that Karin posted.  It''s different  than her Wild Rice Bread and, to my liking, a tad better and I love the Wild Rice Bread.  It would be very difficult to craft a healthier bread too.  Can't wait to have a sandwich made with it tomorrow for lunch.  This bread is why I bake and put up with my apprentice....You have to try it.

She's a tuckered doggie just waiting for the sunset.

Couldn't wait for lunch.  We had to have tomorrow's lunch tonight for dinner - a wise choice !

Formula

We ran out of whole wheat sandwich bread and there is only a crust of sourdough left.  Yikes!  Time to start baking.  Actually I started the San Francisco sourdough three days ago per David Snyder's formula, a very reliable go-to loaf of tangy goodness.  Those were baked first. 

Yesterday I also put together a wild yeast starter and soaker for the Peter Reinhart 100% whole wheat sandwich loaf from Whole Grain Breads (I'm really enjoying this book, got it for my Kindle now too).  That loaf was baked next and almost had a disaster, but hopefully caught it in time.  I was merrily going along doing other things when I happened to look at the oven temp reading and realized I hadn't reset the oven to 35oF from 425F per the recipe.  Uh-oh the bread spent 25 minutes in the oven at 425F.  I quickly turned the oven down and tented the loaf with aluminum foil, baked it another 10-11 minutes and took it out of the pan to give it a look/see thump.  It was done.  It looks none the worse for wear. 

Today's bakes (one SF SD went to work with my husband) -