Made this lovely pizza on brioche dough... yummy!

This has been a very baking intensive weekend and I love it!!

Looks like summer has decided to pay London a visit, we had a nice and sunny day yesterday, a perfect day to make a fruit sourdough. If I start early enough, it will give me a whole day to proof the dough, warm room temperatures to speed up the fermentation, some sugar and fruit in the dough to get things going and to be ready to bake at the end of the night.
And it worked really well – mix everything up at 9 in the morning, stretch and fold until 11, first proof until 3 pm, shape and cold fermentation in the fridge until 9 pm, out of the fridge and warm up for an hour and a half, in the oven just before 11 pm.

Full recipe and more photos on my blog here.

I need new bread for toast. Horribly so.

When I was last here I had just had my second child. So...not much baking went on. He's over a year and a half old now, and I was getting sick of store bought bread. So...back to it. My kids are getting sick of it, too, though, and last night was the first time they touched bread in a long time: I made asiago cheese loaves and...er...they're almost gone now. Two more are in the dough stage as we speak.

So I need some kid-friendly ideas that I could experiment with for breakfast breads. I'd like something I can build on a basic slightly sweet, slightly enriched dough. The sweetening could vary with the type of fruit/seasonings that went in the bread. I was already thinking of doing a maple-oatmeal bread, sweetened solely with maple syrup. I had also tossed around the idea of a strawberry-banana bread (which would be very, very pink inside) and a pumpkin-oatmeal bread (with pie spices), and a blueberry-cream cheese spiral. I've also been tossing around the idea of doing a sweetened five spice bread, but that's a quick bread and not what we're talking about here.

So anyone have anything else I haven't thought of to throw out at me?

Does anyone have a recipe for a fruit nut (raisin / walnut?) bread to serve with cheese? Something fairly dense, with a small hole structure...maybe some wheat or orther darker grains. I've had at restaurants but never made at home.

Thanks.

James

Every summer we're faced with the pleasant task of trying to figure out how to use all the fruit from our trees.  Most of the fruit gets ripe at the same time and it's not possible to eat it all fresh.  Right now the apricots, apriums (cross between apricot and plum), plums, and sour cherries are almost all ripe.  The fig tree, which usually has 2-3 crops per year, is also beginning to have some ripe fruit.  Carol doesn't like jams or jellies so that rules out one method of preserving them.  I like jam but I rarely eat toast, so I don't go through the jam very fast.  Besides, my brother keeps sending us his homemade blackberry jam that's better than anything I ever make.  The obvious solution then, is to make lots of pastry with fresh fruit.  Yesterday it was puff pastry tarts, today it's apricot and plum danish.  And they're just in time for lunch.

The Danish dough is the Danish with Biga from ABAP.  I left the fully laminated dough in the refrigerator an extra day because I was too busy to use it yesterday.  In addition to the fruit, they are filled with pastry cream (also from ABAP) flavored with li-hing powder (1/2 teaspoon of li-hing powder to 2 pounds of pastry cream).  This dough had a mind of its own.  They were supposed to be shaped like the one in the left front in the photo but most of them unfolded themselves while proofing.

Recipe from Bernard Clayton's New Complete Book of Bread - White Bread Chapter

Ingredients:

http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/painauxraisins

Followed the recipe above from Floyd,  I had a lot of fun doing this, especially the shaping of the dough.  Somehow the 1st method of shaping caused the middle to rise more than it should, perhaps I shaped it too tightly.

The 2nd with raisins,  I think I put too much raisins,  all the raisins started to spill out.  

Interestingly, the dough didn't turn out as sweet as i thought it would be. The dough had a good oven spring.  It was so nice to watch it "grew" in the oven.  And I learnt about sugar glaze and egg glaze from this experience.  It was nice to see the shine,  just that the hands get sticky handling the bread after that.

Thanks Floyd - for the great recipe.

This weekend I baked an Orange Prune Bread from Beth Hensberger's Bread Bible. Despite some quirks about the book that annoy me, all of the recipes I've baked from it have turned out very good. This recipe was no exception: I enjoyed it and my kids loved it.

I posted this in respose to quip from Paddyscake on th boiled fruitcake thread but know I will forget where I put it so am creating a new blog

adapted from a Terence Stamp wheat, dairy and sugar free recipe and can be made using a single dried fruit eg apricots, plums or sultanas.

My wheat version (note dairy option) here as follows: