Intersting week this is shaping up to be. The French Cookie recipe was a great and easy bake... interesting that even with the high fat content, they might be the choice for diabetic tasters since there is only 1/3 cup of sugar in the whole recipe.
As per our usual, we three gmas went different routes to get to the finish line...
This was an interesting bake in the fact that even though we were all on the same page in the same book.... we all individualized our final product differently.
Helen (gmabaking2) made hers with chocolate chips... yum...
ending up with these great looking treats to have with coffee
I made mine
We 3 sisters, gmabaking, gmabaking2, and gmagmabaking2.... have set up this schedule to finish bake testing the First Edition of the ITJB Cookbook. The schedule enables us to finish the book by the end of the year. It is our hope that many of the ITJB Challenge bakers will join in and bake and post and share their stories... our first week is posted under 3 gmas ITJB-ing Week 1... It will be fun to see how the bakes come out and to learn from the many very experienced bakers on this site.
We 3 gmas are still working our way through the First Edition of ITJB - determined to learn all we can from this great resource. This week we baked Eggless Water Challa on page 35. Below are the pictures, as with the previous two semesters we had fun comparing our pictures via texting. Helen (gmabaking2), did the traditional shape and braiding so I will start with her photos.
L'shanah tovah t'kaseivu!
Happy New Year! May you be inscribed in the Book of Life for a sweet year!
We 3 sisters baked together again on Saturday the 14th.. We had never made Salt Sticks or Poppy Horns... but are great fans of the Vienna bread doughs. We all mixed it up baking together. Helen (gmabaking2), made the whole dough into nice large salt sticks and poppy horns as instructed in ITJB. I (gmagmabaking2) made one loaf of Vienna Bread and one dozen small horns and sticks. Barb (gmabaking), made the dough into hotdog buns, hamburger buns, and the sticks and horns.
These are absolutely not the Elephant Ears I grew up with. The Elephant Ears I grew up with were giant platters of fried dough dredged liberally in cinnamon sugar and served terrifyingly hot out of a booth at the local fair. They were awesome but not the sort of thing one would attempt at home unless one had a very large quantity of oil in a very, very large pot.
This was one of the recipes I tested for the book, and I enjoyed it very much, finding it an easy dough to work with, flavorful and versatile. This time around, I think I'm going to follow the suggestion of Stan and Norm (p. 108 of the book) and try baking 1/3 of the dough at one hour into the bulk fermentation, two hours in, and three hours in. I'm curious about how the length of fermentation will affect the structure of the dough.
Of course, this may mean that I don't get this bake done this week -- but I'll share when I do get it done! Share when you get yours done!
