O no!  Playing in the garden, I learned from the music across the courtyard it was my neighbor Istvan's birthday!  What to do to wish him the best...?  Bread, because I can't make much else!  But something special, so it wouldn't be just another loaf - a secret ingredient absolutely nobody could guess but everybody seemed to like...

Vanilla! Since I love the couronne shape and Istvan's got a lot of mouths to share with, I tried a big loaf and kneaded up this:

Aaaahhh! Mostly, I thought I would upload this because I found what I ended up with hilarious!  But happy birthday, neighbor... 

Apricot dumplings: A true Austrian delight!  Just in time for Apricot season (northern hemisphere)

A few things to remember before getting started: The dough is 2/3 cooked potatoes combined with 1/3 other ingredients by weight. Potatoes should be the flaky type or bake type potatoes and boil one or two extra to make sure there are enough. Apricots can be fresh, frozen and even slightly on the firm side. One can carefully remove the pits and place a sugar cube inside larger fruits, this works esp. well for freezing. Apricots, peaches or cherries are all posible. Crumbs may include grated nuts as well.

You will need:

potatoes 700g, AP flour, one egg, salt, butter, a large fry pan, a large pot for boiling, work surface, & about 750g fruit or 12 apricots, a slotted spoon, sugar.

APRICOT DUMPLINGS      makes 12

Potato Dough:

• 500g potato; boiled, hot or one day old, peeled and put through ricer, grated or fork mashed very fine.
• 165g flour
• 5g salt
• 1 egg
• 15g unsalted butter

Crumbs:

• 100g unsalted butter
• 70g bread crumbs

Grate fine or put potatoes thru a ricer. Combine loosely and evenly with flour and salt and make a hole in the middle. Add egg and bits of butter. Now pinch and quickly knead into a nice firm dough, no added flour, remove or squish any lumps. Roll out into a log and divide into 60g lumps for apricots and 40g for cherries.

Set a large pot of salt water to boil, you will want to cover the dumplings and they should just swim and not touch the bottom, about 1/3 to 1/2 full of water with about a teaspoon of salt.

Roll each lump into a ball and then into a disk with the middle slightly thinner than edges. Now you can use just a little flour in the palm of one hand to help shape lump and keep it from sticking while you place each fruit into dough. Press & stretch the dough tightly around each fruit trying to prevent any air pockets. Seal opening and roll slightly in hands to make round. Set aside and repeat for next fruit until all are prepared. (They can be frozen or refrigerated at this point. If using frozen fruit, it is recommended to boil right away to retain shape.)

When water is boiling, give it a good stir so it is moving and slip dumplings in on a wet spoon. Set timer for 15 minutes. Turn or jar pot often to prevent sticking. After water has returned to boiling reduce heat to softly roll the dumplings as they boil. Meanwhile, heat up a large fry pan and brown crumbs in melting butter. The trick here is not to let them burn so stir often and turn off heat before they're done, the heat in the pan will continue to brown them. Set the pan aside or nearby.

When the dumplings have boiled 15 min, gently transfer with a slotted spoon into the crumbly pan. Pick up the pan and with a rotating motion rolling the balls into the crumbs coating them as you play. Remove onto a serving plate or smaller plates and serve warm with fine sugar. Variations may include serving with Vanilla sauce or Vanilla ice cream. Three make a meal, one a dessert. I made 8 Apricot and 8 cherry.

Put potatoes thru a ricer... or whatever and fluff in flour & salt

Add egg and butter...and start squishing and kneading

knead: ..and take a picture at the same time ...until uniform  

Shape a disk

shape and fill

...and press around until closed up and sealed

boil and brown at the same time

rock and roll until coated ... then serve up piping hot!

Apricots and Cherries! Yum yum!

Enjoy!

I wanted to share my first loaf of real sourdough with the people who inspired it. I've been baking a long time, off and on, but we retired a while ago and moved to very rural Tennessee, and I really miss the variety of bread it was easy to find in Southern California. This is all the more reason to bake my own.

I read Floyd's lesson "When Yeasts Attack", and made my starter using the method he describes there. I had good luck with it from the start, and I continued to nourish it for a week, and then made the dough yesterday, put it into the frig to rise overnight, returned it to room temperature, and baked it this morning. I need a lot of work on shaping loaves, and slashing, but I'm very pleased with this loaf anyway, and would like to think of it as a beginning.

Please be gentle and think "Rustic" when you view the photos.

Floyd - Love the new feature showing everyone's photo! It's fun to see the pictures since we all have a tendency to form a picture in our minds of what people look like. This bog just gets better and better. Thanks for all your hard work!

Trish in Omaha

 Help ~

   Tried to post pis`s But ????

   How can I do this ?

  Slide__Out

Mini Oven has been putting up photos in a png format but they do not show up with my browser. Png is a standard graphic format and should be able to be viewed with my browser. Is there a setting that needs to be changed in order to view the photos? I am using IE6 on MS XP Professional.

I baked my first challah last Thursday and wanted to share.

Would it be fun to view some miserable failures in this forum?  I've been thinking about this as I admire absolutely beautiful baking on this site. I regret that I have let some very entertaining photo subjects get away. For instance, last summer I choked a trout with a pumpernickle. What say?

I'm going to try to capture the best-of-the-worst baking from this day forward. (Wish I'd snapped a pic of that no knead sticking to the towel!)

[img_assist|nid=2068|title=Something I took in Victoria|desc=This is just an image I took while in Victoria. I'm testing whether image assist module works.|link=none|align=left|width=600|height=450]

Image assist is the new icon below the body. Click on it and it should let you upload an image.

Still a bit buggy, but hopefully it'll help some people with their image uploads.