Thanksgiving Baking

Every year, we spend Thanksgiving in Palm Springs, California with my boyfriend's parents. The weather there is warm and there are many blue, cloudless days to enjoy. We decided to do an alternative Thanksgiving dinner this year without turkey, cranberries, pumpkin pie, or any of the usual fixings. Instead, we had a nice rib roast, which coasted to 120 degrees F slowly inside a 200 degree oven.

Instead of dinner rolls, I opted to make epis using Hamelman's baguettes with pate fermentee formula. The dough was divided into three 500 gram pieces, which resulted in three very fat baguettes, as they had to fit onto a half size sheet pan. While the kitchen is quite spacious, my boyfriend's parents aren't bakers, so I had to do without a bench scraper or a baking stone - in the grand scheme of things, only a minor inconvenience.

For dessert, I made some apple cinnamon rolls with Glezer's Baking Team USA Sweet Dough formula. Instead of spreading butter on the rolled out rectangle of dough, I used a thick layer of apple butter and sprinkled cinnamon sugar on top. The result tastes like apple pie in cinnamon roll form. I highly recommend it. Plus, you can justify eating more than one if you tell yourself that this is a lower-fat version that cuts down on the butter content.

Here are the almost-proofed rolls. It took almost seven hours to fully rise.

After coming out of the oven, they were drizzled with some maple glaze: a couple tablespoons of maple syrup, powdered sugar, and cream.

This'll feed us for breakfast for a couple more mornings. I hope all of you had wonderful Thanksgivings. I look forward to seeing everyone's holiday baking in the coming month.