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Hello, and special thanks to Larry for posting about his Cheese Bread!
My husband loves cheese bread so I made this for him, shaped as a Celtic Knot, for Christmas.
I followed Mr. Hamelman's method for retarding the dough, to help with shaping with the strands.
Somewhere along the line I found this post on shaping, so tried it out:
http://piroulie.canalblog.com/archives/2008/09/12/10232468.html


The baked loaf:

Hello, I wanted to have some good bread to make the turkey stuffing with. Mr. Hamelman's formula for Un-Kneaded, 6-Fold French Bread looked good so I wanted to give it a try. Instead of the 5 baguettes as instructed, I roughly shaped two big loaves. This dough was 73% hydration.
We couldn't resist and cut some to make sandwiches for lunch today.
Another really, really good bread from Mr. Hamelman!!!

The ramping up for the holiday sales started about two weeks ago, but this week was definitely the bulk of it all. Each day started at the crack of the middle of the night, 1 a.m. when I awoke to get ready for the big days of baking starting promptly at 2 a.m. all this week. That meant going to bed at about 5 p.m at night, and focusing on being rested for those 12 hour days of baking.

I thought:  I have just enough time to bake one more goodie.  With both our son and daughter coming home for Christmas, what could be better than a celebration?  Since I just got the BBA off the bookmobile, why not use Peter Reinhart's celebration loaf, the Cranberry Walnut Celebration Loaf to be exact?  Well, mostly exact.  I did not have any real buttermilk, but we have some powdered buttermilk in the refrigerator, so I substituted that instead.  I bought the orange extract for this loaf, deciding I would like that better than the lemon, and I am sure I made

This year I sent all my children and their families, and a couple of dear friends a loaf of sourdough, and a sampling of cookies: Welsh Cakes, Date-Nut Pinwheels--reminiscent of their great-grandmother--and biscotti, a recent discovery and new favorite of mine.

After a week of marathon baking:

10 loaves sourdough--our oven can only bake two at a time,

19 dozen Welsh Cakes,

14 dozen Date-Nut Pinwheels,

14 dozen Biscotti (Parmesan-Blackpepper, Cherry Pecan, Hazlenut-Citron, and Amaretto-Almond)

The kids no longer living with us, I get late into Christmas mode. No Adventskranz (traditional wreath with 4 candles lit for each Sunday before Christmas) on the table, no calendar window to open. Holiday baking happens usually in a rush on the 23. and 24th, but this year we are invited for Christmas dinner, and nobody's around to eat all the goodies (not counting a dog that would LOVE to help us with that task!).

This week has been the week of baking lots of Christmas cookies - this year I've been doing the cookie baking (Floyd's still in charge of supplying our dinner breads ;) Im nowhere near making those pretty sourdoughs myself!)

After my first attempt in artisan baking my family promptly volunteered me for garlic bread duty for the family spaghetti lunch Xmas eve...I figured I'd just do another batch like I did for my introduction and then garlic it but then I decided I wanted to make rolls for dinner at my father-in-law's Xmas eve and lunch at my mother-in-law's Xmas day as well.

 Yields 2 large tinned loaves @ 1064g each

Over the past few weeks I have been trying to "take it up a level."   I had hit the wall on getting properly shaped and slashed naturally leavened loaves.    LindyD's recent post http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/21045/fire-and-ice-great-oven-steam on generating steam set off a lightbulb in my head.  The symptoms I have been trying to cure are cuts that open a little and then seal over, and a split side.   I had been convinced that this was caused by un