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Americans and Germans have a lot in common. One is their love for cheese cake. Though both pastries taste great, Käsekuchen is distinctly different from its US cousin.

Cheesecake crust is made with cookie crumbs, very practical, and a good recycling of even stale cookies. German Käsekuchen has a short crust, more fuss, but buttery decadence.

I made a special miche for holiday family celebrating. This is the 2nd miche I've ever done, and by far the biggest loaf I've ever made in my short six months of really diving into bread. I have a batch of Carl's 1847 starter that I've been feeding for a few months now. I keep it at 50% hydration in my fridge and feed it once or twice a week. The recipe I did is pretty easy:

1. Carve out 225g of the starter (50% hydration so 150g of flour, 75g of water) and drop it in the mixing bowl. 

2013 The Fresh Loaf Dabrownman’s Blog

1/4/2013 - Panettone - The Last Bake of 2012

1/4/2013 - New Year's Day Pizza and Banana Bread Cupcakes

1/5/2012 - Hanseata’s Sausage Filled Puff Pastry with Cheese

Just for giggles and pure laziness, I didn't knead the Japanese Milk Bread this time - just a few stretches and folds like it was an artisan bread.  The dough was sticky and I just placed it into a loaf pan for sandwich bread.  

The water roux (1 part flour to 5 parts water) was 20% of the total dough and I used all purpose unbleached flour instead of the usual bread flour.

flour              100%

Water             33%

Milk                33%

This pulla raised with both sweet and YW levains is a Christmas present for my friends who are having this 'orphan' for dinner tonight.

 I used Ibor's 3 strand octopus braid for the first time after watching his very skilled hands work several times on the excellent videos her has posted here:

http://myfoodaddress.blogspot.ca/

Well this braiding produced a much different loaf of pulla than I have ever baked and should make a fine Christmas gift!

After baking 80 dozen Christmas cookies, I switched to buttermilk rolls for my husband's potluck and some San Francisco sourdough bread for us and one loaf to my son-in-law, Paul.  Paul lives in Rio Rancho, NM so I'll be sending his loaf tomorrow via UPS. 

Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Since we gave away the first fruit cake bake and didn’t even get to taste the SD Gold Rush variety, we had to make another Gold Rush variety - and make a few changes to it to make sure there weren’t any complaints that Lucy was baking the same thing all over again.  She hates playing with the same dough twice.

   This is an adaptation of my regular Durum Semolina bread with the main difference being the addition of Orange Shandy beer for the water and some dried orange peel.  The beer has a slight orange flavor undertone so I thought adding it to this formula with some orange peel would create a nice flavor combination and I was not wrong.  You can taste the hints of the orange beer and orange peel but it's not overpowering at all.  This bread is very tasty and is excellent for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

   These German style rolls were adapted from a recipe on Karin Hanseata's blog.  Her blog is filled with inspired baking so I urge you to visit and explore her adventures.

I found these rolls to by very similar to Kaiser style rolls with a nice hard crust and soft interior, perfect for sandwiches.

Since the day I baked my first San Francisco Baking institute’s Miche (Posted by dmsnyder here) , I wanted to have another go at it soon. Alas, I have been distracted by several other formulas and books and eventually ended up putting it off. Two days ago, I was reminded by the formula when I saw my wheat germ bag sitting in my freezer and decided to give the formula another whirl.