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I am not sure if things happen for a reason or not, but sometimes pleasant surprises occur and push you in directions different from what you had in mind. These events can be small or epic, but I am sure they are all important in the making of ones life. What I do believe however, is that if you put out a question or an idea to the world and keep it close to your heart it will be answered … one way or another :)

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Hello friends. 

This comming January I have an opertunity to go to Ghana and install a dripp irrigation system for people in Homabenase so they can grow their own food. In order for me to get there I have to raise money and who else can I ask if not people who I share interest with. Please take a moment to look at this site and help me out. Thank you http://www.gofundme.com/Ghana

Soooo....

ive been reading this site for a few months, and have officially been a member for five minutes. 

I keep a bakers journal here at home, but thought it might be enlivening to start a virtual one. I've been baking for three years. Seriously for about six months. I began a sourdough  starter four months ago and haven't looked back. 

Ill be posting recipes, baking schedules and photographs of my loaves--which I make about twice a week. But to start, I'll post a little history and information about my process. 

The last few weeks have sucked TREMENDOUSLY around here. Good bread is how I cope. In order to stop the current round of chaos that was the wind down for bedtime last night, I offered to the kids that we should mix up dough.

400g flour

2 pinches of yeast

8g salt

300g water

I wanted a wet, tasty dough that would be ready in time for dinner the next day. I woke up today and at 3 or so punched it down and shaped it. A couple hours later I put it in the oven. Half an hour at 425 later, this is what I pulled out of the oven:

House sweet dough

This sweet dough is a mixture of two recipes; The brioche recipe from the Tartine bread book, but with the percentages of butter, eggs, and hydration scaled back to similar percentages as  Richard Bertinet's sweet dough (My favorite yeasted basic sweet dough).   I use this dough for most of my basic sweet dough pastries, some of my favorites are Monkey Bread, Cinnamon Rolls, Orange/lemon sticky buns, fake croissants (in this case with chocolate), Fruit braids, etc. 

After my sourdough boule disaster this past weekend, my bake with baguette a l'ancienne recipe boosted my confidience a smidgen...

and...

and also some crumb...

Last Friday and Saturday, I hopped over to San Mateo for the San Francisco Pen Show to indulge another of my addictions hobbies. We needed a fast breakfast to get an early start. So Thursday I baked ...

Cinnamon-Raisin-Walnut Bread from BBA

Returning Sunday, I activated my sourdough starter and mixed enough levain/biga for ...

These rolls are SD / YW, caramelized onion, sun dried tomato, bacon, parmesan cheese Emperor Rolls with Seeds so they are pretty much not Kaiser rolls or semmels any more.  We forgot to put in the basil but left it in the formula.

Yeah, those are the best two words to describe this weekend's sourdough boule. I prefer to embarrass myself on accident, hence no pictures. I guess every baker is entitled to a few mishaps here and there. I'll get to the points of where I went wrong.

Same recipe as before except: