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Hi Folks

i was reminded by work colleauges that i had not baked for a little while and that they were feeling deprived of some nice bread. So with that thought ringing in my ears and the thought that i hadn't baked since i had changed my feeding regime for the sourdough culture  where it now spends more time in the cool room than out, coming out for a couple of days for a few feeds and going back in the fridge for a longer stay.

The lead in picture shows that we baked Nisu plus other breads... Helen's picture leads in with her braided Nisu breads and her Alaskan Sourdough. We had a great time baking these breads and decided that we LOVE the dough from this Finnish Nisu (Nissua) bread... it will be the go to recipe for future sweet breads and cinnamon rolls... in fact, today I am going to make a raisin swirl bread with the same recipe.  

Here are our pictures of how this bread came out for us....

Down to my last few weeks in Canada and am now trying to clear a bit of my remaining pantry. Still have a little of the spent grains from the previous spent grain bake which I decided to incorporate in last week's bake. And why not throw in a little beer to make it a beer bread something which I wanted to try for a long time. Recipe was adapted from Dan Lepard's barm bread.

Barm:
250g Ale (I used a home-brewed Honey Basil Ale)
50g Flour
4 Tsp Starter

This is essentially my pizza dough recipe except that I added an extra teaspoon of yeast. I let it rise until double in size. Punched it down, divided it into fourths, formed flattened balls and placed them in a 9x9 pan. Let them rise until doubled again and baked them at 350F for 25 minutes. Sprayed them with butter flavor oil immediately as they came out of the oven, and broke them into individual buns to cool.

They had a nice crumb for burger buns and toasted easily. Tasted great!

Now, this is a first for me - a golden Christmas pudding - golden almonds, golden fruit and actual edible GOLD!!!

Full review and pictures here

Recent bakes:

11/27/13 - 100% Whole Spelt Pandoro-Like Thing

This is a continuation of the 100% spelt brioche that I made last week or so…  I wanted to see what more butter, eggs, and sugar would do using spelt flour...

11/24/13

Rye SD

100g - Water

50g - Organic whole rye flour (Arrowhead MIlls)

48g - Rye SD (100% hydration)

I'm still working on my challenge to provide before and after pictures of all the breads I posted in a collage. This is not the pizza in the collage, but it's the only pizza pic I have that somewhat shows the crumb of my pizza dough. And all my pizzas are the same basic dough, so here's to substitutions!

I am starting to feel the effect of all this tastings - six down, another dozen (at least) to go.

And it seemed like such a good idea - full reviews here

I have been on a higher % rye kick for a while now and decided to bake up a few to stock me up for December.  When I say higher %, I know these aren't quite high, but for me, I haven't really tried anything higher then 40% prior to this.  Maybe a Danish Rye qualifies as higher than 40%...

You just have to improvise and salvage what you can!

These were really good buttery rolls. They should have been croissants!

I was trying to make croissants, but had a major butter blowout while working my dough. Such a blowout that it was not going to work as croissants at all! So I folded my dough up, cut it into 6 pieces, sort of tucked the corners under to form a ball and then went at each ball with my apple corer.

Some times you just have to do what you can to save what you can!