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As I was feeding my starter (Ralph), rather than discarding I fed the discard and used it to make my first sourdough cinnamon rolls.  I'm up to my ears with sourdough pancake mix and just couldn't bear to flush half of Ralph.  I happened on the following recipe in COOKS.COM and with only very minor adjustments, I made the cinnamon rolls shown below.

SOURDOUGH CINNAMON ROLLS
Printed from COOKS.COM

My last rye[url=http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/19306/variations-breads-hamelman-and-macguire] experiment [/url]involved a variation on Hamelman's 66% rye sourdough found in Bread.  The variation was the inclusion of a boiling rye soaker (brühstück) and toasted sunflower seeds.  I was pleased with the result, especially the sweetness imparted by the soaker.

Oh,

for North/Central America

Winner - TEAM USA!!!!!! They ROCK!

 8:30 AM - a full hall to listen to Ciril Hitz talk about laminated pastries and brioche.

Even the professional's heads were reeling with the amount of information Mr. Hitz can pack into a lecture.  We were given a CD with links to Youtube instead of the traditional paper sheets.  There was just that much material...

[size=18][b]Tales of doing every mistake you can do[/b][/size]

 After the first failed attempt at croissant making, it caused me a long hesitation before attempting it second time around. It also made me thinking that croissant was probably just too hard to make and I should leave them to the professional. However, some recent TFL posts kind of encourage me into believing that I can also do it.

So, here goes my second attempt. 

I'm probably trying to learn too much too fast.  And my brain is not as absorbent as it once was.  But surrounded by the centuries--maybe millenia--of collective knowledge on TFL, I want to both catch up and enjoy the learning process.  I know I'm doing the latter.  

 After a martoonie or two and an early night, Tuesday  8:30AM found a very large crowd of bakers and imposters ready to listen to Craig Ponsford and Jeffrey Yankellow talk about the science and application of sourdough based pre ferments.  Both seemed somewhat subdued and I was reminded of a quote about folks in another party town who made an early morning appointment.  When they rolled into the restaurant for breakfast they remarked to the waitress that their counterparts were late and they could have used that extra few minutes to gently recover from the previous eveni