Blog posts

"These traditional French butter cookies are a snap to make. They positively melt in your mouth and make a great addition to any holiday cookie lineup. The cardamom-and-orange combination is perfect for the holidays, but if you aren’t a fan, you could simply omit those flavourings and add a bit more vanilla."—Giselle Courteau, co-owner, Edmonton

Dec. 6, 2021.  72nd bake.

The previous batch of these muffins, #71, came out pretty good. So I scaled it up to four pots from three. And made some slight adjustments, including adding 60 grams of whole rye flour.

Soaker:

This cake, a Jamaican Christmas tradition, came to my attention from a very strange direction.  

Back in October, my wife and I, along with my sister and her boyfriend, spent a long weekend in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula.  That's the “horn” pushing up into Lake Superior at the western end of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  We happened across The Jampot, a bake shop operated by the Holy Transfiguration Skete Society of St. John, a Byzantine Catholic monastery.  Seriously, where else would one go to find out about a cake that is beloved on a Caribbean island?

Borodinsky the Sequel

A couple weeks ago I made a Borodinsky bread with sprouted rye kernels, homemade solod and toasted caraway. Delicious flavour, moist texture and tasted great with homemade mascarpone but pretty strong to eat with anything else.

The second time I do anything I like to change things around and start learning conceptually what happens. This often means I break something the second time around in order to learn from it going forward.

New Solod

Someone needs to explain to me why my doughs with only fruit in them move so slowly and feel super heavy? I can add the same quantity of porridge in a similar recipe and my bulk is done within a few hours. Whenever I use fruit, the dough takes forever to rise and feels really heavy. I decided not to rush this one and give it all the time it wanted. It did feel a lot better during shaping but once again, they are not light and airy loaves after baking. 

Recipe

Makes 3 loaves

Add-ins

220 g sultana raisins

Carmelized Golden Potato Bread

The basis for this bake is Hamelman’s Roasted Potato Bread from Bread (2nd Ed.).  This is my second time making it with two tweaks that I thought were minor (but turned out to be a big difference) and also baked at a lower temp this time.  I followed the recipe verbatim the first time I made it and used Mr. Hamelman’s suggestion of oven roasting the potatoes.  The bread turned out very good. 

This is my second bake using the method I described in my last bake of 100% whole wheat.  In short, I sift out the larger flakes of bran with a #40 sieve, that bran gets scalded and allowed to cool in the fridge overnight while the levain ferments.  In the morning the dough is mixed and the gluten is developed before adding the bran.  The major difference with this bake is that I increased the hydration to 90%.  Despite that I believe that this flour could still take even more which I’ll do next time.

The grandfather of the husband of one of our nieces (nephew-in-law?) died recently and my wife made a meal for his family.  I pitched in with ciabatta bread, using Reinhart’s ciabatta with poolish formula from BBA.  Since each loaf was a different size, we gave them the Papa Bear and Mama Bear sized loaves.