66% Sourdough rye (Mellow Bakers)

I made this bread (a Mellow Bakers from December) over the weekend, while making the roasted garlic levain, but I passed it on to my official sourdough rye taster (my dad) and had to wait for his report. (My first December bread was the unkneaded six-fold French bread, which I made this past summer.)

The 66% sourdough rye was similar to many of the other sourdough ryes we've made. Actually the enormous number of sourdough ryes has been my biggest struggle with this challenge, since it is not a favorite bread around here and there are just so many different versions.

I made the sourdough starter and let it ripen over night. The next morning, I mixed everything (rye flour, bread flour, some vital wheat gluten to fill in for the high-gluten flour, water, salt, and a pinch of instant yeast) together in my stand mixer. I often have the problem of my dough hook refusing to mix ryes, especially when I've cut down the recipe and there's not much dough in the bowl. The hook ends up mashing around on top of the bowl without ever actually doing much kneading. So I tried a new technique: I saved a little of the bread flour and sprinkled it around the outside of the dough. It seemed to do the trick, giving the dough hook a little something to latch on to, and the dough actually kneaded well.

Once everything was kneaded, this was actually a really quick bread, with two very short rises and then a quick bake. After a 24 hour rest, my dad reports that the bread was delicious with butter for breakfast along with his tea. Nothing unusual about it, just another good sourdough rye. My dad will definitely be the only one in the family sad to see the end to all of these rye breads.

Roasted garlic levain (Mellow Bakers)

Here we are at the final month of the Mellow Bakers...hard to believe! I actually made the other two January breads already, the semolina in December when I was looking for a quick one-day bread for dinner one night and the five-grain levain over a year ago.

This weekend I refreshed my starter in preparation for my last three breads (my last January bread and two December ones that I missed). When it was good and bubbly, I mixed up sourdough builds for all three (I later realized that I forgot to make the soaker for the sourdough seed bread, so I only ended up making the 66% sourdough rye and this one, roasted garlic levain).

I followed the instructions from KAF for roasting heads of garlic (I needed less than half of one for the half recipe, but I made two heads and dumped the rest of the cloves in a baggie with some olive oil and stuck it in the freezer).

I mixed all the ingredients in my stand mixer (bread flour, whole wheat flour, olive oil, water, instant yeast, salt, garlic, and the levain). I let the bread rise for two hours with a fold in the middle. I shaped the loaf into a long oval and then life got in the way. I ended up changing our dinner plans and the loaf went into the fridge for 24 hours. The loaf exploded in the fridge. I was nervous about slashing it, but decided to risk it, and sure enough it started deflating immediately. Happily, it recovered somewhat in the oven.

We ate the bread with our favorite chicken-veggie-noodle soup. My little guy who usually only likes white breads of the ciabatta/French bread/dinner roll variety actually gobbled up two big pieces. Hubby loved it (no surprise there). The garlic flavor was consistent but not overpowering, and it paired especially nicely with the soup.

From tragedy to triumph

Or from cake disaster to delicious dessert, at any rate: bombe cake to the rescue!

My baby sister's birthday is New Year's Eve. She loves chocolate, but we were going to celebrate her birthday in the evening, and frankly, too much chocolate in the evenings makes for a really impossible bedtime for us. When I saw this new recipe for a moist yellow cake (better than a box!) with a fudgy frosting from KAF, I thought it might be just the thing.

Late the night before our party, I baked up the cake. I followed the recipe exactly, but when I opened the oven, I saw this:

My cake had completely fallen in the center. I'd never seen anything like it; I'm not sure the picture does it justice, but the sides were a full 2" high and the center had sunk to maybe 1/2". There was no way frosting could salvage this cake. I was really bummed; I definitely didn't have time to make another cake. What to do?

Suddenly I was hit with inspiration: what if I tore the cake apart and used it to create something like the ultra-successful devil's food bombe I made this summer? I knew it would need a thicker frosting than the fudge frosting that was posted with the cake recipe, so I browsed around some more on KAF's website and found this one: super-simple chocolate frosting, supposedly quick and easy, and should be thick enough to hold the cake together. With my plan in mind, I went to sleep.

The next morning, I got to work. I sliced the cake into layers (because of the sunken middle, most were missing a center) and used pieces to fill up the bottom of a small mixing bowl. I spread some frosting (which really was quick and easy...and delicious!), then more cake, more frosting, more cake, and on, until I reached the top of the bowl. I was able to get two slices that were big enough for the top of the bowl and actually had centers, so they covered the top of the bowl. After several hours in the fridge, I slipped the cake from the bowl and used the rest of the frosting to cover the cake.

The kiddos were very excited to decorate Auntie R's birthday cake.

It was a huge hit, and no one knew that this cake was not what was intended (until I told them, of course). :)

Happy birthday, little sister!

Wordless Wednesday: Merry Christmas to me!

Baking with Julia and some new plates for blog pictures from my hubby.
A well-loved and well-used hand-me-down from my dad:
his copy of Modern French Culinary Art.

The rest is from my first-ever cooking store shopping spree,
also courtesy of my awesome hubby.

What to get for the lady who has everything

My stepmom is one of those people who is impossible to shop for. She spent many years as an independent career woman, and when she wants something, she gets it for herself. Christmas becomes something of a trial then, because she can't think of anything that she wants.....usually, I end up buying her some jammies.

This year, though, just before Christmas, KAF posted this blog post about Pecan and Salted Caramel Candies, and I was inspired. My stepmom loves turtles...whenever we're looking for a special little thank you candy treat, I always pick her up a little box. What about homemade turtles?!

Part of the fun for me is making things as homemade as possible, so while I used the KAF post for inspiration, I didn't really want to settle for using store-bought blocks of caramel or wafers of chocolate.

I've made caramel sauce before, but never caramel candies. After some research, I finally settled on this recipe from David Lebovitz for salted butter caramels. I followed his recipe exactly, except that I'd calibrated by thermometers just before and adjusted the temperatures accordingly. (I say thermometers because, while I have a candy thermometer, I don't really trust it...so I use it to give me an approximate sense of where we are and then pull out my thermapen for exact readings as I get close.)

I found this recipe by Emeril for homemade turtles, so while I used a different recipe for the caramel, I used Emeril's for technique. I toasted pecans for 10 minutes in a 350º oven, stirring half-way through. Then I arranged them (I couldn't quite achieve Emeril's star-shaped pattern) into eight piles on a buttered jelly roll pan.

I poured the caramel into a loaf pan (an 8" instead of a 9") and let it cool for about 10 minutes. Then I used an oiled tablespoon to pour a tablespoon of caramel over each pecan stack. The caramel definitely stayed in place better after the 10 minute rest (the caramel I tried to pour immediately just ran all over).

While the caramel was hardening, I cut up a 4 ounce bar of chocolate (60%) and melted it. Once it had cooled to 80º, I used a spoon to pour it over the turtles. (I skipped the shortening that Emeril called for.) Not knowing how she'd feel about salted caramels, I sprinkled sea salt over half of the turtles and left the other half plain.

Because I only made eight, hubby and I didn't actually get to try any of the turtles. But, and I am not normally a caramel person, the buttered salted caramels were amazing...especially sprinkled with a little sea salt and dipped into some of the leftover chocolate!

Show-stopper!

When hubby told me that his work holiday party was going to be on Wednesday, I was thrilled....for the first time ever, our schools actually had parties on the same day! AND we both signed up for dessert. That meant I could make one dessert, split it in two, and call it a day. Hurray!

I wanted a show-stopping recipe, so I put out a call to my Twitter baking buddies for suggestions...and then spent hours and hours on my computer reading all of their suggested recipes and all of the associated comments for each recipe.....What? Doesn't everyone do that?? :) That's why I love having online baking friends...they understand things like that when most of my real-life friends say, "Why don't you just run to the store and pick up a couple of boxes of cookies?!"

Nancy and Di both gave two-thumbs up to this recipe from Dorie Greenspan, and when I gave hubby a few choices, it was the one he picked: Black forest torte, called cherry fudge brownie torte by the Tuesdays with Dorie crew.

The recipe was a process, including lighting dried cherries on fire! It was my first time ever trying to flambé anything, and it was quite exciting. :)

I made a full recipe of the brownie cake, but divided it between two six-inch pans. Because I don't have any mini springforms, I just used my two six-inch cake pans. I tipped out the brownies from the pans, and once they were cool enough, hubby built me a couple of parchment collars and then came up with the brilliant idea of using binder clips to hold the parchment together after we'd tried and failed with every kind of tape in the house.

The marscapone-cream cheese mousse layer was pretty easy to make, and we dumped half on each brownie with its collar, threw them in the fridge, and went to bed.

The next morning, I attempted to pipe some leftover preserves onto the top of my cake. It didn't go very well, so I just sprinkled hubby's with cocoa. And then we brought them to work.

To say this recipe is a show-stopper is an understatement! I walked into the lounge at the end of the day to witness people picking at the plate and having "just one more tiny nibble." Apparently there were huge debates going on in first lunch about whether the torte was homemade (everyone voted that it was purchased at a bakery...is it just me, or is that the greatest compliment ever?). Today, a coworker said, "It was just so mind-blowingly good!" Apparently hubby's coworkers were still talking about it today, too.

Oh, and we all loved it, too. I'm not usually a cherry fan, but I really liked the chocolate-cherry combination in this brownie, and the addition of the chunks of chocolate. It was so fudgy and dense and delicious. And the mousse layer was just divine...I could've eaten a bowl of it! :) Hubby's email, after he first took a taste, read, "OMG, sooooooooo ridiculously good!!!!!!!"

Wordlessish Wednesday: Gift bags

 

Gift bags for preschool teachers and our co-workers.

Hot-chocolate-on-a-stick (to dissolve in milk or just eat plain):
idea, cocoa blocks, marshmallows, and

candy cane biscotti dipped in white and dark chocolate.
And many thanks to Di for gift bag inspiration. :)