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Cheese Snails

cheese snails 2

Cheese Snails 3

These are the marvelous cream cheese snails that have been made and posted many times here. I thought they looked delicious and decided to give them a try. I really like cream cheese so decided not to make the ones with raisins/cinnamon and did the entire batch this way. At first I thought they were too small but they did rise enough that they were just the perfect size for me.

I mentioned before that I am still fairly new to bread making but I think making the same exact recipe (my mother-in-law's dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls, yes, it's the same basic dough) over and over for the last year has helped a lot. I will always be greatful to her for teaching me. I wish she lived closer as we would have a great time in the kitchen together. All of our family is in Oklahoma and we are in Alaska though, so we don't get to see them very often.

The other thing I am greatful for is patience. And I have been reminded that bread making takes lots of that as well. It's great meditative work for me (as is snow shoveling but I don't enjoy a clear driveway near as much as I do the end results from baking). But I need to keep shoveling to work off the REAR end results from baking, LOL.

Hope you all have a great weekend! I will be making a batch of cinnamon rolls for the church potluck on Sunday and will be sure to post a photo. If I get really ambitious I might try to make chocolate sticky buns as well.

Amy

As you may have noticed, in the past couple of days I've replaced a few of the ads on this site with ads for Food Buzz.

The folks at Food Buzz approached me a month or so ago to talk about sponsoring the site. After chatting with them I agreed because it seemed like a mutually beneficial relationship. Food Buzz will include The Fresh Loaf as one of their Featured Publishers, thus increasing the exposure of this site. Presumably that'll increase traffic here and expose more people to the great content we're creating here.

For us it establishes a relationship with a vibrant, growing food portal. Their site is structured more like a social networking site and includes a lot of features I'll be unlikely to add here, thinks like geographically tagged restaurant reviews and photos. It seems like a good place for some of us who have other food-related passions than just bread to go find other like-minded folks to share our enthusiasm with.

This relationship should also improve the finances of TFL. I'm afraid I'm not able to quit my day job to devote myself full-time to The Fresh Loaf or anything like that yet, but I should be able to do things like migrate the site to a faster server or pay for a backup service in the next few months without going into the red. I have a few other projects I've been meaning to work on here too, and this increases my incentive to get on it as soon as I can. So it seems like a good thing all around.

HI,

 This is my first post, and I really hope somebody can help me out.  My mom's recipe for holiday buttery egg bread is lost.  Consists of flour, eggs, yeast (little sugar for the bugs to eat), butter and milk.  Makes a batter-like dough, which rises in the fridge, punched down and left overnight.  Next day, dropped by spoonfuls, spongy into loaf pans coated with melted butter.  Forms a crunchy crust.  I need proportions and timings, etc.

 Sound familiar to anybody?  Thanks in advance.

The Gingerbread I baked last night I did not bake long enough, so the ends were done (and quite tasty) but I threw away the majority of it. So sad.

However, the miche I baked Monday night came out fantastic.

Pretty, pretty loaf.

Grandmother's Apple Cake

5 tablespoons plus 1/4 cup sugar

1 cup AP flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 egg

2 tablespoons milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature

2 medium baking apples

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1. Set the oven to 400 degrees. Spray the bottom of a 10 inch cast iron skillet with cooking oil spray. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of the sugar into the pan.

2. In a bowl, sift the flour, salt, and baking powder.

3. In another bowl, whisk the egg, milk, and vanilla.

4. In an electric mixer, beat the butter with 1/4 cup of sugar for one minute or until light. Remove the bowl from the mixer stand. Stir in one third of the flour, then one third of the milk. Add the remaining flour and milk in the same way.

5. Use the back of a spoon or your fingertips to spread the batter in the skillet - it will be thick and sticky.

6. Peel and core the apples. Slice them 1/8 inch thick. Starting at the outer edge, arrange the apples on the cake in slightly overlapping concentric circles.

7. In a small bowl, mix the remaining 3 tablespoons with the cinnamon. Sprinkle over the apples.

8. Bake the cake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the apples are tender and a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean. Let the cake cool for 10 minutes.

9. With a wide metal spatula , loosen the edges and bottom of the cake from the pan. Place a large plate on top and invert the pan and cake together. Lift off the pan. Place another plate on top of the cake and invert it again, so the cake is right side up. Serve warm.

Be careful not to burn this cake!

Heirloom apples are a palette of the past. Their names reach across centuries: Ashmead Kernel, Cox Orange Pippin, Lamb Abbey Pearmain, Reine de Reinette, Sheepnose or Black Gilliflower. Their flavor does, too--either one in the mouth takes you to a tree in a stone-edged field, discussing apples with a man in leather and homespun.

Hudson's Golden Gems

Our neighbor Willis Wood makes cider from antique apples on a press bought new by his family in 1882.

The best cider comes from knowing the apples and how to combine them.

This cake uses 3 cups of it.

Willis boils fresh cider into syrup and jelly.

A little more than half way along the forest trail that leads from my house to the cider mill, the scent of apples meets us, pungent, sweet and vinegary, odd against the smell of fallen leaves.

Beth Hensperger's Fresh Apple-Walnut Loaf

Ingredients

1 tablespoon active dry yeast

2 tablespoons light brown sugar

1 cup warm water (105-115 F)

1 cup warm milk

6-6 1/2 cups unbleached all purpose flour or bread flour

2 medium-large tart cooking apples, peeled, cored, and coarsley chopped (2-3 cups)

1/2 cup dried currants

1/2 cup walnuts, coarsley chopped

2 tablespoons walnut oil

2 large eggs, at room temperature

2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspons ground mace

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

1 tablespoon salt

1. In a large bowl using a whisk or in the work bowl of a heavy duty electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the yeast, brown sugar, warm water, warm milk, and 2 cups of flour. Beat until smooth, about 1 minute. Cover the bowl loosly with plastic wrap and let stand at room temperature until foamy, about 1 hour.

2. Add the apples, currants, walnuts, oil, eggs, cinnamon, mace, allspice, salt, and 1 cup more of the flour. Beat until creamy, about 2 minutes. Add the remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time, until a soft dough that just clears the sides of the bowl is formed. Switch to a wooden spoon when necessary if making by hand.

3. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth and springy yet firm, about 5 minutes, dusting with flour only 1 tablespoon at a time as needed to prevent sticking. Push back any fruit or nuts that fall out during the kneading.

4. Place the dough in a greased deep container. Turn the dough once to coat the top and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise at room temperature until doubled in bulk, 1 1/2 - 2 hours.

5. Gently deflate the dough. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface. Grease two 9 by 5 inch loaf pans. Shape into two braided or regular loaves. Let rising pans till tops are an inch above rim of pan, about 45 minutes.

350 degrees for 45-50 minutes.

A wild apple tree is as gnarled and angular as an elderly aunt.

Most evenings deer gather beneath this tree, till the snows bury the remains of the season's apple crop.

• Wild Yeast Bread recipe

Just wanted to jump for joy and shout it out loud. I made the Rustic Loaf recipe from this post  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/recipes/rusticbread  and it turned out pretty good.  I have only made dinner rolls and cinnamon rolls before so I am very pleased.  I haven't cut the loaf yet so not sure how it looks on the inside (or how it's supposed to look actually) but I am still proud. Can't wait to taste it. I used a Sushi knife to cut the slashes, it's the only sharp knife in the house. I learned a lot already from this one loaf.  Can't wait to make more. : )

Here is a picture!Rustic Loaf by (Hope this works!)

Had to try uploading it to yahoo, hope you can see it now

A right sidebar! We have a right sidebar! Whoo hoo!

Ok, if you aren't a geek you probably don't care, but I think it is neat. If you are running at 1024x768 or less you won't see it, but that is ok because it isn't critical information. If you are running at a high resolution, it is an added bonus.

Of course it looks perfect in Safari and Firefox but a bit funky in IE. If you are still browsing in IE, I beseech you to download Firefox. Even non-techies find it a much nicer browser than IE.

The right sidebar gives me a good are to show off many of the beautiful things people have baked and posted to the site over the years. I'll be digging through the archives and adding more thumbnails into the rotation in the next few days. Not tomorrow though: jury duty.

I baked a miche tonight. Probably the prettiest I've baked yet. I'll try to get photos in the morning.

I was looking forward to spending the day playing with bread dough, but the wind has been blowing a gale all night and there is a wind advisory. The power has been out twice already so it doesn't seem wise to start any baking. I do have the steel cut oats version of the NKB all ready to shape so I guess I will cross my fingers and go for it - don't have much choice. Or go fly a kite? A.

I made a few changes to the layout over the weekend. The logo has changed and is now dynamic, I've reduced the padding between some of the elements, and, most significantly, I've fixed the width of the body.

Non-nerds may not care about this, but whether web pages should have a fixed width so they look the same on all machines or a flexible width so that they can take full advantage of large monitors is one of these debates that web designers discuss endlessly. I've always been in the flexible width camp, but of late I've begun to move into the fixed width camp.

For me, the big advantage of fixed width isn't the design consistency, it is the readability. When text flows over 1000 pixels before wrapping, it becomes very difficult to not lose your place. Think about newspapers for a minute: if they printed copy all the way across the page rather than in columns it would be much more difficult to read. A consensus is emerging that as the web is becoming more and more of a reader's medium, designers should do whatever they can to improve readability. So with that, I'm sold on fixed width.

The screen resolution stats on people who visit this site are interesting:

The vast majority of us have large, high resolution monitors now. So with that I'm making sure 1024x768 is well supported. I may add perks for folks with even larger monitors, like a rail to the right of the content that could include links to favorite stories or something. We'll see.

Any issues with the new layout, please let me know.