Recent Blog Entries

A little bit of everything: oatmeal raisin cookies, banana bread, and pain sur poolish.

I tried baking some of the poolish bread in a ciabatta sized loaf instead of a baguette. We'll try it tonight.

I can't decide whether I am just really bad at shaping and scoring or whether my dough is too wet to score. I keep trying to score it but ending up w/ the blade stuck in the goo. So my loaves aren't pretty, but they've been tasting great.

My first attempt at creating a sourdough starter. I used the raisin water technique because I wasn't sure I wanted some of the other things that could be found floating in the air around here. This is approx 48 hours after I started it. It now sits safely in my refrigerator until I get past the spring allergy season LOL

Well, I was going to tell more about it last night, but my husband distracted me. As Paul Harvey would say, "Now for the rest of the story."

I started my starter using what I had here based on Floyd's Featured Story ""When Yeast Attacks"

I had a box of california raisins from Wal-Mart and I used stone ground whole wheat flour (this was ground by a friend about 6 weeks ago). I started with the 3/4 cup of raisin water and 1 cup of ww flour. When I checked it about 10 hours later, it looked to me like there was a little bit of bubbling going on. So I added a cup of water and a cup of ww flour. Waited another 8 - 12 hours with it sitting in my cupboard with just a paper towel placed very loosely over it. It didn't look very promising when I checked it this time, but I figured I didn't have much invested in it and a couple more cups of flour wasn't going to break the bank, so I put a cup of wal-mart brand, all-purpose flour and a cup of water in, stirred it all up and left it to grow. I came back Wednesday morning to a very happy starter. I wasn't sure what direction I was going to go at that point, so I fed it (all growing babies need to be fed, right?) and let it sit until I took the pictures last night.

I probably won't be able to do any baking until Monday with it being Mother's Day weekend, but that gives me more time to search for "the" recipe that is going to knock my husband's socks off. He isn't thrilled with the SD bread that comes from the store, and I have to keep reminding him that my homemade from scratch food 99.999 percent of the time tastes much better than anything we buy at the store or from a restaurant :lol: I just know he's going to love this bread and I won't be able to buy loaf bread off the shelf anymore.

More to come next time on the Cookie Bakes Bread channel.

I was going to make the valentine's day pain rapide au chocolat tonight because my boy wanted me to buy him chocolate chocolate chip muffins at the grocery. Well, I just couldn't see myself making mashed potatoes just for that, so I went to google and dug up two C-C-C muffin recipes and between the three recipes I came up with this. And they're quite good, like the bread recipe, not too sweet, but in the middle they have some melty chocolate chip goo that makes them just right.

1/2 cup sugar
1-3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 Tbsp. powdered milk
6 Tbsp. unsweetened cocoa
2-1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

mix all the dry ingredients together, and if necessary, squish out any hard, rocky lumps in the baking powder.

in a smaller bowl or 2-cup measure, mix together:

3/4 cup water
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 tsp. vanilla extract
I also splooshed in 2-3 Tbsp. Irish Cream, lacking rum or any other appropriate spirits

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the liquids, mixing just until blended--as usual for muffins, leave it slightly lumpy.
Spoon into a 12-cup muffin tin, greased or lined with paper accordion cups. Bake at 400F about 18-20 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean unless you've struck a chocolate chip.

and of course, you can use 3/4 cup dairy milk in place of the water/powdered milk ingredients.

Here's the poolish in the AM:

According to Artisan Baking Across America, the puckering in the middle is a sign that it is ready to use.

The baked loaves:

They were acceptable, but not great, this weeknd. I think I made the dough a bit too dry. I'll try again soon.