Rose's Alpha Bakers: Whole Wheat Walnut & Raisin Loaf (bump)

I haven't had a chance recently to bake with my friends in the Rose's Alpha Bakers group, but I'm going to try to get back into the swing of things as the summer winds down (I can't believe it's already August!). This week's bake is Rose's 100% Whole Wheat Walnut Loaf. I made this bread (with a few tweaks) way back in February and it was absolutely delicious!

It quickly became a favorite and I made is about 5-6 more times during the long and seemingly never-ending New England winter we had this past year. It was the perfect winter bread - hearty but not heavy, tasty, and amazing when toasted up and topped with butter and honey.

My tweaks were to add a small amount of white flour and to add raisins. I also started making 1.5x the recipe so I could get two full loaves out of it. The first time I made it I got one loaf plus a few rolls so figured...why not increase the recipe slightly and get two loaves?

This bread is an all-day affair as the starter takes about 4 hours and then there are two rises. I tried once to start the dough the night before and finish it the next morning, but I didn't like that loaf as much so went back to waking up early to start the loaf and finishing it around lunchtime of the same day.

I highly recommend making this bread! Delicious.

yummy and healthy!

delicious with butter and a bit of honey

nothing better than homemade bread on a cold winters day!

My full post for my tweaked loaf that I called Whole Wheat Walnut & Raisin Loaf, plus lots of pictures, is here.

Bye for now...
 

Rose's Alpha Bakers: Hamantaschen

This week's bake with the Rose's Alpha Bakers is Hamantaschen, small cookies eaten during the Jewish holiday Purim (learn more about Purim). Hamantaschen are traditionally made with a poppyseed filling, however I like to save my poppyseed-eating for cakes and muffins so I improvised and did more of a rugelach-type filling. In all seriousness, I like poppyseeds - but not that much - so I thought a cookie filled with poppyseed paste would be too overpowering.

My poor little Hamantaschen - which were supposed to bake up in a cute little triangle shape - were a complete fail. They all opened during baking so I ended up with more of an open-faced mini mince pie cookie. I followed the directions exactly in terms of the chilling of the dough, the rolling of the dough (thickness and size of the cookie), and I don't think I overfilled them, so I'm at a loss of what went wrong. Maybe I should have used a folded over corner instead of pinching them closed.

I also wish I had mixed up the apricot lekvar with the nuts, raisins and cinnamon-sugar so it all melted together better, but...oh well. Even if they don't look the way they should, they were tasty.

you can see the flaky pâte sucrée crust...

...but they are all flat flat flat...boo hoo!

mise en place for the cookie crust

I prefer to make my pie crusts by hand rather than in the food processor as instructed in the recipe (seems easier to get a real feel for the dough, you don't over-work the crust, and you don't have to wash the food processor bowl and blade afterward). It's easy to do by hand - just go fast and keep your hands well covered in flour (so their heat doesn't melt the butter). This cookie dough was actually a pâte sucrée crust, which has sugar and an egg yolk, so it's a sweeter and more sturdy dough than regular pie crust.

In these first four photos I'm incorporating the butter into the flour-sugar mixture. In the next four, I've added the cream and egg yolk and am forming the dough. The dough is then divided and given a rest in the fridge before rolling it out.

incorporating the butter

finishing the dough

filling for the cookies

Rose raves about muscovado sugar - and uses it in many recipes - so I bought a 2-pack of huge(!) tubs of light muscovado sugar from Amazon.com. It was a bit expensive - for sugar - but much, much cheaper than buying the small packs available at the grocery store.

smells delicious!

cutting out my cookie rounds

I wish I knew what went wrong. Maybe I left the openings too large? Maybe I should have sealed the edges with water instead of an egg wash? Too much filling? All of the above?

They are a bit more open than the pictures in the cookbook, but I pinched those edges pretty good! Oh well. I'll just pretend I did it on purpose...mini open-faced mince pies ;)

cookies assembled, given an eggwash, and chilled

a close-up

every single one opened back up...

mini open-faced mince pies

still delicious!

Bye for now...

Rose's Alpha Bakers: Chocolate Pavarotti with Wicked Good Ganache

To celebrate Valentine's Day, the Rose's Alpha Bakers are baking something deep, dark, and delicious. Up this week is the Chocolate Pavarotti with Wicked Good Ganache...and Caramel Whipped Cream (I finally made the amazing caramel whipped cream from the Chocolate Cuddle Cake week!).

my finished cake with white chocolate "pearls"

time for a slice, with delicious caramel whipped cream!

I had mixed feelings about this cake. The cake was a breeze to make. And I really liked the flavor of the cake - it was very chocolatey but not overpowering - but I felt the texture was a little too crumbly. It looks more firm and dense (in the pictures) than it was and, for me, the heavy ganache needed a slightly more dense cake.

And...that brings me to my next mixed feeling - the ganache. Again, the flavor was delicious, but I thought the ganache was too stiff. It was lovely and very smooth while spreading but was too hard once it was on the cake. The texture of the cake was too soft and crumbly compared to the stiff ganache; the two didn't seem to go together. My decorating plan was to make little valentine's hearts on the top of the cake by putting drops of white chocolate on the ganache and dragging a toothpick through...but the ganache hardened immediately so I wasn't able to. I had to settle for little white chocolate "pearls" on top.

Instead of the ganache, I think this cake would be lovely with some caramel sauce on the plate and a dollop of the caramel whipped cream. Next time!

The ganache was made with both 60% and unsweetened chocolate, so it was very rich and not overly sweet. There were a few more steps than usual for Rose's ganache (melting the unsweetened chocolate first, in the Lyle's Golden Syrup) but was still very easy to make.

ingredients for the ganache

first the unsweetened chocolate is melted in the Lyle's Golden Syrup

the 60% cacao for the rest of the ganache is bashed into bits

Instead of breaking out the food processor for this little bit of ganache, I just made it by hand. The scalded cream is poured over the broken chocolate pieces and stirred gently until it's completely melted, then the other chocolate-syrup is mixed in.

the stages of ganache

gorgeous, smooth Wicked Good Ganache

The ganache sets up for several hours while the cake is made and cooled. The cake was very easy to make, as all of Rose's cake are.

mise en place for the cake

first the cocoa powder is melted in boiling water and set aside

then the white chocolate is melted and set aside

the dry ingredients are combined with the melted chocolate, oil, and butter

and mixed well

then the eggs are added

and finally, the melted white chocolate

such a lovely, smooth batter!

and, voila, chocolate cake

so pretty

time for a slice, with the caramel whipped cream

delicious!

Bye for now...

Rose's Alpha Bakers: Caramel Whipped Cream

A quick post to showoff my delicious homemade caramel and Caramel Whipped Cream. During the week of the Chocolate Cuddle Cake, I neglected to make the accompanying Caramel Whipped Cream and was told over and over by the other Rose's Alpha Bakers that I had missed the best part of the Cuddle Cake! After such rave reviews, I knew I had to make this whipped cream the next chance I got.

For Valentine's Day, the Alpha Bakers are making another chocolate cake (Chocolate Pavarotti with Wicked Good Ganache) so I thought, what better accompaniment? Caramel Whipped Cream!

chocolate Pavarotti cake with caramel whipped cream

my gorgeous caramel!

I have to admit, I'm a bit of a caramel "chicken." The thought of accidentally spilling boiling hot sugar on my skin scares me. Plus, caramel seems so unforgiving! Leave some sugar crystals on the edge of the pan? It's ruined. Cook it a moment too long? Ruined. It's so temperamental! But, as they say...practice makes perfect, so I guess I'll need to just keep making more and more caramel until I master it.

Here are my caramel and Caramel Whipped Cream photos:

cocoa powder is mixed into the caramel
which is then mixed into the whipped cream

my sugar is boiling away

cream has been added

then butter is added

and it's stirred until blended

gorgeous caramel!

the melted cocoa powder is added to the caramel

and then the chocolate-caramel mixture is added to softly whipped cream

and it's beaten until stiff...so delicious!

Bye for now...

Rose's Alpha Bakers: Whole Wheat Walnut & Raisin Loaf

It's catch-up week for Rose's Alpha Bakers. Instead of making a recipe I missed, I decided to try something healthy this week and made the 100% Whole Wheat Walnut Loaf from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Baking Bible. I made a few small changes though - adding a bit of white flour and some raisins - so I'll call mine a Whole Wheat Walnut & Raisin Loaf. It was a mostly whole wheat loaf that was 100% delicious!

While I am enjoying baking through The Baking Bible, I am really feeling the need to be more healthy...so I've just purchased Rose's The Bread Bible and will be making more breads and fewer sweets. I'll still be baking along with my online buddies (as evidenced by next week's chocolate cake, which I've already made!), but - here in Massachusetts - we've been digging out from one storm after another and making fresh bread from scratch while I'm stuck in the house feels like an awesome winter project.

my finished loaf and dinner rolls

You can see here that the loaf baked up with a nice light crumb. It was hearty, but not heavy.

a view of the inside

lovely fresh rolls

Overall, the bread was amazing. It was easy to make (although it took all day) and the taste was delicious. I felt so healthy eating it! It also made so much dough that I could make a full sized loaf plus eight rolls.

I was a bit nervous about using only whole wheat flour because I feared the bread would be too dense and heavy, so my loaf doesn't look much like the picture in the book. Rose's bread (in the book) looks almost like a Boston brown bread to me - very dark in color with a tight crumb. My loaf is lighter in color and slightly fluffier inside. The addition of raisins also kind of threw off my senses and I was expecting it to be slightly sweeter, so next time I think I would add a bit more honey to the dough or just use nuts and no raisins. Turning it into some kind of cinnamon-raisin-walnut bread would also be yummy.

The first step in making the bread is making a "sponge," a starter dough that adds structure, flavor and texture to the final bread. I let mine rise for the full 4 hours (with the rest of the flour sprinkled over the top) to get the best flavor possible.

ingredients for the sponge - so easy!

the sponge was really liquidy

One of the ingredients was vital wheat gluten. I'd never even heard of this before, but was glad I found it at the grocery store! I don't know if it was just a great recipe or the addition of the vital wheat gluten, but this bread was really great! A definite make again recipe.

ingredients for the bread

hmmm...so this is what vital wheat gluten looks like!

the dry ingredients are mixed together

After mixing the starter ingredients, the rest of the dry ingredients are mixed together and sprinkled over the top of the sponge like a thick flour blanket. Then the dough rests for 1-4 hours.

sprinkle sprinkle...see you in 4 hours!

After 1 hour, small cracks have formed in the flour "blanket." After 4 hours, there are lots of bubbles all around the edges. Baking with yeast is so cool - it's alive (said in Dr. Frankenstein's voice)!

after 4 hours...bubbles everywhere

so cool - a science experiment in my bowl

After four hours of resting, the dough gets mixed together then the oil and salt are mixed in. I was a bit worried at this point because it seemed really oily...but, of course, it turned out fine.

After that, the raisins and walnuts are mixed in, then it gets the first rise.

mixing everything together...a bit oily now, but not for long

in go the raisins and walnuts

and another very brief mix, to incorporate everything

Time for the first rise. The dough goes into my lovely dough-rising-bin.

there is always that nervous moment...will it rise properly??

yahoo, it rose! Beautiful.

After the first rise, the dough is turned out - look at all those beautiful air bubbles! - gently deflated, and back in the bin for another rise.

gently deflating the dough

and giving it a gentle knead

Time for the second rise...

after about an hour, it's done

Then the dough is turned out again, shaped, and put in the pan for the final rise. To shape it, it's rolled up and placed in the pan, seam side down.

rolling...

...rolling....

and pinching the seams

into the pan for the final rise

I thought there was way too much dough to fit into my bread pan so I split it in half for the loaf and to make 8 rolls.

roll dough, ready to be shaped

into the pan for rising

After the final rise we're ready for baking. Yum!

beautiful dough!

golden brown rolls

look how pretty they are!

a bit of butter and we're ready to go

gorgeous loaf on the outside...

...and in the inside!

Bye for now...