Bake-o-Rama
I'm pretty well embroiled in some bread rage right now. I made 3 utterly failed loaves of Italian bread last week, and made 2 reasonably passable loaves afterwards that were still too dense for my tastes. The fail loaves refused to come off the pan (understandable, since they had spread far beyond the bed of cornmeal I had prepared for them) with anything less than Herculean efforts; this resulted in stabbing with a metal spatula and clawing the clingy loaves off of the baking sheets with Ove-Gloved hands (nearly bending my fingernails backwards in the process... ow). The fail loaves were not really edible. They were dense, gray, and sad.
I posted a desperate cry for help on cooking , which yielded some useful advice, and a good chunk of useless crap (one suggestion that was oft-repeated: "use a baking stone." SURELY A STONE WILL HELP MY SHITTY DOUGH WORK LIKE MAGIC!!11). One useful nugget was to use the Bread Baker's Apprentice as a reference tome. I even found a blog project in which several bloggy people have evidenced their use of the book's formulas in text and photos, and their Italian breads look just grand. I need this book.
Today I started some croissants to finish tomorrow. I... don't know how they will turn out. I'm only 2 folds in (final recipe calls for 4) and the dough is already tearing in places. I may just make the 3rd fold tomorrow the final one, then cut and shape after that.
At least my red velvet cake for Christmas came out nicely. The roux buttercream was actually really great; it was nice and fluffy, if a little sweeter than I wanted. I flavored it with Tahitian vanilla - Tahitian has a very different vanilla character for sure. I want to make some shortbread with it now.
I posted a desperate cry for help on cooking , which yielded some useful advice, and a good chunk of useless crap (one suggestion that was oft-repeated: "use a baking stone." SURELY A STONE WILL HELP MY SHITTY DOUGH WORK LIKE MAGIC!!11). One useful nugget was to use the Bread Baker's Apprentice as a reference tome. I even found a blog project in which several bloggy people have evidenced their use of the book's formulas in text and photos, and their Italian breads look just grand. I need this book.
Today I started some croissants to finish tomorrow. I... don't know how they will turn out. I'm only 2 folds in (final recipe calls for 4) and the dough is already tearing in places. I may just make the 3rd fold tomorrow the final one, then cut and shape after that.
At least my red velvet cake for Christmas came out nicely. The roux buttercream was actually really great; it was nice and fluffy, if a little sweeter than I wanted. I flavored it with Tahitian vanilla - Tahitian has a very different vanilla character for sure. I want to make some shortbread with it now.