Blogger bug still biting

Nasty one, this one! Still have no regular access to my blog. Posting at intervals whenever I manage to find the backdoor. It appears to be a "dashboard" problem combined with log-in. Page keeps refreshing and asking me to log-in. (Same by the way for Gmail but that one comes through.) 

There seems to be no way of contacting some real life person at the Blogger end, and it's not only me having this exact same problem. It exists already since the 13th of February (which was a Friday btw... Friday, 13th?). So, mr Google/Blogger when are you going to act?

I am looking at other blog possibilities; Type pad, Wordpress... to be honest I'm not looking forward to spend the time and energy and switch. Very very aggrevating!

Potato bread for Bread Baking Day no. 17

This month's Bread Baking Day is coming to us through Lien over at Lien's Notes (Notitie van Lien). She is our charming hostess this month and chose potatoes to be the star of the show.

My first potato-bread acquaintance must have been in one of the first books I bought, Beth Hensperger using potato flakes in a bre

ad machine recipe and I remember thinking: huh, she means the dried stuff you add water to? Bought some, tried some, wasn't entirely convinced (besides that it's a great way of saving too wet

 doughs by the way) and started using real potatoes, peeled, boiled, mashed.... and was sold!

Adding potatoes to bread -or even make a starter using potato water/mashed potato- is a great way of adding a certain "je ne sais quoi" to your bread. Somehow it makes for a fluffyness in the crumb, adding moisture to the crumb without turning it to clay, and yes, firmness too. 

My absolute favourite is still the Royal Crown Tortano, but the rolls compete for first place, the one I had to get used to but liked was the pizza, so many variations possible, roasted potato bread anyone? Or a Daring bread? For old times sake (pfff) I baked a bread with potato flakes again, or rather ... two different ones, both using a matured poolish.

Poolish ingredients:

1/4 tsp instant yeast

100 gr whole wheat

100 gr bread flour

150 gr lukewarm water

Combine and mix into a stodgy paste, cover and leave at room temperature for at least two hours. I kept it for longer than that on the counter but treated it as a starter, fed it in 8 hour intervals.

Recipe potato bread no.1:

180 gr. poolish

360 gr. water

400 gr. bread flour

100 gr. dark organic whole wheat

1.3/4 tsp salt

3/4 tsp instant yeast

5 tbs potato flakes

Very straight forward directions. Combine and mix on low speed using your dough hook. Switch to medium speed and knead for about 7-10 minutes. Dough cleans the bowl and will be slightly tacky. Halfway through first -bulk- rise, pull up the dough to stretch and fold over itself. Second shape-rise will take something like 45 minutes. Baked this in a loaf pan, 225C. 

Recipe potato bread no.2:

100 poolish (poolish refreshed 4 hours prior to baking with 100 gr water/100 gr flour)

350 gr. water

400 gr. bread flour

120 gr. dark whole wheat

80 gr. corn flour

100 gr. "matvete durum" (sprouted wheat berries from a can I brought from Sweden)

1 tsp instant yeast

2 tsp salt

2 tbs vegetable oil

1 tsp caraway seeds

1 tbs cracked flax seed

3 tbs potato flakes

Same mixing and rising method as the first dough. This one also cleans the bowl, but is definitely wetter than the other dough and is very sticky! I used the slapping method to get more definition and air, it needs only 2 minutes of pull and slap to turn into a nice -still sticky- but firm and elastic dough ball. Same directions for rising, I tried to shape a couronne.

We really liked the second recipe, especially with aged cheese, cold cuts slathered with a nice mustard, pesto and it even paired nicely with jam. Little warning though; needs some toasting the next day, gets stale very quickly!

Bread Baking Babes celebrate with walnut (or without)

Yippeeeee!!!! I have access to my blog again!! Still can't sign in but able to access via the back door... :-(

Not sure what the Blogger Bods are thinking, missed all kinds of deadlines (sorry Chris!) but I really needed to have my post on line today. Because girls and boys, we have a real anniversary on our hands! Yes, this month has us celebrate the first year anniversary of the Bread Baking Babes!

Can you believe we baked 12 different, wonderful loaves of bread in our first year?

 

Each one of them as different as we Babes are different from each other, but all of the breads -and the Babes- have their own unique handwriting; rule-free, nutty, fibrous, well-shaped, sweet, hearty, bold, long, round, flat, boisterous or filled. 

I think Tanna and I never could have imagined that our mail-exchange a year ago about starting this group just to bake bread and who we should invite would knead such a wonderful group of bakers together. We had so much fun this past year, shared laughs and stories, bitched and cried together, we were all there to celebrate or support when one of us was up or down. We miss Sher terribly, she was one of us right from the start and her passing away shocked us to the core. In the wake of this Glenna bowed out to re-focus. We miss both of them and they will always be our Babes. We needed some time to recover but with this anniversary coming up decided to add two Babes to complete the group again and invited two long time Buddies: Gretchen of Canelo y Comino and Natashya of Living in the kitchen with puppies. 

Tanna made a wonderful bread to celebrate our Buddies, showing each and every bread we made this past year in her post ánd linked to each and every Bread Baking Buddy that baked with us. Thank you all for baking, you're the best! When we started this group we decided from the get-go that our group would stay small, our own Baker's dozen of Kitchens getting together monthly to bake, to laugh, share coffee and stronger stuff, so that's why we invented the Buddies.  If you would like to be a Buddy too, read this post. Being a Buddy is a care-free role, just let us know you baked our monthly challenge within some 10 days of our posting and you'll have your own Buddy Badge! All badges are carefully designed by wonderful artsy Lien by the way!

As it happens February finds Tanna as Kitchen of the Month, she chose a walnut-five grain bread for us to bake. I baked quite early, first time without walnuts and substituting almost all of the requisite grains for different ones and adding walnut oil to the dough. Pantry-panic resulting in a use-what-you-have. I made a 9x5" loaf and some thing french bread. We really loved that first bread, I missed the walnuts but I need to have my private cracker-elfs to perform the task my hands can't.

The second one had walnuts in it, I left the house for an entire day and came back to ..... nothing! No pics and very satisfied boys raving about a wonderful bread, lovely crust, great sandwiches... yeah right. This is one recipe I will keep coming back to. Very very versatile, easy to slice, nice crunchy crust and because of the small amounts of different grains easy to use/substitute. Very nice choice and healthy too!

This is what I did to the original recipe:

(this makes 2 9x5 pan baked loaves or 1 9x5, 2 small boules and 2 thin french breads)

3.1/4 ts instant yeast

690 ml water

510 gr bread flour

125 gr oat flour (ground rolled oats in coffee mill)

65 gr "lumberjack" flour **

60 gr white rice flour

125 gr "Gram" flour = chickpea flour

130 gr dark whole wheat

1 tbs bakers salt (=20 grams)

3 tbs walnut oil

(300 gr. chopped and toasted walnut pieces)

**The lumberjack flour is a fancy name for a whole wheat mix with rye, linseed, millet, wheatbran, soy, buckwheat, corn.

I used an autolyse/volcano method where you mix all of the liquid and 2/3 of the flours plus all other ingredients into a shaggy dough, covered it with the remainder of the flours and leave it be for about 20-30 minutes. The yeast will start working and eventually push cracks in the surface flours. Then you start mixing, either by hand or mixer. A wetter dough but I didn't add flour, used the Bertinet "slapping" method to get more air into the dough. First rise was quick (which I didn't expect). Surprisingly enough with all the less-gluten flours this dough behaved very well in rising and proofing. First bulkrise about 50 minutes, shaped another hour or so. Bake at 400F for 40-50 minutes. 

I expected a dense bread but as you can see in the pics it had a lovely crumb, tight but not dense or overly moist. 300 grams of walnuts is a lot, experiment and see what you like!

Welcome to the world (part two) baby cupcakes

Baked and decorated the cookies I just couldn't resist adding some cupcakes. Simple vanilla-lemon zest flavoured cake batter, topped with smooth royal icing and those incredibly sweet looking cake toppers. Saw these in a cake-decorating shop and well... couldn't leave without. 
My sis told me they were a great hit with the nurses in the hospital! Too bad I didn't leave a calling card (and I live an hour's drive away from that hospital...)
Anyone care for a diaper change? This is the diaper wreath I made.

Kitchen of Love and baby booties

Nothing to do with Valentine but my kitchen was a true Kitchen of Love yesterday night. My first attempt to make decorated cookies... to celebrate my newborn nephew. I've always thought I couldn't do it but to my surprise I really enjoyed myself, in fact I found it relaxing, like when the boys were smaller and we would sit around the table with pencils and drawings, colouring away.. I also made iced cupcakes. (Accidently deleted from my camera, will update with those as soon as I have a copy).

 

Kitchen of Love is an event that is hosted by Chris at Mele Cotte, it celebrates Valentine’s Day and participants are supposed to make something foodie using at least one food/ingredient that's considered an aphrodisiac. An aphrodisiac you say? You can find some info this post. Or, look here, here, or here. 

Now, I'm fully aware that baby booties, or rather a baby in itself is the perfect anti-aphrodisiac (although technically speaking a baby can be the result of aphrodisiac-induced happenings..).  

So this is just an announcement, I have to get my brain focused on the other side of love now and come up with something tasty. If you like to join you'll have until the 10th to submit your entry to this event! All information can be found here at Kitchen of Love.