A (chocolate) bread to blog by

Ahh, life is good!

Blogging here, my kids barely not screaming in the background, and relaxing with a cup of coffee and this pain au chocolat from the Artisan Bread in Five website, spread with plain butter:

lock lock 003

I forgot to put sugar on top of the pain before I baked it – probably because it was 6:45 in the morning.  I had dreams of breakfasting on this bread, which is made with lots of butter, cocoa, chocolate, chocolate chips and more yummy stuff.

I will warn you – though it looks like it (sorry for all the brown against the brown countertop in the photo!) this is a “sophisticated” grown-up chocolate bread; the little kiddies (2 and 4) didn’t like it much for their breakfast.

I actually ran out of eggs; I only had three in the house (three out of four that the recipe calls for) while mixing it (Ted came home a little while later, so I had more eggs to mix up tomorrow’s no-knead challah).  The recipe has a lot of moisture in it, however, and doesn’t seem to have suffered for the lack.

Would I make this again?

I don’t know.  I like this… a bit. 

The recipe is more potchkedik than most of the no-knead recipes, what with melting stuff for the ganache and the many different add-ins. 

I also felt it took way more mixing than a “no-knead” recipe legitimately should.  It was hard to stir, definitely on the stiff side, and I don’t think one more egg would have helped much.  And it needed quite a lot of forceful stirring, as I was trying to avoid having pockets of whiteness. 

(It would probably have saved time to mix the cocoa with the flour ahead of time, thus distributing the colours evenly from the start)

For next time?  While I’m taking out the butter, cocoa, and all the rest, I might just be tempted to make a coffee cake – not quite as sweet as full-on cake, but a couple of notches up from bread.

Then again (nibble, nibble… it really is quite a nice flavour), maybe I will give it another chance, using all the eggs, premixing the dry stuff, and adding a sweeter topping.

Comments

Post a Comment

Okay, guys... I'm turning moderation OFF on all my blogs. I will be patrolling for spam, so play nice!

Know what else you're gonna love?

Baking in Israel? Beware of FAKE condensed milk

Image
If you didn’t know any better – like I didn’t when we first came here – you’d probably assume, with good reason, that both of these tins contained condensed milk: But that’s where you’d be wrong.  Sure, at least at first glance, the Hebrew text is exactly the same: חלב מרוכז וממותק / chalav merukaz umemutak / concentrated sweetened milk.  But the English is different, and therein lies the key difference between the two – the one on the right is FAKE. Here are the ingredients of the real thing (on the left): Milk (55%), sugar (45%).  That’s it.  Pure and simple. Now, here are the ingredients
Read more

Super-Easy Thick, Spreadable, Bakeable DIY Cream Cheese in Israel

Image
Cream cheese can be a hit or miss affair here in Israel.  Sure, some brands are okay for eating, but where the native product fails is usually when it comes to baked goods that call for genuine cream cheese, as I discovered at Shavuos a couple of years ago.  It's too thin, too gummy, too shiny, whatever.  It's just... WRONG. In case you’re wondering, sour cream is called “krem gevina shamenet,” and as you can see, there are lots of flavour choices… …but none of them are anything I’d want to bake into a cheesecake. But then this year, I found out I could make my own.  And not only does it taste great, it works perfectly in recipes! I won't bother calling it a RECIPE, because it's too easy to be a recipe!  It only works if you're in Israel, simply because you can’t get Israeli dairy products here.  Then again, if you're outside of Israel, you can probably just buy Philly.  The truth is, you can buy Philly here in a lot of places as well, as well as s
Read more

Easy, tender, and affordable roast in Israel… yes, it IS possible!

Image
I wasn’t a big meat cook in Canada.  We ate a lot of chicken, but I was kind of shy about beef.  Still, I managed to make some acceptable roasts from time to time – meat that was tender enough and tasty enough that we could enjoy it together on special occasions. All that changed when we moved to Israel, where all the meat cuts are different from what I was used to and nothing, it seemed, was tender and tasty except the most expensive bits, like steak (which always seems to turn out tough when we make it at home, but we don’t mind because it’s delicious). But some of the English speakers here were chatting on our WhatsApp group last week about roasting beef, and it made me really want to try it again –even after having been burned numerous times.  So on Thursday evening, we bought a nice little #6 roast, which according to this indispensible meat chart is called Fillet Medumeh (פילה מדומה), petit tender, or foreshank.  The page's owner, Marc Gottlieb, says it’s good for “G
Read more

More delicious kosher morsels!

Show All