Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Less and less yeast each week… I’ve been making the same challah for a couple of months now because it’s SOooo yummy.  My challenge (to myself) has been incorporating as much sourdough as possible, decreasing the commercial yeast a bit more each week. I haven’t really said much about this challah recipe yet.  It’s based on this one , but I use sugar instead of honey, and I leave out the egg.  I found it when I was searching for a sponge-based challah, and it seems like the ideal way to incorporate a sourdough, because it gives the starter lots of time to get going overnight. This week, I wanted to make exactly THREE challahs, so I multiplied the regular formula by 1.5… I’ve set up a spreadsheet to let me figure out how much of my 60% starter I can substitute in a recipe that either calls for another type of starter – or no starter. In the case of this challah recipe, the original calls for no starter, so ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Birthday’s a’comin’… my wish list here . (yes, fo’sure “a’comin’” is one word!!!)

Our neighbour’s birthday was on Wednesday.  She doesn’t have much family, and I figure everybody deserves cake, so I invited her for Shabbos dinner so I’d have an excuse to present her with THIS: It’s a black forest cake, made out of my basic chocolate cake recipe .  I sliced the layers and spread white icing and pie-filling cherries in between.  I toasted one layer and crumbled it in the food processor to make cake crumbs to press onto the outside, somewhat messily. In fact, it is a very messy cake, and not entirely a beautiful one, despite my amateurish efforts with the star tip.  The initial looks more like a T than a J, but, hey, it’s the thought – and the taste – that counts, right???

This is the Pumpkin-Oatmeal No-Knead Bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (which I still don’t own!). It’s a fun bread because it doesn’t taste like a “healthy” bread (being mostly white flour), but does contain token quantities of rye, whole-wheat and oat. It is a very easy bread to make, despite the sloppiness of the final dough. I baked these seven loaves, along with gingerbread and shortbread cookies, to fill up holiday parcel boxes whicih we mailed to members of our extended families. (actually, the 7th was for our supper: shhh…) I added cranberries and lightly toasted walnuts to make it into more of a “festive” bread. Anyway, ours was delicious with tomato soup this evening; soft and fresh. Almost too soft, I hope, because, this being Thursday, the others won’t arrive at their new homes until perhaps Monday. This particular loaf is one that would be delicious slightly stale and toasted, so I was hoping that even if the loaves aren’t completely fresh when ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  “No knead” bread broke my mixer! Forgot to blog about this one during the week.  I have some wonderful, local Red Fife whole-wheat flour my sister gave me that I wanted to try out, so I decided to do the No-Knead 100% Whole-Wheat Bread from King Arthur Flour again.  I made it once before with spelt and it wasn’t fantastic.  This time around, it made a VERY dense loaf, but one that was eminently sliceable and eatable. This is an unusual no-knead bread because you use a hand mixer (or stand mixer) to mix the ingredients.  The finished “dough” is somewhere between a thick cake batter and a thin bread dough.  Definitely not kneadable.  And as the six words point out, really too heavy for what my cheapo hand mixer could take on, apparently.  (Luckily, I had a spare in the basement, albeit a tippy one I hate.) Once mixed, you let the dough rise in the loaf pan (mine’s a bit big, which the King ...

Elisheva made cimbuns again… but this time, she added just a few drops of food colouring to the icing. Mmm, purple !

These are the same as Friday’s, made once again with the Balthazar’s Chocolate Bread dough. They turned out great!  Much easier than I thought they would be, although the table is still a powdery, jammy mess. The sourdough wasn’t quite ready from its overnight rest when I had to mix up the final dough (it was fridge-cold when I started it last night – I didn’t give it any time to warm up first), but because the recipe calls for added yeast, I didn’t worry about it too much, and the dough still rose fabulously well.  It’s a moist dough, but far more workable (in my opinion) than the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day pain au chocolat.  If I was making it up as a loaf, I would definitely go with this recipe. I used a plain round cookie cutter, let them rise a bit before frying, and filled the heavy pareve enamel pot with oil so as to ensure a perfect yummy sphere shape for each sufganya. Et voila!  Here they are, fried up and naked, waiting for their powder...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!  Chocolate beignets… a newfangled Chanukah treat! I made chocolate-bread-dough donuts last year for Chanukah , but I think I used the Artisan Bread in Five recipe, which I remember as being on the potchke-dik side (long and involved process). This year, I went with the Balthazar’s Chocolate Bread recipe.  Chocolate bread is ideal for donut-making in so many ways – it’s definitely chocolatey but not too sweet.  My family didn’t like the bread as BREAD because the chocolatey look of it really throws you off and you’re expecting cake.  The Balthazar’s dough, based on a gentle sourdough or overnight starter, was VERY easy to mix up and to work with.  The trade-off seems to have been that the donuts were not very puffed-up; not very rich. Here are the steps, without much commentary, because it’s late and I’m tired.     I tried filling with jelly and folding over… ugh, what a mess.  I stoppe...