Six-Word Saturday: 28 Kislev, 5771 (Chanukah Edition)

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.

frying 009 frying 010 

I tried filling with jelly and folding over… ugh, what a mess.  I stopped after the first four.

frying 011 

Just cut the rest into nice rectangles.

frying 012 

Followed the advice of this King Arthur author and shallow-fried rather than wasting a huge pot of oil.  Worked well enough, I guess.  This is my new pareve 12” cast-iron pan, which I found at Superstore for $9 and finally toivelled this week. 

What a great way to break it in; It’s thoroughly seasoned now!

frying 014

I wish I had sprinkled the finished beignets with icing sugar.  Instead, I tossed them in icing sugar, which made the sugar look caked and unappealing.

This is a terrible picture:

cookies 003

They went fast, so they must have tasted good.  I know I had a few, and they stayed fresh and appealing well into Shabbos afternoon.  I am making this recipe again for my extended-family’s Chanukah party tomorrow afternoon.

Happy Chanukah from all of us:  the staff, volunteers, members, board and executive of Adventures in BreadLand!

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