A wonderful, wonderful year to everybody reading this and even those who are not! May all of our braids go ‘round and ‘round     Coiled tightly   in the snails of our lives!   More New Years’ Dough! Two kinds of challah this year:  4-600g loaves of Super Wonder Challah (double recipe) and 3-675g loaves of Auntie Sally’s Challah . Here, I’m mixing flour into the gloppy sponge for the Super Wonder challah last night before it had a chance to rise.   What did the sponge look like?  Happy you asked! Most spongy indeed.  And then this morning: Oy, vey!    It actually popped the bucket open in the fridge, and a bit of it was dried out, but I tucked it back in and it moistened up again just fine.  By the way, you can’t quite see in this picture, but the bucket was so swollen it wouldn’t sit flat on the table – it was wobbling like a weeble. Dark = Auntie Sally’s Light = Super Wonder May it be a good, sweet year of dough, dough, dough!!!

Mmm…. my baker sister was coming up today to babysit the kids and she said (half-joking?) that if I had some sourdough awake, she could make something with it. Well, I didn’t, but I happened to have a bucket of no-knead dough left over from last Thursday… and I came home to these yummy handmade fougasse PLUS a pan of apple-and-cinnamon buns!   Mmm… now THERE’s a talent! And now you can even Follow her on TWITTER !!!

“Specifically, let them eat a wormy-looking channel straight into the heart of the cake so as to avoid eating anything that has come in contact with the edges of the pan.  And then claim it is because they wanted to give Mommy the ‘moistest piece.’” No cake, however mediocre , should have to suffer and die this way.