Thursday night truly begins only when I do my challah calculations and print out the week’s customized spreadsheet.  I have spreadsheets like this set up for about 6 challah recipes and a few other breads (a sourdough cornbread, the chocolate sourdough I use for sufganiyot and a few more recipes that need scaling up or down at various times. Every week, it’s a new printout.  I feel bad wasting the paper, but I feel like I have a clean new formula to work with.  What I should do is just keep a copy of the recipe, scaled for x2, x3, x4 etc (x3 makes 5 challahs, plus a bit; that’s what I’m making this week).  I have one hanging around from Rosh Hashanah that has something like x9 on it, and that was half what I ended up making, I think. Anyway, I do waste the paper, and it may not be normal, but it feels good to start fresh each week… so there. This is the basic “reliable challah” (eggless) that I make when somebody orders challah (I occasionally and VERY info...

Going, going… GONE!

Well, I have no idea why, but I am putting together a challah bake sale for next Sunday, erev Rosh Hashanah.  With free pickup here or personal hand-delivery in the neighbourhood. Why bother?  No idea.  I suppose there could be some profit in it, along with some stress and – I guess here’s what I’m hoping: lots of fun, kneading (or not), baking, sharing decent bread.   I may have even finagled my sister Sara into coming and baking with me next Sunday.  I’ll let you know how it goes – if not right away.  I have promised delivery between 3-5 pm, and pickup at 4 pm.  These are awfully tight deadlines, considering I’ve been known to still have challah in the oven at the start of Shabbos and Yom Tov, but I have a really good plan to get things rolling very, VERY early in the day.  All I need is a little sleep and maybe someone else to handle the laundry.  ;-) Funny thing – I was looking for a picture of a baked, streuselled round challah I ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! Last bake sale for this summer.  :-( (tomorrow – if and when I get some sleep!)

Going away for the rest of the week, so I just whipped up some no-knead dough for next Sunday’s final fun fair of the summer.  This is a double batch because the pletzl went so quickly last time. ( Here , once again, is the “Basic Boule” master dough recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.) I also made a batch of my standard challah.  I’m working on converting the recipe to weight measures, but haven’t gotten it quite right.  Will post it here when I do! (I have given the “experiment” challahs to grateful neighbours and haven’t even tasted it myself…!)

Well, for me, anyway. Here’s my menu/sign.  Very windy day; the sign kept blowing over: These signs just make me happy to look at, for some reason.  Maybe it’s Elisheva’s hand-painted magen david happy faces! I managed to sell out all the beer bread mix I made, 10 bags, I think, at $3 a bag.  Plus the entire loaf of beer bread, at 75 cents a slice. Absolutely the world’s BEST pletzl ever!  Here’s a picture of the two I made before baking; I took one with Ted’s camera, I think, afterwards.  They were golden and beautiful and rich and savoury and slightly sweet and ever so amazing.  I used the Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day Master Dough instead of any kind of enriched dough.  The only special thing I did was mix it on Thursday night so it had three days to retard in the fridge. Muffins!  Blueberry, strawberry – both frozen because I didn’t have fresh-picked this time.  About three dozen, a giveaway at 50 cents each!   ...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out!   Beer bread mix!  Comin’… get it! This is for tomorrow’s FunFair bake sale .  And yes, I know it ought to be “come n’ get it.”  But that would be SEVEN words, which is a whole ‘nother meme.  :-)))

Another funfair at our local park and once again , I’m having a baked-stuff table.  What am I making this time?? Garden-herb beer bread (more info here and here – still not sure if I’ll sell this or just give samples again to people interested in buying the mix) No-Knead Pletzl – a whole one just to see if people buy it. Strawberry smash streusel muffins Vegan brownies w/Tofutti crm chs icing … and Ted’s unbelievably popular Triscuit pizzas Plus, more beer bread mix to sell!!  I’m going to mix it up ahead of time, ie motzaei Shabbos, rather than at the last second again this time. Yay, fun, wow!

While we were in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, I had a gift card and decided to bite the bullet and buy a no-knead bread book. They had Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, which, of course, I’ve raved about many times here. But I know there were tons of typos (hee hee – I typed “tongs of typos,” just to show you that no-one’s immune!) in the first edition of that book. Plus, they’re all so expensive. I’m no fun when I’m looking at prices of things in stores . Finally, I compromised with this book, 200 Fast and Easy Artisan Breads , by Judith Fertig, which didn’t look like much fun, but has a lot of good, basic recipes. Today, I used it for the first time to make the Caraway Rye Dough. I left out the Caraway seeds because I really dislike them, but otherwise made it exactly as written. The formula is very simple – basically, wheat flour, rye flour, water, yeast, salt, molasses. I did cut down the molasses slightly because Elisheva doesn’t like molasses – down to just ove...

Today’s fun fair at Laughlin Park was so utterly incredible, I almost cannot wait for the next one in July.  (For more about the funfair itself, and not just the stuff I baked for it, check out my real blog here !) Here is the menu / billboard Elisheva and I made.  We repurposed from an old school project of hers (you can see the ripped tissue paper around the edges where I (respectfully) tore off pictures of the Mir Yeshiva). As I posted late last night , I ended up baking Strawberry Streusel Smash Muffins, Vegan Brownies (with Tofutti Cream Cheese frosting), Roasted-Potato Buns, plus Ted made his Triscuit Mini-Pizzas and I offered samples of our incredible Beer Bread to go with the Beer Bread Mix I was selling. We ate the few leftover roasted-potato buns for supper.  The truth is, they were NOT fantastic.  Freezing dough is still a mystery to me.  Sometimes, it comes out perfect, and sometimes it just flops like a toad on the baking pan and never does...

Why the weird dates? Click here to find out! That’s a lot of potato buns. :-o (38, to be exact) These are for the community fun fair tomorrow afternoon.  I mixed the dough last Thursday, before we left for Ottawa.  It’s been in the freezer all week, and I took it out yesterday afternoon to thaw.  It handled beautifully this evening:  very wet and sticky, but I managed to tame that with a bit of flour.  I showed Ted a “rustic” bun and a regular round bun and he preferred the rustic model, so that’s what I went with, shaping them quickly by rolling baguettes and just slicing them with the bench scraper.  Tomorrow, I plan to bake strawberry streusel muffins and vegan brownies .  And sell tomato plants.  And maybe, just maybe, if I get up the energy, pack up and sell beer bread mix (mix = all ingredients except the beer!).  I figure I can measure out the ingredients batch by batch, then quickly whirl them in the food processor to...