So my super-smart baker-almost-psychologist sister (aka Vegan Ukelele on YouTube ) has decided to branch out into super-smart musical baking videos.  Since she's vegan, almost everything will work for kosher kitchens as well. Did I mention she went to baking school and everything?  If she tells you something's good, it is . And her first video is all about one of my favourites: cornbread.  Or cornbread muffins.  It’s all in how you bake them up, as I’ll let her explain in the video, which I’m embedding below. Watching this video, so proud of my “sister-from-the-same-mother,” I had quite a few weird separated at birth moments, thinking in my head, "That's exactly what I would have said."  That was especially true because I was watching with NR, who has

After however-many hundreds of years, it's not often that you come across a NEW way of making challah. So when Seth Brandes shared his "dad hack" for making challah "without messing with braiding the dough," I passed it on earlier this week. (Why isn't anything moms do in the kitchen considered a hack?) I also decided to try it out.  Instead of my usual portioning, balling, rolling, snaking, and braiding steps, I formed the dough into elongated ovals and got ready to go to town.

I had such high hopes… but it turned out so, so badly.  Well, tasty enough.  But UGLY as sin. It all started with a video that showed a beautiful, trim Israeli lady making the most gorgeous braids with the kind of ease that you only acquire after having made thousands of them. I watched it.  Naomi Rivka watched it.  We were inspired – hooray! As soon as I started to pull of this complicated six-braid, everything began to go horribly wrong, starting with the ginormous octopus contraption you see at the top of this post. From there, I created a not-too-shabby looking braided thingy…   And then tucked it together to resemble – um, a mummified dog?   Yuck, says Naomi Rivka. Meanwhile, she herself was inspired by another technique she’d seen in the video to create a round challah, wrapped with a band to make it more regal.  Beautiful!   Just to make the situation even more ridiculous, it turned out there wasn’t room on my (...

What with the kids making challahs yesterday, I realized I had too many if I made all my “snakes” into 4-braid challahs.  So I decided, with the snakes I’d already rolled out, to make 2 6-braid loaves instead of 3 4-braid loaves. Rolled out the snakes nicely: long and thin, because if they’re too fat, a 6-braid can easily turn into a round challah.  Braided them up… and then noticed an extra snake sitting on the table: I’d forgotten to include it, and one of my beautiful “6-braids” was actually only 5.  Can you guess which one???   Quick fix – and seriously, this was the easiest solution to any bread problem I have ever encountered:  tuck the extra snake underneath the braided challah in the pan.  Can you see it hiding under there??? Left it to rise, baked as usual… and nobody ever noticed the difference.  The volume of the finished challahs is identical, because they both contain 6 strands – just one has the extra strand hidden inside… ...

Here it is… I’m making this old family recipe (or at least, an old family-member’s recipe) as I said I would this Shabbos, and although I have said all along that I don’t like an eggy challah, hers is a delight to knead, as are many rich doughs.  The texture of this dough is quite supple:  smooth, even a bit glossy.  There’s a sheen that doesn’t quite come across in these pictures.  More like Silly Putty than Play-Doh, if that’s helpful.     It’s a very heavy dough:  with four and a half eggs, a cup of oil and a cup of sugar, I mean that quite literally.  I was surprised that it seemed to tire my hands out a bit quicker than other challah doughs. Here, Ted continues to hold the camera (those are his pictures above) and pretend to be impressed while I demonstrate the Gluten Windowpane, stretching out the dough into a rectangle to reveal – gasp! – my hand on the other side!  Besides being a cool trick, this shows us that the dough is...