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...

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.

Well, we’re back from the cottage, and here we are, making homemade “cottage challah” last Friday! Eyeballing a very basic, thicker-than-usual dough on Thursday night… Kneading in an impromptu “dough bowl”…   Then, hauling it out for the kids on Friday afternoon!   Mine looked gorgeous!  I’m not used to working with such a firm dough…   We gave the kids raisin packets and I told them they could eat as many as they wanted and use the rest for their challahs.  Naomi painstakingly poked each one in to “hide” it in her dough.     What beautiful challahs! And once again, I forgot to take pictures of the finished product!  They were a little drier than usual, and not as sweet as I like them, but they were warm and fresh, and THAT is a lovely thing in itself, in the midst of a crazy-busy cottage week.

The only difference between these two flatbreads is that I used lots of olive oil on the “focaccia” one, along with tomatoes and lightly-fried zucchini; the pletzl was made with milder canola oil, along with caramelized onions and poppy. Baked 10 minutes at 500 degrees, they were both amazingly good!

I came across a recipe for Blender Challah yesterday and the name just DREW me in.   A blender!  For challah!  It just sounded so cool! It’s not quite as exciting as it sounds.  You use the blender for maybe 20 seconds at the beginning.  Basically, you make a slurry with all the ingredients, plus 1/3 of the flour, in a blender (I used my Cuisinart food processor) then stir the slurry into a bowl of dry flour.  This is almost what I do with no-knead doughs, except I use my Danish Dough Whisk , so the slurry doesn’t get as well-mixed, I suppose.  And I don’t pre-mix some of the flour – just dump it in all at once. So I guess this recipe gives you a well-mixed base, probably better mixed than the no-knead, and ultimately a not-overmixed, probably cakey-type dough.  It appealed to me in part because we’re having a Rock-Bottom Shabbos where there is no grocery money so I have to make a smaller batch than usual.  Blender Challah calls...

Recipe here if you’re curious, but truthfully, this wasn’t an outstanding bread… possibly because (mea culpa) my barley flour had actually expired.  That may explain the slight bitter taste that only I could detect, though that may just be an effect of barley in general. What WAS nice was having my hands in a lump of dough again.  This dough was beautiful to work with; silky-smooth and damp, but not too damp.  The recipe made two beautiful bâtards, just enough for the family plus a bit left over. Served with a nondescript soup, this was not my best bread meal ever… but definitely not the worst, by far.   Slashed deeply, I thought, but not deeply enough…   … to really open up during baking or…   … to prevent a wee bit of a blowout out the side. Sliced beautifully, though!   And it was quite nice with a bit of butter.  But then, what isn’t ? So why is it that warm weather seemingly gives me this compulsion to work with BRE...