Just like the stuff at your favorite chain steakhouse, except for the dark dark color. If you want that, you need to add food coloring or use 100% molasses instead of honey. Use a waterbath-type deal if you like a nice crust.

Wet
1 ½ cups warm water
2 tbl softened butter
¼ cup honey
½ cup molasses
Dry
2 cup bread flour
1 2/3 cup whole wheat flour
1 tbl cocoa powder
1 tbl sugar
2 tsp instant coffee
1 tsp salt
2 ¼ tsp instant-rise yeast

First, sift the dry ingredients into a large bowl.

Create a well in the middle of your dry mix. I did it in my handy yellow bowl, but its capacity fell a bit short. We’re going to be incorporating the wet ingredients into the dry.

After adding the yeast and the rest, slowly stir the deal around to blend together the wet ingredients. Then, start pulling the dry into the middle to create a wet and messy dough.

New setup!

I then tranferred the wet and messy mix to the floured board:

Work the deal around a bit. It’s a very sticky thing to deal with at first; you can definitely use a scraper to avoid too much sticky fingers. Knead for about 10 minutes; it’ll still be sticky, as well as uniform in color and maybe a bit shiny.

As far as the kneading, I started doing it heel-style but I eventually just squished it around until it began to release its gooey-grip on the skin. Sticky it is.

Transfer the deal to a greased bowl, cover and let rise for an hour in a warm room, or the oven with the pilot light on. After the rise it should be pretty easy to handle; I prefer to use kitchen shears to cut the dough. I believe I split them into 4 or 5-ounce portions.

ANOTHER rise, same conditions as the first.

I have tested these with the following accompaniments:

Fettucini Alfredo – STRONG
Meatloaf – STRONG
with Cream Cheese – STRONG
with Butter – NOT BAD AT ALL

Next time, I might add a bit of brown sugar to increase the sweetness Or would the yeast eat the brown sugar? Also, I’m going to try an American-Style loaf, yes I am excited!

These turned out pretty dang delicious. I would charge at least two bucks each.

DOUBLE-SNICKERS CHOCOLATE CUPCAKES
(adapted from Cook’s Illustrated’s Dark Chocolate Cupcakes recipe)

• 8 tbl Butter
  2 oz Semisweet chocolate
  1/2 cup Cocoa (I used Ghirardelli brand)
  3/4 cup All-Purpose flour
  1/2 tsp Baking Soda
  3/4 tsp Baking Powser
  2 large eggs
  3/4 cup sugar
  1 tsp Vanilla Extract
  1/2 tsp Salt
  1/2 cup Sour Cream
  3/4 cup Snicker’s Bar, cut into 1/8″ strips, then dusted with cocoa to prevent sticking

Frosting, recipe from Ghirardelli (enough to frost 12 cupcakes)

• 1/4 cup butter
• 3 tbl milk
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 1/2 cup sugar
• dash salt
• 1/2 tsp Vanilla Extract

The frosting is made exactly like the chocolate ganache/wonder mix that used in the cupcakes. Here’s the pictures!

Creating chocolate mix:

Using double-boiling technique to melt chocolates and butter:

Got to take the mix off the heat every few seconds to prevent burning:

Back on, back off. The butter needs to be completely incorporated, it will linger if the whisking isn’t strong:

Plus chocolate:

Plus flour mixture:

Muffins? Allright, but let’s kick it up a notch next time. Enough baloney!

Pineapple Coconut Cupcakes Muffins. Turned out good, next time I will do a buttercream instead of a glaze.

Here’s how the whole deal proceeded:

Mixed thm all together:

Mixing together the wet ingredients with hand-powered whisking device:

Pour wet into dry:

Mix em’ up:

The mix-ins, pinapple and dried, dessicated coconut. The coconut was a refugee from a put-off project, froma cake store in Seattle. Can’t find it at Safeway. Pat/squeeze dry the pineapples.

Scooping stuff into cupcake thingies:

Buns in the oven:

Done, pre glaze:

Thanks!

Talkin’ Shop

Sometime I make graphics, click here for a recent one.

Breadly Postmortem 2 : Much Better

So yesterday I was trying to figure out how to improve on my previous dark brown bread effort when I thought about molasses. I’ve never worked with the stuff, but I reasoned that it would help with the bread color and might mask the yeasty overtones of the last batch. Also, I decided to use a muffin pan instead of rolling them freestyle – the wet dough spreads too much without support.

My local safeway had two varieties of molasses, I chose the cheaper bottle. Three bucks!

So with this batch (only 1/2 size, ran out of yeast) I added a fair amount of molasses, replacing about half of the honey. To ensure a crusty bun, I nestled a pan filled with ice into the next to the baking sheet. This combination creates steam, which thru science/magic creates a uniform crust all around the bread. In French its a “bain marie” it is. Figure A illustrates this:

This time, there wasn’t any yeasty baking smell at all. After twenty minutes I popped the buns out of the oven and they looked pretty good. I brushed honey on the tops and made a honey butter with honey, butter, cinnamon and vanilla extract. Honey, butter, honey, butter. Honey butter!

So this batch turned out much better than #1. Better flavor, sweeter, crusty, non-yeasty.

Breadly Postmortem 1 : Meh

Well, I didn’t know what to expect from this first batch so I wasn’t too disappointed. Basically I created a wheat roll, very good for sopping up sauces and whatnot but not so hot alone. Also, it was a bit too yeasty in character. Lessons learned:

– Don’t forget the water first when making yeast sponge

– Use a spatula or similar scraping device when attempting to knead wet, sloppy dough

So they turned out fine, but not exactly what I was looking for. With my newbiemess factored in, I would rate them as a B. They looked a little dumpy, plus silly cookbook author’s rolled oat garnish was ick.

Baked more bread, smells yeasty

Alright, so I baked again today. This time I tried a whole wheat bread recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. For some reason the smell of yeasty bread baking grosses me out, to more than a minor degree. The recipe turned out 12 five-inch round buns that got a good reception. I can’t objectively rate the quality of my baked goods right after baking… after all the rigamarole I tend to go right for someplace with fresh air to relax a bit.

So yes, pictures to follow. I need a recipe for that really dark bread.

Hello world!

Hello, this is where I will post records of my baking activities. I enjoy baking as its an excellent creative outlet and the results are tasty. They are rather like little puzzles. So my first bread item I baked last Saturday, a Jewish Sabbath bread called Challah. I decided to tackle it because it required only five ingredients and looked cool in the picture. I made a sponge and did the rising thing. The twisty bit took a bit of time to register, but I have it down now. Here’s what it looked like after the final rise:

And here is the final baked product, on a pink background with “grungy” graphics on the side. It turned out excellently:

The recipe was from Fine Cooking magazine. My next project will be a brown wheat and/or multigrain bread, like the kind you get at Black Angus or Outback Steakhouse. Then cupcakes with Snickers bits embedded in a delicious manner.