What are you baking? July 2023

Mini Mary Ann cake topped with tangerine curd/sour cream and a berry coulis below. Local blueberries have been delicious.

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Michelin star worthy.

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Why thank you Stef!:blush:

Black Forest Cake deconstructed, the tart cherries were poached in sour cherry juice and sugar. Chocolate cake was brushed with the syrup and topped with crème fraîche which was a good choice as it offset the sweetness of the cherries. This was just the right size portion for us, I’ve made it several times with different chocolate cakes, all seem to work well.

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It’s 87 degrees, so of course I’m making pie.

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Buckwheat scones with peach jam and chopped sweet cherries folded in, from BCOTM One Tin Bakes. Delicious. (Details here.)

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So beautiful!!

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Thank you! Not difficult to make, the chocolate cake is about the size of a half cupcake. I happened to have a jar of tart cherry juice in the pantry and it made a nice syrup with sugar to poach the cherries.

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I made rosemary and onion focaccia last night, because have recently learned my mom loves focaccia.

My goal was to use mostly whole wheat flour (finely milled indian chapati atta to be specific), and it’s been hit or miss with bread in the past, so I finally procured some vital wheat gluten to see what difference that would make. Well, a lot!

This was half whole wheat. I’m encouraged to try all ww next. Focaccia rose beautifully, and the result is soft and springy.

I poured over a little brine just before baking, but I think I made a mistake about when I should have dimpled the dough (before 2nd rise vs just before oven) because I deflated the beautifully bubbly dough like a dolt. Still, it recovered in the oven and was airy and light to eat.

Dough from 1 cup of flour fit perfectly in a 3 cup pyrex. 3/4 gone at dinner time, so it was the perfect size for us.

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Beautiful!

That looks great! Charlie has a 100% whole wheat focaccia here if you’re interested:

This btw is delicious and sort of focaccia-like:

(It’s thinner and crustier, but similarly high hydration and nice chew)

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Thanks! He calls for ww bread flour (or lower hydration but no specification of how much lower, so I’d have to experiment).

I don’t have ww bread flour, just the Chapati atta (which is higher protein than standard US ww flour, from what I’ve been able to find). All the bread recipes I’ve researched for just atta say to add gluten, or protein in some other form (milk powder, yogurt, egg).

I bought a small packet of vital wheat gluten to check out the effect, and it worked well. Very soft and chewy result, none of the density of ww otherwise. My family actually wondered if the focaccia was underbaked because it was so much softer than the bakery version they usually buy :joy:. Maybe that means cutting back the gluten addition even further (what I read called for 1T per cup of ww flour used).

I may try yogurt another time, because while gluten is a specialty ingredient, we always have yogurt at home.

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I think you should be fine with that flour. Focaccia is really great with all purpose flour and doesn’t require tons of gluten since it isn’t meant to stand up tall. I will be interested in seeing how it works out as you keep playing around with it!

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I had some chocolate chips I wanted to use up, since I don’t tend to have much use for them and I remembered that the Chipwiches on Serious Eats don’t call for that many chocolate chips and I really liked those cookies.
I made Salt and Straw’s vanilla ice cream and used my food processor to churn it. I knew I didn’t want custard ice cream for these and I didn’t want Stella’s options for the filling since they’re too sweet for my liking, and a bit troublesome in the case of the Klondike bar filling.
This ice cream is AWESOME. I used some of the 210s I have rather than xanthan gum figuring that being a mix of xanthan and gum arabic it would work well. It’s amazing to me what a 1/4 tsp of this does for the texture of ice cream. The ice cream is just the right sweetness (1/2 cup sugar), very cleanly flavored Philadelphia-style. It’s perfect for an ice cream sandwich. I added 1/4 tsp salt and just added vanilla to taste.

For the cookies, I’m out of malted milk powder, so I subbed some toasted milk powder. I always have to pause before adding liquid in a cookie recipe here due to the flour. I used 1 oz instead of 2 of milk and thought maybe 1/2 oz more would be good then wondered if it wasn’t too soft. It worked out, but next time for the sake of experimenting I’ll stick to 1 oz.

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Sour cherry slab pie. Recipe from Smitten Kitchen; I used Erin J McDowell’s crust technique (multiple folds.) I was a little short on fruit so I tossed in some local peaches.

This is a favorite recipe. I really enjoy how much more crust you get in every bite.

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Slab pies rule - yours is gorgeous!

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Wow.

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Thanks :wink:

Literally the only thing I don’t like about this is the crust edge. The directions have you roll out the bottom piece much bigger (more overhang.) You then fill the pie, put the top piece on, then bring the bottom crust up and overtop, roll in, and crimp. This invariably gets you an immensely unnecessary amount of crust around the edges. I mean, crust is great, but there’s such a thing as too much.

I’d like it to kind of be smooth, without any parts where the crust is, effectively, doubled. I wonder if I could kind of reverse the directions: put the bottom piece in, trim it to juuuuuust fit the pan with no overhang, and roll the top crust out slightly larger. Then I could trim it to just exceed the rim of the pan, and tuck it down the sides…?

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Erm… as someone who only eats the crust on fruit pies, no, no there is not :joy:

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Would you please elaborate?