RLB’s prosciutto ring (lard bread) from The Bread Bible.
I’ve made this before, but this time I subbed quite a bit of sourdough discard for equal parts flour and water. My starter is AP, and here I prefer bread flour, so I also added 1 ½ t. vital wheat gluten. Meats included soppressata and pepperoni, and the lard used was Kurobuta bacon fat.
I probably subbed a bit too much starter (45% of the flour weight). The dough was awfully slack, the proof took some extra time, and in general it didn’t look too positive going into the oven. The end result, however, was quite acceptable. The bread rose, the crumb is decent and the flavor is excellent. I feel the sourdough notes are an improvement, and I’m thrilled to have gotten rid of 300 g. of discard. All is well that ends well, but next time will probably cut back to 200 g. starter for ease of handling and a bit more structure.
If of interest, the recipe is located on a food blog here.
Looks great, I’ll need to try your ice cube trick. Just starting to refresh my starter today, it’s been unseasonably warm, too much so to want to bake bread.
Two small ice cubes worked well. I made the same bread today and fortunately, the bread released easily from the banneton, so I skipped the cubes. It’s a good trick to have up your sleeve if you think the bread can use a little boost.
I baked two cookie crusts for this panna cotta tart, one was fine, the other was a slight disaster, don’t quite know why given that they were made identically.
Open to tips for a contender for the silliest thing I have asked for help with – anyone have a foolproof cookie crust?
It’s my mom’s birthday and I didn’t want to bake a cake because she hardly ever eats any in attempts to limit her sugar, but last year she loved her opera cake, and she likes tiramisu. I had my other genoise in the freezer, so I decided to attempt a tiramisu cake. Normally tiramisu cakes contain heavy cream in the filling, but I can’t count on that ingredient for now, so I thought I might as well attempt to use Stella Parks’ tiramisu filling even though she warns that it’s too loose and light for a layer cake. I adore Stella’s tiramisu. To me it’s absolutely perfect. I love that it doesn’t contain heavy cream and I love that it uses whole eggs, so it’s not so heavy and rich. The flavor is for my liking perfectly balanced — not too boozy and not too sweet.
I’ve made it with the cardamaro, and it’s lovely, but also great with other options like rum (and people used to boozier tiramisu tend to like the punch of rum and similar spirits). Bailey’s is great in place of the crème de cacao she calls for. This time I used Kahlua and rum.
In order to ensure the cake would hold up, I decided to layer it in a ring mold with acetate lining. I used 2/5 of the filling since it calls for 5 eggs and that seemed like it would be enough for the three layers I needed. This time I folded the whipped eggs into the mascarpone rather than adding the mascarpone to it, because that’s one of the major pitfalls for this recipe, and that decision worked out perfectly. No soupy filling, no breaking.
For the syrup I used half of what she calls for since genoise is thirstier than ladyfingers. Because to me my genoise is less sweet than ladyfingers, I decided to add sugar to the soaking syrup. Three tablespoons seemed enough on tasting it. Still not very sweet, but what I thought should be enough to keep the layers from being too bitter. I brushed the syrup on both sides of the layers I eyeballed the amount of filling between layers and ended up with a touch more for the top than I needed, but only a few tablespoons.
Overall the cake turned out really well! The only thing it would have benefitted from was even more syrup, but flavor is good, it’s not too sweet or too heavy, and the filling holds up perfectly!
I have made so many versions of muffins which call for grated zucchini, it’s hard to believe I hadn’t tried a single one which doesn’t call for additional add-ins (carrot, apple, coconut, orange, ginger and the like). I tried a recipe this morning from Taste of Home, and can start weeding out some of the other, more complex recipes I’ve collected. The TOH recipe is perfect. Dead simple, with crispy edges and a moist middle, and the perfect ratio of fruit and nuts to batter. So perfect, in fact, that King Arthur has almost the exact same recipe under a different name.
I used 50% white whole wheat flour and 6 tablespoons of chopped walnuts. The zucchini was wrung after grating and the currants soaked. Baked at 375. Otherwise as per the recipe.
Made some cream puffs to sell. Had some leftover puffs and they’re honestly so good as is. Perfectly hollow on the inside, crisp outside with just a little sweetness from the craquelin.
I’ve made the pear chocolate one and it’s a tricky recipe . Have you read the comments? A lot of people had sinking problems with the center of the cake. If looks don’t matter, it’s a nice cake, mine didn’t sink but my DIL ‘s did and she was very disappointed.
ETA…Yossy has a fig chocolate I made that would work with pears and it’s very good.
Terrific! Definitely a make again, happy you had success. I happen to enjoy pear and chocolate combinations, also nice with hazelnuts in the mix. Now I want one, too!
