Saturday, December 01, 2007

it's to cold to rise

in honor of bread baking day #4, i offer this post.

bread baking day #4 was hosted by baking history. many thanks, this was real fun. the assignment was to bake a bread with spice and post about it by 1 dec.

since it is baking in december and the beginning of various holiday celebrations, my first thought was to bake gingerbread. the silver palate cookbook has my favorite gingerbread recipe. very quick, simple and wonderfully good. i bake this for my sweet friend and i quite a bit during the holidays. since i am always striving to trim the fat, i used cholesterol free liquid eggs and substituted half of the oil with applesauce. and since i do have an incurable sweet tooth, i used all of the lemon glaze recipe for pouring over the hot gingerbread! i am not sure if it was the lack of fat or that it was freezing cold in our house or that i poured the complete amount of glaze that made it harden instead of soaking into the bread. it is probably a mixture of all of those things, though it did not affect our enjoyment of it. there is barely enough of the loaf left for tomorrows breakfast tea!

and since gingerbread is a quick bread instead of a yeast bread, i also chose to bake swedish cardamom braid from bernard clayton's new complete book of breads, the revised and expanded version. this is a very rich bread with both butter and eggs. again, i used the liquid eggs and put in 1/2 cup of flax seed meal for a bit of the butter. i also substituted currents for raisins. and since our house is drafty and cold, this dough had a bit of uneven rising. once i turned on the oven and let it rise on the open oven door, it did much better. i brushed the braid with an egg white glaze before baking and baked it on a stoneware cookie sheet which browned the outside of it nicely. while slicing i was a bit worried when the crust seemed a bit hard. once past the crust, the bread inside is so crumbly the browned crust kept the bread from falling apart. the bread is a little rich for me, though the cardamom offsets the butter well. but i love braiding bread and the look of braided loaves, so it was nice to do that again.

but i love baking bread and it is always great to see what others bake, so thanks for hosting bread baking day #4, baking history. it was great to be a part of it.





5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for participating to bbd#04!
manuela

David T. Macknet said...

I will have to remember that trick - turning on the oven & letting it rise on the door. I keep on getting breads which are just ... well, dense. I've suspected the yeast, the flour, all manner of things, but we concluded the other day that it's probably just 'cause it's cold here!

Anonymous said...

Hi Jackie the roundup is on line thanks for your entry!

http://bakinghistory.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/bbd-04-roundup/

Susan said...

Both look great!

Tatter said...

Beautiful breads!