#experimental baking

[copperbadge]

Recently a friend of mine told me that one of our local bagel places, Chicago Bagel & Bialy, was also serving pizza, made with their bialy dough. Bialy dough isn't all that far from pizza dough to begin with, but I misheard him and thought they were somehow serving pizza with a bagel-dough crust. I spent days wondering about the logistics. Bagel dough has to be boiled before being baked, and obviously you can't boil a pizza. Did they steam it before baking? Did they just not bother with the boiling step?

Anyway, I decided to try my hand at "bagel pizza poppers" which are balls of bagel stuffed with a mixture of sauce, mozzarella cheese, and "toppings". I made a batch of King Arthur Sandwich Bagel dough, then added some food coloring while kneading in order to color-code by filling -- red for pepperoni, green for sauteed mushroom, yellow for caramelized onion. I split the dough by weight, hand-stretched each piece and stuffed it with a spoonful of filling, then sealed, boiled, and baked.

They came out really, really nicely -- basically they taste like Hot Pockets look like they should taste, and they still have that nice chewy exterior. A few of them burst during baking, but the filling mostly stayed inside, and they reheat well in the microwave or oven.

[ID: Two images of the pizza bagel poppers. On the left they are not yet cooked, sitting on quarter-sheet pans sprinkled with cornmeal; there are six red ones, six green ones, and five yellow ones (I dropped a yellow one). On the right, they are visible after baking; they have slight browning on top, and the nearest one in the photograph, a green one, has split open slightly to show a mixture of sauce, cheese, and sauteed mushrooms inside.]

[petermorwood]

Here’s that herb bread from yesterday, sliced and buttered.

It’s far more cheesy than herby so the herb content will need stepped up. This is an interesting effect, since dried herbs are usually more emphatic than fresh ones. Also, even after overnight in a bread bag, the crust remains more assertive than we like.

So today DD is making a Second Draft loaf, with increased herbs (more tarragon, more basil), a bit more liquid so the dough isn’t as dense, and shaped a bit thinner. The baking time will also be about 10 minutes shorter. Most of this should produce a less armoured crust.

And, after saying all that, the First Draft bread is still very good; I have a feeling it’s going to make great toast, just the thing for even more cheese on top, or maybe some cold cuts (memo, check freezer for salami or some sliced roast beast.)

I also suspect it’ll be great toasted and well-buttered alongside a bowl of nice hearty February-weather soup, like the sausage-goulash soup with peppers & sour cream I made a couple of weeks back; recipe for that queued for later today.

*****

ETA: Second Draft loaves, just out of the oven - the baguette was baked on a baguette tray (duh) and the ammonite was baked in a cast-iron pot.

They smell great, and both have a lot more give, suggesting they’ve got a proper crust instead of an armoured carapace - even though that would be entirely right and proper for the ammonite...

[dduane]

Okay, time to get on with this Nutella and crushed-hazelnut roll cake I've been plotting for the last couple of weeks. (One of our neighbors did us a favor just now and I want to bring them some of this to say Thank You.)

The recipe looks quite sound—no surprise, as this lady's website is full of great stuff. But I'm going to have to spoof it somewhat, as it's predicated on the use of a sheet pan size that wouldn't fit into our oven (the usual US-size-vs-European-size hardware- and appliance-size issue). Probably I'll wind up baking about 75% of the batter in the 10x15-inch pan I've got and the rest in a smaller 9x7-inch, so that the sheet cake doesn't come out so thick that it refuses to roll correctly.

...Got to toast the hazelnuts first, anyway. I'll add pics to this post as I go along.

ETA 1: The hazelnuts, just out of the oven. The aroma in the kitchen is fabulous. :) (We've got a tabletop microwave-cum-fan oven that has about a hundred custom cooking/baking programs built into it, and one of them is for toasting nuts.) (Oh look, @petermorwood got a shot of one of the special menus from the manual when he was posting about the microwave sponge cake.)

...Had I not had the fancy gadget, I'd have just put the hazelnuts on a baking sheet and toasted them at 180C/375ish F for ten or fifteen minutes, stirring the nuts around every five minutes or so until the outsides went nice and brown. The skins rub right off when the nuts cool down, if you don't want them. But I left some in so they'd keep their toastier flavor. These are a soft nut after toasting/roasting, so they crush really easily.

Meanwhile, while sitting still a moment before getting the mise en place together for the cake, and idly scrolling down through the menu on Sky Movies: wow, I really do need new glasses in a hurry. Saw the movie title "Fred Claus" and read it as "Fried Clams." (sigh) After the holidays, for sure. (It's the usual problem. These glasses are trifocals, you have to point-and-steer them to get the right results depending on what you're looking at, and sometimes you're distracted or in a hurry and can not be bothered to do the hunting-for-focus thing, and as a result you get comical results.) (sigh)

Now the mise en place:

...So typical. You're trying to have it be pretty for the photo and one of the egg yolks breaks. (eyeroll)

Anyway. Not shown here: running off to give the stand mixer's bowl an extra wash to make sure it's absolutely clean, because any grease getting into egg whites being beaten will inhibit how well they fluff up.

So, time to get on with that.

First thing, though: the baking pans need to be prepared while the egg whites and so forth are beating.

So the recipe suggests that you should butter both the pans and the parchment paper used to line them. And speaking as one who's writing this after rolling the cakes up, I can speak directly to its effectiveness. The cake sheets pretty much leapt out of the pans. As I can imagine all too clearly what having to convince them out would be like, better to go overboard with the butter at this stage. I buttered the pans with solid butter and then melted a couple of tablespoonsful and brushed the baking-parchment liners with them.

Lining the pans with the paper, btw, is much assisted by having buttered them first. You just press the paper down and it sticks. Then you go get the scissors and cut off whatever's hanging out.

And now comes the part where you make the cake batter.

First you beat the egg whites and half the granulated sugar to the stiff-peak stage. (Took my mixer about five minutes.)

Then in a different bowl you beat the egg yolks and the rest of that sugar together. Somehow I missed getting a pic of this: apologies. It's the usual "beat together until pale, light, and fluffy." Took about seven minutes for that.

Then: sift together the flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder, The logistics of the original recipe get a little complicated at this point—it sounds like a third bowl is being called for. But at that point I'd decided that I already had more than the usual number of bowls to deal with, not to mention the one I'd just sifted the dry ingredients into. And we don't have a dishwasher. So I just said "The hell with that", added the coffee and vanilla to the egg yolk mixture, and mixed it a bit more: then spooned about half the sifted dry ingredients in, and pulsed the mixer a few times: then added the rest of the dry stuff and mixed again, very slow, just wanting to make sure that everything was completely combined. (As usual with cakes at this point, the idea is to get everything well mixed without doing anything to develop the gluten in the flour. I never let the mixer go very fast.)

...Then comes the "folding in the egg whites" part of the operation. Always use the biggest spatula you've got for this.

Then, when you finish this stage (again, sorry, no pic, I was busy racking my brains over what tool would be best for this job) you spread the batter in the pans.

When I finished with this task I was very glad that I had an offset spatula, because if I'd attempted this with a regular mixing spatula, I don't think the result would have been anything like this even. This batter is light but it's also moderately firm... and with the best will in the world, no amount of shimmying the pans around on the work surface is ever going to even that batter out. As for its thickness in the pans: we're talking about a centimeter at the most.

And then: into the oven for ten minutes, while setting up the pieces of cocoa-powder-dusted baking parchment meant to receive them. I don't have pics of them in the pans when they came out, because the get-them-out-of-the-pans stage is kind of a time-sensitive thing (like immediately). So I got on with it.

They fell straight out onto the prepared sheets with no trouble at all. The small one fell out by itself: the large one fell out with the baking parchment still clinging to it, but not so desperately that it took more than gently lifting it away between finger and thumb to get rid of it.

And then came the rolling. I did the little one by myself, to get a sense of the technique: then asked @petermorwood to video the rolling of the larger one.

...So now they get left to their own devices until, oh, tomorrow morning, I guess. That's when I'll move on to the next stages.

My plan is to unroll the little cake as a test: brush it inside with warmed/semi-liquid Nutella: sprinkle the Nutella with crushed hazelnuts, which theoretically/please gods will stick to it if gently assisted; and then contrive a filling that will taste at least somewhat of Nutella but not be too sweet to bear. Then the ganache will be made using that fabulous Belgian chocolate that came in a couple of weeks back, and when the whole cake's put together and has had a little time to rest, Peter and I will test it and see if it's something we feel confident enough to offer to other people.

So we'll see how it all goes. Tune in again tomorrow for more hijinks... :)

ETA 2, December 23: When we last saw our cake rolls, the two of them (the one baked in the Euro-size pan, and the smaller one where the spare batter went) were sitting innocently on the counter, waiting to settle enough to be unrolled.

Now's the time. And guess what?

DIsaster! (-Ish. As you'll see.)

The first small sheet of cake was just too small to deal with this treatment without immediately cracking into one-inch slices upon unrolling. I therefore won't waste your time with that video. Instead, you should have a look at the video of the bigger-baked sheet as it gets unrolled, and watch it crack in pieces! (This was either due to the baked sheet being too thick, or too thin. More diagnostics are needed before we come to a verdict.)

But first: the buttercream filling, which worked just fine.

This is the recipe I used:

This recipe worked perfectly. There's zero reason to inflict a long video about this on you, as I was working in a cold kitchen (with three stone walls, two external...) and the butter and sugar took something like half an hour to get friendly enough so that the Nutella could finally be added.

One thing I will show you, though. It's been a long time since I bothered buying confectioners' sugar / icing sugar, because when I need it, I make it myself... in the (very old and beat up-looking) coffee grinder. The sugar's grind comes up finer than that of a lot of commercially made icing sugars... and unlike too many confectioners' sugars in North America, there's no cornstarch in it (which they put in to keep it from caking with storage).

If you try this, make sure not to forget to brush the grinder out well afterwards, and wipe it clean with a damp paper towel. Otherwise the sugar, which is very hygroscopic, will go solid, glue the blade to its spindle, and be a real nuisance to clean out after the fact.

Meanwhile, here's the Nutella buttercream frosting after it's done. Just a very quick clip here, so you can see what the texture should be like when you pull the beater out of the mixture. (Volume down on this, please: it's really noisy.) If it's not soft enough, do as the recipe recommends: add a tablespoonful of milk or so and beat well until things soften up a bit. Add another, and do the same again, if you need to.

So now we come to the baked-cake unrolling. (Apologies for the black bars at the top and bottom of the video. For reasons best known to itself the phone insisted on recording in 9:16/portrait format, and the bars are an artifact of flipping it back into landscape...)

...So after all that, both cakes, the big and the small, are in the fridge now, stabilizing. And there we'll leave matters until tomorrow.

[crabsnpersimmons]

Hey there. I’m back again.

Just wanted to say that I really love your art and sorry that didn’t mention it before, I love your au’s and your art style.

I’M GOING TO EAT ALL OF IT.

Anyway, here mooncake, Would you like a flower?

awwwe thank you so much friend! i'm glad you're enjoying the au! 🥰

and here's Moon's response:

Moon: ough! a flower for me? you’re so nice! thank you thank you!!

Moon: (notices your account name) or or or!! do you like maple syrup? i can make maple cookies! oh! or maple candy! oh oh! what about maple madeleines? that sounds yummy too!

[notbecauseofvictories]

lostimist replied to your post “I challenged myself to make cookies for the office...”

ok if it's not a hassle do you have the savory cheddar shortbread recipe to hand? that sounds really good esp if freezable!

Well, first of all, pretty much all dough is freezable! Regular cookie dough, pie dough, puff pastry, pizza dough, bread dough...but “ice box” cookies like shortbread freeze especially well and can last up to three months in the back of your freezer, which makes them especially good for holiday celebrations.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup all-purpose flour

1/2 cup butter, room temperature (if you’re using salted butter, you can omit or adjust the salt below)

1/2 teaspoon salt

Herbs and shredded cheese, to taste---get creative! I used a combination of crushed red pepper, dill, and colby jack, but the possibilities are limitless. Cheddar and rosemary! Mozzarella and basil! Pepper jack and oregano! Parmesan and ranch powder! I recommend sticking to harder cheeses; something like feta or ricotta will throw off the texture. Also, dried herbs work best in my experience, but you can use fresh too!

DIRECTIONS

On medium speed, using a handheld or stand mixer, cream together flour, butter, salt, and herbs until they form a soft dough.

On low speed, mix in cheese and any other add-ins.

Shape into a log, and wrap snugly in plastic wrap. Chill in the fridge for 2+ hours. (If freezing, chill two hours then transfer from fridge to freezer.)

When ready to make, slice log into medallions. If desired, you can brush the slices with a simple egg wash and sprinkle with salt, sesame or poppy seeds, according to taste.

Bake at 350F for 12-13 minutes (...ish. it will depend on the size of the log and how thinly you slice it.) Edges should be golden brown, and the middle slightly soft-looking. Let cool for 5 minutes on the cookie sheet before moving to a cooling rack.

NOTE: if working from frozen dough, thaw in the fridge overnight before slicing and baking.

[scrivenger-grimgar]

BNHA x DGR because I’m mentally ill ✨

Izuku would be the ultimate analyst and he’s like 11 when he’s scouted and accepted into HPA’s class 77 (SDR:2), but he still desperately wants to be a hero so he’ll constantly seek out Akane and Nekomaru and be like “teach me to fight” and they’re like “holy SHIT he’s terrifying let’s do it” so they become friends, and later he approaches Peko and is like “fight me” and Peko finds this both deeply unsettling and also accepts that the request immediately. Fuyuhiko is very happy that she’s making friends!

They become the Fight Club and it’s essentially an underground fighting ring except above ground and you aren’t allowed to kill or maim people (psychological warfare is very much allowed however).

In that first year Chiaki befriends Hajime, and Hajime is forcefully befriended by Izuku and the two drag him into class 77 until they collectively see him as a friend (barring Nagito). But Hajime is going thru it and thinks that they don’t think he’s a friend, and this ultimately leads to him considering the Hope Cultivation Program. He gets kidnapped by his career councillor near the end of the year and is officially expelled from HPA. He later goes missing. For a year.

Izuku is super fucking sus bc he’s not an idiot and has obviously noticed tha something fucky is going on with the school (finances are skewed, funding is disappearing into somewhere, high ranking people visiting the school too often when they don’t have any relatives attending, stockholders buying and selling at increasing rates, leery of heroes and police, monitoring students more than usual, extreme security increases; Izuku smiles and nods and ciphers everything down through multiple different scripts with missing keys that no one has solved, and very carefully does not react. He searches for the Rat’s encrypted email for 6 months because he still wants to be a hero.)

When he sneaks through the ventilation and finds that lab and finds the one in the lab. That changes things.

After the first year’s sports festival, there is a four day break.

When Izuru finally meets the vent crawler in person he feels something other that anger, hatred, or fondness, that he can’t identify; it’s not from the still sleeping Hajime. Emotion is not something so easily removed from someone who feels so strongly. The scientists don’t know what exactly happened to some of the talents they tried to instill in him and he would never tell them that it was his other half who had received them.

The hero raid on Hokkaido’s Hope’s Peak Academy is largely missed by the media, if only due to the fact that the school is largely made up the quirkless.

In other news UA’s first year classes now have new classmates. As do some other hero schools. Wonder what that’s all about…

(UA gets class 77, Aizawa gets Izuku, Izuru, and Hajime, Sekijiro gets Peko, Akane, and Nekomaru, 1C gets Nagito, Chiaki, and Ibuki, etc.)

[arcann]

To me da2 is deeply centrist the way victims are punished in a vitriolic and morbid way while characters like Aveline and Cullen are unopposedly good. If you see it as leftist media that's because it does present clearly leftist characters but it won't waste time in putting them in the most cruel and humiliating situations or throw them against characters who should have a more benevolent opinion of each other for the sake of "banter". There's still people in the fandom who think Anders is the absolute worst when the very same game has the templars growing a slave ring of lobotomized kidnappees with teenagers or that Cullen and Aveline are lawful good when they are never challenged for the decisions they made which had tremendous collateral damage.

You can enslave Fenris but you can't do anything similar to Cullen. Orsino WILL die as a monster trying to kill Hawke but Elthina died a martyr. You can antagonize Anders the whole game and murder him but you can't do that to Aveline. Hell, Aveline's mourning of Wesley is treated as a tragedy to be respectful towards while Anders' mourning of Karl is hidden from a female Hawke due to biphobia and homophobia and rarely discussed even if it's incredibly relevant as another lever to humanize Anders and villify the circle. You see every outrageous opinion coming from da2 fans and it's because they choose the options that don't deny any of their values. They can do that too. Gaider and kristjanson and hepler let you support those leftist characters but you can also visciously humiliate and murder them. Meanwhile the more "tame" characters who support the system achieve a happy ending no matter your choices. They only defied the corrupt system they thrived in once it came at them with a gigantic brainwashing sword and a legion of colossal statues trying to crush them. That, and only that, was too much for them. And they're awarded for having such lousy limits.

In inquisition Hawke can't say anything outright good about Anders even while romanced, Fenris is confirmed to be alone by Blue Wraith, Merrill is in no side content post-da2. Meanwhile, Aveline is still working on the same position with tremendous power when we saw her fail and blunder several times over the years and you really have to be a manipulative and ableist piece of shit to Cullen for him to get a bad ending and guess what? The game WILL guilt trip you for it. Adding to that, Varric, the appointed voice of Dragon Age as a series and new viscount of Kirkwall has absolutely nothing good to say about Anders and is ok with the inquisition supporting the templars freely after everything he knew they did IN HIS OWN CITY. A leftist game wouldn't have this bias. A centrist game would, in the end, let characters who don't side for or against the suffering of others in an established system until it personally affects them, who aren't "risky" and have nothing to say that could, even accidentally, reflect badly in our very real system, be rewarded with the better endings.

[reitziluz]

if these brownies get fucked up i'm baking another trusted recipe this weekend.

it's so hard to estimate if they're done because they've formed a shattering levels of crispy top. when i do the stick test it leaves behind a hole as if ice had cracked under someone and plunged them into a lake.

[schlushiii]

Random thought but. To go along with the headcanons people have of Ingo having a sweet tooth I feel like he’s the better baker while Emmets the better cook between the two?

Idk just a thought

[honeycombhank]

9/11/23

I haven’t done any baking in quite a long time so today I decided I would make something sweet..

I couldn’t decide between a cobbler or a crisp..

So I decided to experiment using both kinds of toppings!

I used two different recipes and made a cobbler biscuit topping and then a crisp topping from another recipe that is more oaty and used cinnamon as well.

I’m really proud of how it came out!

Blackberry, Raspberry and Peach cobbler/crisp haha

[clownattack]

gorsh

im currently failing sm to focus bcs im just overcome with the thought of MAYBE being able to pick up my funny clay corpse from uni furnace tomorrow. LIKE IM NOT IN A RUSH AT ALL but i want them back and thinking abt this disables me from doing typography for my catalogue augh. I want to assemble my hot transi gf and take pics so i can DO MORE TYPOGRAPHY

[dduane]

…Oh, for people interested in how the soda bread baked the other day (https://at.tumblr.com/dduane/todays-accidentally-scenic-loaf-some-white-soda/vtwi3ejx88kt) in the Emile Henry bread loaf baker would look when it was cut? Here you go. 

The crust is nice (especially when slightly softened by a night in a bread bag). …Might try some corn bread next: I haven’t made that in a while. 

[asinglesock]

I made red bean paste earlier today and I was going to use it as a filling for steamed buns as my bread recipe of the week, but now I don't feel like starting another project

[cmweller]

This is one of the things I do when I'm not writing.

[thestudentfarmer]

Hey hey everyone~

Update post!

Nothing yet on the lentils but the soil is a bit dry and it's been cold so not entirelys ure they will even sprout.

The peas are starting to have some flowers! :D

The carrots are doing fine, soon I'm gonna start thinning them out and saving a few to get the next generation of seeds :)

The pumpkins are really holding on, I'm gonna just wait to pull them for now as I'm very curious if they'll finish ripening up. The plant looks pretty bad though right now :(

The paperwhites bloomed beautifully this year :) I think this year I will be digging them all up and spreading them about, Same as the other flowers in this mess of mint and flowers

And last for now, some kale I grew primarily for seed collection and deco, the cage is repurposed from an old rabbit cage and is there to keep the ferals from using the pot as a litter box.

I also made my first go at sourdough! Once I'm a little more used to making it and know it's consistant I'll be posting about it in more detail :)

Anyways that's it for now everyone :)

🌱🍞 Happy Gardening and homesteading everyone! 🍞🌱

[sspookyspoonss]

We have made a discovery. One that will shake the world of your British grandmother. Rice pudding with couscous rather than rice is superior. Better texture, better taste.

I will die on this hill.