Christmas stollen

My most beautiful cookbook (shut up, it is beautiful) Home Baking has a lot of seasonal breads in it, and I've been meaning to make the stollen for a few years now, despite the fact it never was anything I had in my childhood or a family tradition or anything. Although the Germans do seem to do Christmas best; my mother does make lebkuchen cookies with oblaten wafers every year. These are heavy on the almonds, so I never eat them unless she refrains from decorating some. Anyway, some helpful links:
.wav file for pronunciation
stollen is praised by gawker, so it must be good

My version involves the previously mentioned candied peel, and dried cranberries. No one likes raisins, son. It's quark stollen, but quark is somewhat lacking in the bodegas and markets of Brooklyn, so I substituted Greek yogurt. Germans and Greeks get along, right? My recipe had no almonds, but many do. Or, worse, marzipan. (It's harder to see and pick out marzipan than it is almond slivers.) Seriously, people, stop it with the almonds. It's kind of trying too hard, really. The fruit is all soaked overnight in a mixture of orange juice, rum and black tea. Mmm.
I halved the recipe, which was a blessing, as the loaves made are humongous. Here they are, wrapped up in swaddling clothes. Uh, saran wrap. This isn't blasphemous, as stollen are supposed to look swaddled. Or mine entrances. It's all a bit confusing, really. See the first link above. I froze one, ate half of one over the course of a week and took the rest home.

mmm, millet

I made the no-knead bread a few days ago. I've made the basic recipe 2 or 3 times before, so this time I used 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour to replace some of the white flour, and threw in sunflower seeds and millet. I've been obsessing about millet since college, when the dining hall (hi pierce!) occasionally had this awesome bread that had about 10 billion types of seeds and grains in it. So I hunted down millet in Seattle (seriously, New York has something against bulk foods...maybe it's a law?) and brought it back to New York for this express purpose of making myself bread. And it's very enjoyable bread. Now I just have to figure out what all those other seeds were.

The obligatory somewhat gross pictures of the baking process: right after mixing the dough together. And after about 20 hours. It should have taken less time to get the little bubbles on top of the dough, leading me to believe I should have bought new yeast. Or at least used the unopened packet. Cooked and all. A slice of bread. Sadly, the resolution is not quite good enough to see the tasty sunflower seeds and millet.

My sister just went off to college, so I felt obliged to send her a care package of zucchini carrot bread.


I also made one zucchini and carrot muffin so I could test it and make sure the bread was edible. I devoured this before photographic evidence could be taken.
I should mention here that I have a special fondness for zucchini carrot bread, as I had it while staying at the Sheraton in New Orleans when I was seven. I recall it was in their standard bread basket in just about every meal. It was delicious, especially as there was no way then I was going to eat frog's legs. It was at some computer trade show, I remember them unveiling some sort of new Macintosh.
I have a terrible propensity for baking bread for too short of a time such that it's either uncooked in the middle or comes out of the pan in more than one piece. This is clearly unacceptable for a gift. I think I baked it around an hour? It came out fine, with only a little knife work, and packaged up nicely.


It turns out, while my sister likes pumpkin bread and banana bread, she's not so much a fan of carrot bread. Sigh.

This post is brought to you by the letter "B"

Well, now there's all this pressure to be entertaining. Hmph. Speaking of entertaining, I had my father visiting this weekend. My mother tells me he likes super-ripe bananas, so I went out and bought some. He ate one, leaving me with five. ("Yes, we have no bananas" was a favorite song of my mother's. I still have no idea what it means.) Which means...banana bread! (And maybe banana pudding somewhere down the line, but I don't know how that's going to work out.)
My favorite banana bread recipe is Big Bird's. Yes, that Big Bird. The recipe is from a Sesame Street book, part of a series of...I dunno, 26? I'm pretty sure it's out of print, so I'll post my version of the recipe. I've tried a few other recipes, and none of them are good. Or maybe I was just brought up to prefer a really moist and dark banana bread.

The first step is mashing three ripe bananas to kingdom come. As shown in the lovely image below. It gets better, really. Or at least briefly. Just looking at the pictures alone will show a distinct narrative arc of not pretty, pretty, and not very pretty. Add 1/4 cup melted butter. Mmm. Then add 3/4 cup of honey, 1/2 tsp of baking soda and 1.5 cups of flour. (Big Bird suggests whole wheat flour, but I generally just use white flour and am all the unhealthier for it. I am not a role model like Big Bird.) Having stirred that altogether, pour into an oiled loaf pan and placed in a preheated (you did preheat, right?) oven at 350 degrees. Bake for one hour, although after one hour my loaf feel apart when I took it out of the pan. So use a loooooong toothpick to poke through the whole loaf to check for doneness. Cool briefly in pan, then let finish cooling on wire rack. Let's linger for a while on the pretty picture. Well, apparently the banana bread doesn't want to linger, but wants to get a move on. Or I need steadier hands.
Shoulda baked it longer. I tried cooking it a little longer in a turned-off oven after I got the top half off and then pushed it back in. It didn't really work very well, but was definitely moist and tasty as ever.
In conclusion, children should be allowed to watch television as it leads to things like the best banana bread.

Wotcher, muffins

I have had my eye on this recipe for English muffins for quite a while. I've been cast-iron skillet-less for a while though, so I never attempted it. But since I got a skillet for my birthday (thanks, Mom) I finally have all the requisite tools. Now, the temptation to do this post with an English accent or a British theme is nearly irresistible. However, accents don't work as well written out. (Or perhaps they do, at the very least, better than my English accent...) How do people come up with gimmicks for every blog post? I'll just assume that making English muffins from scratch is novelty enough. My del.icio.us shows that I bookmarked this recipe back in April 2005. Back then, I was still in Chicago (*sniff*) about to graduate from college. I can't remember if my thesis was due before or after then, which probably says something about my thesis. Which, actually, brings us to our first picture. This is the milk, shortening, sugar and salt cooling down. Blobs of oil can be seen on the liquid-air interface, which was (more or less, in an excruciating paraphrase) what my thesis was on. Mmm, appetizing.
Possibly even more appetizing is the yeast proofing, shown here for your enjoyment. Sorry. I took the picture, so I'm obligated to share. This picture has nothing to do with my thesis.
Here are before and after rising pictures, as I'm always amazed at how bread actually rises. My apartment is incredibly humid and warm, making for ideal rising conditions, even if it meant I was about to pass out while kneading.

The following picture does not do justice to the kneading/post-kneading situation of the kitchen (and myself) covered everywhere with flour.
Judging by the blurriness of this picture, this is showing cut-out fetal English muffins trying to escape. Their lack of legs prevents this from being a viable option for them, they all ended up staying on the cutting board. I had to re-roll the dough once, which didn't seem to make any difference during the second rise. They were cut with the mouth of a large mug, the nicer looking once being the second go round after I realized I really had to slam that mug down. This is half the dough, and easily made 9 muffins and a baby muffin. (I already called them fetal, so baby doesn't really make sense. So by baby I actually mean runt.)After a second rise, here they are being born. I mean cooked. Same difference. The original recipe is infuriatingly vague ("They're done when they look done."), but...I can't really help. It was very play-by-ear, especially as I kept on adjusting the flame. Cutting one in half was an easy enough test, and I could then eat it immediately. Here're the finished muffins (minus the two I ate while they were cooking.) They look sort of like pancakes, but they're much thicker, with a more cake-y (dare I say, muffin-y) texture. Ah, this reminds me I once knew of a girl at my school who was in 2nd or 3rd grade, about 6 grades below me, whose name was Muffin. This strikes me as meaning she either has very, very cruel parents, or parents with no forethought and little idea that their child might grow up some day. I'm sure she's, uh, fine now. I'm also assuming this little anecdote is un-Googleable.
With my terrible cameraphone, one might think by this photo that I am presenting a store-bought English muffin! (Except for that fact that that would be incredibly boring.)
As the recipe noted, one half of the dough can be made into a loaf of bread. I gently rolled it out after the first rising, then rolled it up into a log for the second rising. Although it looks very promising, I actually don't know how it tastes, because I ate way too many muffins and am mildly over-full. It's now in the freezer, waiting patiently for me.