Recent Baking

A quick round-up of a few recent baking adventures. Nothing particularly special, just keeping the baked goods population up. For some reason, they disappear awfully fast...

First, some cheese bread. I used this recipe, with the Parmesan cheese substitute. (And regular generic flour, not King Arthur brand. Sorry, King Arthur people.)

I was really pleased with how this turned out. Sliced nicely without crumbling, which made it perfect for making grilled cheese sandwiches. Great with soup, too.

I ran across some cornbread mix on sale at the store, so I decided to try it out. Hadn't used my square pan in a while anyway. 

Turned out pretty well, and also very good with soup. Dried out quickly, though. I can't eat all that in one day (well, I probably could, but not a good idea), and the next day I was not so much eating cornbread as adding cornbread crumble to the soup. Not bad as a change of pace, but I probably won't do it regularly.

And of course, more cookies. 

Specifically, macadamia nut (pictured) and chocolate chip (not pictured). Minimal work on these - just bought some frozen cookie dough and tossed them in the oven. Not quite as good as those made from scratch, but not bad and really easy to do.

Further Adventures in Bread Making

I started out using my bread machine for basic French bread and sandwich bread, which has worked out very well. Those are still my favorites, but I felt the need to branch out for some more bread variety.

I'm sure no one who knows me is surprised to find that I first tried banana bread. It doesn't fit nicely into any of the pre-set mixing-and-cooking programs on the machine, so I followed this recipe and used the dough mix setting, followed by manually setting the bake time. My first attempt didn't completely mix all the ingredients properly, resulting in some small pockets where the dry ingredients had baked into a sort of crumbly mess. Easily remedied on future attempts by using a spatula to assist the machine's stir paddle, making sure everything got mixed up properly.

Bread of bananas.

That turned out nicely, with a bit over an hour of cook time. Slice it up, add butter, great snack or dessert.

Next I attempted a recipe from the bread machine's booklet, honey and almond bread. I'm not a big fan of nuts in bread, but they're OK as long as they're chopped up small enough. That part I was able to handle, but unfortunately the actual bread part didn't work too well. It didn't rise much at all, which in turn meant it didn't cook properly.

Hard to tell by looking, but trust me, that honey-and-almond loaf turned out dense and doughy.

I tried the recipe twice, just in case I screwed it up the first time, but got the same result. I suspect the issue lies with the yeast...either not enough of it, not the right temperature, or the wrong mix of other ingredients for it to activate properly. So I gave up on the honey bread for now. I may try it again someday, but I'll be finding another recipe to use.

Next, I decided on another bread machine booklet recipe, whole wheat bread. It was more similar to the successful recipes than the honey bread one, so I felt fairly confident that it would work. The main difference is using whole wheat flour, and sunflower oil/water rather than milk/eggs. And indeed, it turned out nicely. 

Wheat bread. Very brown.

It doesn't slice quite as easily as the white sandwich bread, so I probably won't make it too often, but it goes really well with soup or stew. Might use it more in the winter when hot soup sounds better than a sandwich.

There are tons of additional recipes out there, so I expect to try more bread types in the future. Already got my eye on a cheddar cheese bread recipe.

Summon Bread!

As most anyone who knows me can attest, I'm not much of a cook. I most definitely like to eat, though, with bread right at the top of my favorite foods list. (Or maybe second. I like cheese a whole lot.) Also, I like tech toys.

Enter the bread machine. This is exactly my kind of cooking. Put ingredients in, set the program, push start, come back in a few hours...bread!

The machine I have is a "T-fal Actibread" that I bought from Amazon.com. It can make up to a 2-lb loaf, but normally that's too much to eat in a few days (even for me), so I usually make the 1.5-lb recipes. That's what causes the weird looking top of the loaf...with the smaller size, there's empty space in the machine so it isn't smooth coming out. No big deal.

There's a ton of different kinds of bread you can make in a bread machine. I've only really done French and normal sandwich bread to this point, but there's another dozen or so recipes in the bread machine's recipe booklet, and a nearly infinite variety on the Internet. Way too many of them are "gluten free," which holds zero interest for me, but those can be ignored easily enough. I'm thinking about trying possibly my favorite bread flavor ever next - banana bread.

With fresh bread available twice a week with almost no effort, it's hard to imagine why I'd ever go back to eating store bread!