Banana Bundt Cake

My love of green bananas has been documented before, so I am sure it is no surprise to see me mashing slightly brown fruit to make a Banana Bundt Cake. This is another great banana recipe from Dorie Greenspan's "Baking."

Beauty and the Feast was headed over to bake with me, so I set out the ingredients after my bananas were mashed:

This is a fairly standard cake recipe - the butter is creamed with the sugar, and then the dry ingredients are added alternately with the wet. Once all of those items are incorporated, the bananas are mixed in, leaving the batter a bit chunky:

This cake would also bake beautifully as a loaf - the top is decorative enough to not justify greasing all of the grooves of a bundt pan:

The turned out cake was sliced right away and eaten warm!

Classic Sandwich Bread

I'm a big fan of creatively shaped and differently flavored breads...but sometimes all you need is a classic recipe for white bread:

The only excuse I needed to make such a simple bread was a craving for a good grilled cheese and tomato sandwich:


This bread starts out with flour, yeast, salt, sugar, milk, butter and water:

Once everything is incorporated into a ball...

You knead it about ten minutes, until smooth:

I used a bowl with measurements on the side for the initial rise to gauge how much volume my dough gained. When I left it to rise it was below the one quart mark:

Here is the dough rolled into a log and placed in my loaf pan. You can see the indentations of my fingers well because this dough is very soft:

Partway through the rise...

and after! 
At this point I had to run out for an errand so I used the trick of putting the dough into the fridge so it wouldn't rise too much. I then let it sit on the counter for about an hour to come to room temperature before baking.

Then, once the bread had baked and cooled, I enjoyed a sandwich of cold cuts, lettuce, tomato and homemade spicy guacamole:

Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate Chip Cookies are an almost guaranteed crowd pleaser, and everyone has a favorite recipe (usually the one on the back of the bag of chocolate chips). I decided to take a look into Dorie Greenspan's "Baking" for some inspiration, as I have found her cookbook to be a great source for twists on some of my favorite things. This time, I decided to make her Chocolate Chocolate Chip cookies. As you can see here, the basic formula of butter creamed with sugar and brown sugar is followed, and there is cocoa powder mixed in with the flour and leavening:

The flour mixture was mixed bit by bit into the creamed butter and sugar after I added eggs and vanilla:

You can really see the mixture picking up all of the great chocolate flavor as I added more of the cocoa mixture:

Finally, I added in chocolate chips and the dough was ready to go:

To get more regularly sized cookies and to keep my fingers a little bit cleaner, I used a small ice cream scoop to deposit the dough on the parchment lined cookie sheets:

Here are the finished cookies fresh from the oven:

Bread I Like: The Boudin Bakery in San Francisco

I visited San Francisco for one quick day recently, and made time for some bread tourism at the Boudin Bakery:
The Boudin Bakery, as you can imagine from their location, is known for their sourdough. The sourdough for their bread was started in 1849, making it the oldest in San Francisco - and a must-visit spot for me!

I was also delighted to see some of the fun shapes that the bakers are able to make out of dough. I'll...perfect some simpler shapes before I try these:

Challah, revisited

I've made Challah before:
I am a big fan of this light, eggy bread.

My challah recipe starts a little differently than some bread formulas - instead of whisking together the dry ingredients and adding in the wet directly, both the wet and dry ingredients are incorporated before they are mixed together. To the left of the usual flour, yeast and salt is a mixture of eggs, oil and water:

I added the wet mixture to the dry and a few minutes later I was ready to knead:

Ten minutes of kneading and two hours of rising later, I decided to have some fun with my challah and make a celebration loaf - basically a smaller braided loaf set on top of a larger one. I sectioned the dough into six boules to rest before further shaping:

Here are the braids of dough...

and here they are on the parchment lined baking sheet:

After another hour of rising and an egg wash the loaf is ready to bake:

I really enjoyed slicing into this bread and being able to see the texture of the six individual pieces of dough that I had shaped:

Even if the ends of the loaf were not quite as pretty as I had hoped - this is a shape the practice!

Lemon Poppyseed Muffins

I read soon after I made my poppyseed bread that poppyseeds can easily go rancid if not stored properly. My response? Lemon poppyseed muffins:

These muffins are just a basic quickbread. First, you mix together your wet ingredients and your dry ingredients. The dry ingredients include lemon zest and sugar:

The final ingredient? Poppyseeds:

I added the poppyseeds before the dry ingredients were fully incorporated:

Because when the batter is properly mixed there should still be some lumps of flour, or the resulting muffins will end up a bit tough:

Spoon right into lined (or greased) muffin tins:

And less than twenty minutes later - breakfast!

Poppyseed Bread

A braided poppyseed bread starts like many other breads - flour, yeast, salt and a little dry milk:

Add in your water and oil and mix it up, just like always:

But then add a lot of poppyseeds:


Once those are well mixed in and the dough has risen, it is separated into three pieces and rolled into strands for braiding:

Here is the braided loaf before...

And after rising. An egg wash of a whole egg, a little milk, and some sugar has been brushed onto the loaf:

The slightly sweet egg wash on top lent itself nicely to a sweet and tart cherry jam: