Christmas Bread

This was the bread that I brought for Christmas with Matt's parents. It's Rose Levy Berenbaum's mushroom bread from The Bread Bible, and it has duxelles in it. Duxelles are chopped mushrooms sauteed in garlic and butter for a long time. The idea was that if I baked it in a coffee can it would take the shape of a mushroom. Sort of. Um.

It was very good, and better toasted. The mushroom/garlic flavor wasn't pronounced-maybe next time I would use a mushroom broth instead of the water to intensify.

Cake Baby Steps

Brooklyn summer is wrapping its warm, wet, sweaty hands around my shoulders, and I'm elbow deep in my oven, as usual. This week I've been setting off the smoke alarm right and left, roasting chickens, chopping onions, and creaming pounds and pounds of butter and sugar. In addition to my usual madnesses, I'm deep in the grips of a new obsession--Wedding Cake.

This August, I'll be attending two weddings on two consecutive weeks (all blessedly in New England!). First, dear friends Stacey and Avi will be married in Maine. Now, as you may have gathered from the odd guest post on this site, Stacey, in addition to Libby and Matt, is pretty much my main partner in foodie crime. We call each other to gloat about particularly successful recipes, email lunch menus and ingredient suggestions, troll* farmers markets, and generally indulge our ridiculousness on grand scale together. She's one of the few friends that I have that I know I can never bore on food topics, and a willing collaborator and taster, as well as an inventive and talented cook, who roasts an impeccable chicken and is always up for sausage and pickles. Avi is also a foodie, curious and hungry and an inventive cook. As you see, they're a formidable team to please, and I feel very honored that they have asked me to create their wedding cake.

As if that wasn't riches enough, my fantastic cousin Becky is marrying the beautiful and stylish Michelle exactly one week later, and they have asked me to do theirs as well! The engineering bar is far lower, as they want cupcakes, but the possibilities are temptingly endless, and the style challenges complex. I am so excited. I know it is months away, but I have been mulling things over internally for weeks already, and last week started up a frenzy of samples and experimentation. I am reading everything I can find about cake chemistry, homemade wedding cakes, design, etc... and testing yellow cakes at an astonishing rate. I am already driving everyone crazy, although I hope to get it out of my system and have the whole plan in place in a couple of weeks, and move on, I'm a pig in shit here. I get to make so much cake! I have a legitimate, scientific reason to create all kinds of things that I would never get to make, to use books that have been lying lonely on the shelf, to pretend to be a pastry chef at last. Now here's where it gets interesting. I can turn out a pretty fair chocolate birthday cake, carrot cake, and coconut cake, and so I thought I was pretty together. However, when I started to think it over, and went through the Thanksgiving Princessetarte, the pink Strawberry Cake, and the Tiramisu Cake, a humbling realization ensued.

I'm not that good at making basic plain cake.Wow. That was strange to realize, especially when I'd just pledged four people the cake experience of their dreams. I'm not scared--even in the last week's experimenting I've turned out some specimens that I'd be proud to serve--but I am not as experienced in this particular branch of dessert as I'm going to need to be, so I turned to Rose Levy Berenbaum and her aging but entirely relevant classic, The Cake Bible. Rose and I are going to go it together, with ample help from Martha, Dorie, Deb at Smitten Kitchen, The Kitchn, Shirley Corriher, the ladies of Sugar Sweet Sunshine, the betrothed themselves, and, hopefully, you. I welcome all comments on the enterprise, all advice and cheerleading, and I thank you in advance for putting up with what will quickly seem an overwhelming amount of information, as I plan to overshare. Part of the original purpose of this blog was to restrict obsessive food commentary to a forum where the readers were willing participants, and that outlet has never been needed more.

Over the next two months I will keep you appraised of progress, experiments, fun facts, and tons and tons of yellow cake. Beginning right now.

* troll (v.) Gleeful grabbing and grunting of leeks, rhubarb, turkey sausage, shaking said products, and stuffing them in one's sack and running away.

Ciabatta

Another casualty of the shrinking of my home population has been a decrease in our consumption of bread. Even when we were five, I often found it hard to convince the roommates to use up any bread that was older than just out of the oven fresh. Part of this may have been the packaging--things in old plastic bags are hard to find and sometimes harder to find appetizing. We do a lot of toast.

Still, now that there are just the two of us, the problem has magnified. I've taken to keeping bread in the refrigerator, wrapped up in the same old plastic bags. I make bread less often, and I make a lot of garlic toast. It works out. Sometimes I get so excited about the stale bread recipes (mmm, pappa al pomodoro) that I actually run out of bread, and then it's finally time to make more. After a little refrigerator-emptying early stuffing experiment, it was that time.

(I should mention that my family Thanksgivings are structured in such a way that I have no part in cooking or serving them, I just occasionally make a dessert. So my early and late stuffing experiments are completely gratuitous, I don't have some fancy occasion to cook for, I just like stuffing. Come back later this week, though, because I do have an impressive cake planned, which I'll blog about as I move through the stages.)

I made two breads. The first was a fairly uneventful ricotta bread, a fortified yeast bread from Local Breads. The second, inspired by this post, was the ciabatta recipe from the same book. I think Local Breads is a great book, and I've had a lot of success with his recipes, but one thing I don't appreciate about the book is that he simply refuses to give hand-kneading instructions for many of the wetter doughs, saying that they are better in a mixer and that is that.

That leaves me...nowhere. Of course, I understand that mixers help out a wet dough...they reduce the sticky hands and minimize the urge to add more flour. However, I don't have a mixer, and people have been making breads with wet dough since before mixers were around. I usually just wing it, and if my crumb is sometimes a little tighter (more water, more open crumb), I deal. I try very very hard to avoid using more flour, I wet or oil my hands, and I just get pretty sticky. Sometimes it works better than others. I expected trouble from this ciabatta, but it was a dream. Sticky, yes, but it had a lot of body, and right from the beginning it was like kneading a real entity, rather than a shapeless misery.

Everything went perfectly. I sliced the dough into irregular roll sizes with a pizza cutter, baked, and then we ate a lot. Very few leftovers of these. I'd like to keep experimenting with this recipe. The post referenced above, the one that inspired the ciabatta-fest, is from the blog of baking guru Rose Levy Berenbaum. In another example of internet democracy in action, my comment on the post received an almost immediate reply from Ms. Berenbaum, and the subsequent responses received several more thoughtful insights. I have actual real friends who don't respond this quickly, let alone international cookbook writing stars. I really do appreciate it, Ms. Berenbaum. Scroll down to the comments section of her post to read the discussion with me and other contributors.