mix, mix…stir, stir

If you want to eat chocolate for breakfast, here’s your ticket. This bread drives the deliciously bitter and complex flavors of cocoa front and center leaving the bananas to the finish as a hint that this is legitimate breakfast food.

A full cup of cocoa powder gives the bread a dark enticing appearance and bold flavor; it reminded me more of coffee than chocolate. What could be more perfect for breakfast? I would even consider leaving out the pieces of chopped chocolate next time. I added a generous ¼ teaspoon of freshly ground cardamom which created a beautiful lingering warm floral flavor that complimented both the cocoa and banana equally well.

It turned out I could have pulled my bread out of the oven a few minutes earlier because it was just on the boarder of being over baked. I may have been thrown off by the bits of chocolate in the batter making it look like the toothpick I inserted to check for doneness was coming out with wet batter attached, when I actually just stabbed a reservoir of chocolate. It’s probably a good idea to try pricking a few different spots before making a final assessment as to the doneness of the bread.

A parchment paper sling is my surefire way to be able to remove baked goods from pans. In the recipe, Dorie suggests placing the loaf pan on a sheet pan, but instead I used two nested loaf pans to create a little air space in the bottom for insulation. It worked great. The batter filled a 9×5 loaf pan perfectly. If you have a smaller 4×8 loaf pan, bake some of the batter in a separate ramekin or muffin tin.

I am so thrilled with this bread and can’t wait to make it again. I was really taken with the beautiful bitterness of the cocoa that came through. My favorite cocoa powder is Felchlin Cacaopulver. I buy it through The Chocolate Man who offers a fantastic selection of quality chocolates from around the world.

Steph of Obsessed with Baking made the recipe selection for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie kitchen activity. She has the recipe posted on her wonderful blog. I encourage you to check out the recipe for Cocoa-Nana Bread and click around to see what other culinary adventures she has been on.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 110 recipes completed 111 to go!

I’ve been on a nice run of baking successes lately, but had a doozie of a failure last night. I made rye bread that is better suited as a doorstop rather than as a consumable.

I expected creating the rye starter to be the tricky part, but that worked like a charm, sort of. I tried two different starter methods. The one from the recipe I was interested in trying seemed so unconventional that I decided it would be wise to create a back-up starter, which turned out to be a good plan. The recipe called for a starter made from rye flour, buttermilk and salt, which was then to be left for four days to do it’s starter thing. The use of buttermilk in starter is unusual though not unheard of, but I have never heard of salt being added so early in the game as it’s a yeast inhibitor, and I was very suspicious that the starter didn’t need to be fed daily. 

For my back up starter I turned to a new book I have been exploring. I received a review copy of Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley from the publisher, Andrews McMeel. The book gives a great overview of rye starter and bread and instructions for a simple starter of rye flour and water that was bubbly and active after the first day. After four days of feeding it was ready to go, unlike the buttermilk starter which I tossed out on day two when I discovered a thick coating of fuzzy mold growing across the top.

As Whitley describes in Bread Matters, rye bread dough is supposed to be very wet and loose like the consistency of mashed potatoes. The recipe I made created dough more like cake batter. I think it was just too wet to be able to rise. Now that I at least have a healthy rye starter I look forward to trying the rye bread recipes from Bread Matters and I expect they will be winners. The only thing I have made so far from the book besides the rye starter is the English muffin recipe, which I make almost weekly. This recipe alone is enough to put this book on my “buy” list, but once I do a bit more baking from the book I will share a full review.  I have to say I find myself reaching for this book over the other bread books I own when I want information, like how to make a rye starter, for example.

Here is a great bar cookie that’s not sickly sweet, greasy, or flavorless. All problems I have had with other bar cookie recipes.  These would be a great bake sale item,  just look at all that chocolate!

The oatmeal in the dough seems to temper the sweetness along with the peanuts. There is just a hint of cinnamon dancing around in the background to add interest. The chocolate center layer is fudgy and soft and remains a distinct chocolate zone rather than melting into the dough which gives a great visual and textural contrast to the cookies. I omitted the raisins to please the non-raisin eaters and used a slightly darker chocolate than standard chocolate chips, but otherwise knocked this recipe out just as Dorie instructed.

My friend Lee and I whipped these up after dinner one night in about 15 minutes, but because they are thick bars they take a long time to cool. We couldn’t stand to wait and dug in before the thick chocolate layer had become structurally sound and ended up with a pile of cookie bar pieces on each plate rather than intact cookies; tasty nonetheless. Once cooled, they cut beautifully and hold really well. We ate the last ones three days later and they were just as good as they were on the first day.

 I lined the pan with a parchment sling for easy removal rather than buttering it. If you haven’t use parchment paper I encourage you to pick up a roll and give it a try. I line cake pans, loaf pans, cookie sheets, really anything I bake that needs to be removed from what it’s baking in or on gets parchment.  To make a sling, just cut the paper so that two of the sides extend beyond the height of the pan walls. This way it’s easy to grab the parchment and lift the entire baked good out of the pan for easy cutting.

Lillian of Confectiona’s Realm picked the recipe this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie reicpe and has it posted on her blog if you would like to make it yourself.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 109 recipes completed 112 to go!

Sugar coated fried dough is a decadent treat to me. Generally only something I indulge in when someone else is doing the frying, but this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe had me heating up a large quantity of oil at the risk of infusing the odor of “fried” throughout the house.

Windows open, vent fan on turbo, and in goes the dough. Though I don’t fry often, when I do, I like to use my wok because the bowl shape allows me to get away with heating up less oil than if I were to fill a flat pan. The sloped sides also make it easy to flip small items like these cookies by just lifting from underneath to flip them up onto the side wall and then they slide right back down into the oil.

Once drained the dough is hit with a dusting of cinnamon sugar and then dusted with powdered sugar just before serving. Overall these didn’t do much for me. They tasted like fried dough, but weren’t especially interesting. I think the problem was that I rolled them extremely thin and if they had been slightly thicker they would have had a nicer texture and more flavor. I thought it would be a clever idea to roll the dough through my pasta machine. It was really quick and worked great except for the fact that I didn’t have any idea how thin I should go. I tested four different thicknesses, which were numbers 6,7,8, and 9 on my machine. Nine is the last and thinnest option.  It turns out that the thicker cookies fried better and tasted better. They had more structure and flavor. I wish I had tried some on 3 or 4.

Teanna of Spork and Foon was the bold baker who selected a fried recipe for all of us to make this week. She is always cooking up beautiful and interesting food and sharing it on her blog. You can find the recipe for Mrs. Vogel’s Scherben there if you want to give these simple fried cookies a test for yourself.

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 108 recipes completed 113 to go!

The most important thing to establish about this cake is that you don’t need a birthday to make it because it’s easy and tasty enough to make for no specific reason at all. This cake has kicked me back in gear with posting my Tuesdays with Dorie baking adventures after completely losing my blogging rhythm due to all the traveling I did during November and December selling SpiceCare.

I am excited to share this because it’s such a classic chocolate cake with no funny business; it’s the kind of cake Mrs. Cleaver would make. There is the wonderful little twist of malt powder in the frosting, but chocolate malts were popular in the 50’s, so it’s not so out of character really. The frosting is sweet making a cold glass of milk the perfect pairing to serve alongside a slice. I found the texture to be much improved after spending some time in the refrigerator rather than eating as soon as it was baked and frosted (we just couldn’t wait!). The cake became a little denser and slightly fudgy after being chilled. If you  usually buy cakes or bake from a box, I encourage you to give this recipe a whirl. There is something so special about a homemade cake; it will be worth the baking adventure.

I didn’t mess with this classic one bit. I even stuck with the two layers to be true to a classic birthday cake. I usually prefer to split layers and assemble four layer cakes, but that just seemed too fussy for this recipe. For my taste, in the future I will bump up the malt a touch because it’s really subtle and substitute at least half of the bittersweet chocolate in the frosting with unsweetened chocolate just to tame the sweetness a tad. Because it is such a sweet cake I highly recommend using a dark bittersweet chocolate, something in the 70% cocoa solids range. Trader Joe’s sells a nice bittersweet chocolate that is very reasonably priced, Cost Plus generally has a nice selection of imported dark chocolates as do many grocery stores. Standard chocolate chips would be far too sweet, but if that’s all you have, just substitute some unsweetened bakers chocolate to compensate.

Since I’ve encouraged non-bakers to give this cake a try, here are a few cake baking tips that might be helpful if you are new to baking.

• Invest in a roll of parchment paper to line the cake pans with. Just cut out circles of parchment that will fit right in the bottom of the pan. I don’t find it necessary to grease the parchment paper. Don’t forget to peel off the parchement before assembling the cake!
• Check your oven temperature and adjust accordingly if it runs hot or cold.
• Room temperature butter is considered to be about 66-68 degrees F. Easy to cut and spread, but not so warm it’s squishy.
• Room temperature ingredients incorporate better than cold.
• Take the chill off eggs before adding them to a batter by placing whole eggs in a bowl of hot tap water for 3-5 minutes before cracking them.
•  Take the chill off milk or other liquids with a quick blast in the microwave; just enough to remove the chill, not enough to make it hot.
• Avoid leveling a measuring cup of flour by shaking it. This compacts it and you’ll end up adding too much flour. The best method is to spoon flour into a measuring cup and then scrape it off level using a knife. Or even better weigh it; 1 cup of all purpose flour weighs 5 ounces.
• Take your time letting the butter and sugar cream. This process beats air into the ingredients which will enable the cake to rise in the oven.

For the recipe for Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake visit Laurie of Slush. She is the mastermind behind creating this baking group which has been cranking out weekly treats for two years now! She selected this week’s baking task and has the recipe posted on her blog.

Though I haven’t been blogging lately, I have been cooking and baking and will have a lot to share in the coming month as I catch up with my posts. Happy New Year!

Over 350 baking bloggers are baking our way thorough Dorie Greenspan’s book, Baking: From My Home to Yours . 107 recipes completed 114 to go!