Vanilla Bean Pound Cake

Sunday, June 15, 2008


We’re back from Australia and New Zealand, and we had a fabulous time. However, crossing the International Date Line seems to be hard on a person’s body, at least on this person’s body, so I’ve been a little under the weather.
First, a few days before we were scheduled to leave, I was trying out my new exercise ball. I’d had a few glasses of wine (you can already tell that the combination of a few glasses of wine and an exercise ball are not going to lead to a happy ending, can’t you?) and decided it would be an excellent idea to do a backbend using the exercise ball. Not surprisingly, the ball slid out from under me and I flew through the air, whacking my leg on the corner of a door. I watched in awe as the leg turned purple and swollen before my very eyes. By the next day, I could barely walk.
My own personal physician, Dr. Liz, my new doctor-daughter, told me she was worried I might have a deep vein thrombosis or a tiny fracture, either of which might interfere with our trip, to put it mildly. But a visit to a real doctor revealed that all I had was a big fat hematoma, which is sort of a fancy name for a bruise. I was a little alarmed at first because I remember from my soap-opera watching days that people are always dying of hematomas, at least on soap operas, but then I remembered that those were subdural hematomas—bruising on the brain, I think—which is a very handy thing to know about if you’re a soap opera writer and are often required to kill of characters quite suddenly. Anyway, my clinic doctor (the doctor I have to pay for) told me to wear a compression stocking on the flight, but the bruising and big goose-egg lump on my leg was going to last a good long time.
So I limped all over Australia and New Zealand. Then I got blisters on my other foot, probably because I was walking funny; then I could walk only by doing a sort of shuffle-shuffle-hop, which was even a funnier walk than before.
I also developed a urinary tract infection while I was in the outback, about 500 miles away from anything else.


Royal Flying Doctor Service to the rescue! They had a little clinic at Ayers Rock resort that gave me some antibiotics.

The next day I woke up with a big spot floating around in front of my eye. Jim said, "Oh, that's just a floater--I have them. It happens when you get old." Dr. Liz said, "It could be a sign of a detached retina--but probably not." So I had spots in front of my eyes for the rest of the trip, but apparently it is just a floater, and it is just one of those things that happens as you get older. Dr. Liz says it must be hell getting old.


Then I got a cold and a sinus infection as soon as I got back—probably from breathing all that airplane air with billions of germs floating around in it.
You thought you were going to get a mini-travelogue, or at least something about a pound cake, and all you get is a tale of woe.

Despite these woes, the holiday was amazing. (I’m going to start saying holiday instead of vacation and rubbish instead of trash, in order to sound more cosmopolitan). I loved Sydney, and would like to go back there for several months, in order to explore the city and some other areas in Australia.

The south island in New Zealand was perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen, especially the trip from Queenstown to Milford Sound.

We did a tour of some wineries on the south island, and I’m trying to track down some of those wines, especially the pinot noir, to buy locally. Jim will probably post some pictures eventually, but now it’s time for me to get back to the subject at hand—baking.
On Mother’s Day, I baked the first project of the Lazy Bakers’ No-Rules Club. The second project was a vanilla-bean pound cake recipe from The Cake Bible. It seemed only appropriate to bake another project for Father’s Day. Since it was my choice, I guess I have to post the recipe, so here it is:

DELUXE DOUBLE-VANILLA POUND CAKE
3 tablespoons (45 grams) milk
1 vanilla bean
3 large eggs
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups (150 grams) cake flour
3/4 cup (150 grams) sugar
3/4 teaspoon (3.7 grams) baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
13 tablespoons (184 grams) unsalted butter, softened

Split vanilla bean in half lengthwise, place it in a small saucepan with the milk and scald the milk. Cover pan, remove from heat, and cool to room temperature. Remove vanilla bean and scrape black grans from its center into the milk.
In a medium bowl, combine the vanilla-infused milk, eggs, and vanilla.
Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl and mix on low speed for about 30 seconds. Add butter and half the egg mixture. Mix on low speed until dru ingredients are moistened. Increase to medium speed and beat for one minute.
Scrape down the sides and add the rest of the egg mixture in two batches, beating for 20 seconds after each addition.
Scrape batter into a buttered and floured 8" x 4" x 2 1/2" loaf pan and smooth the surface. Bake 55 to 65 minutes or until a wooden toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Cover looselyly with buttered foil after 30 minutes to prevent overbrowning.
Let the cake cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes and invert onto a greased wire rack. Reinvert so the top is up. Cool completely.

Melinda Pickworth won a massive amount of vanilla beans in a vanilla-bean-lottery she participated in, and she generously shared them, so I have a bunch of vanilla beans to use before they dry up and wither away. Since I love Rose’s recipe for pound cake, it seemed like a good idea to bake the vanilla-bean variation. And it was a good idea.

Here is why I like Rose’s pound cake: 1) it’s easy; 2) it tastes magnificent, with a tender but still substantial texture, a rich, buttery taste, and a slight buttery crunch to the crust; 3) it’s not so big that I will gain five pounds if I should happen to eat the whole cake; and 4) pound cake is the best excuse in the world to add fresh fruit and whipped cream to the dessert plate. The pound cakes are best made in a small loaf pan. Rose says they’re better if they’re kept small, and she advises against doubling them, so I never have, but I’ll bet if you wanted a cake that would fill a whole bundt pan, you could double the recipe anyway and it would still be delicious.
I was hoping that the vanilla beans would be a little bigger, so they’d be more noticeable in the cake, as in Edy’s Vanilla Bean Ice Cream, which our family always called “ant gut ice cream.” But, since you can’t really see the vanilla beans very well in this cake, I can’t very well call it Ant Gut Cake.

Served with whipped cream and fresh strawberries and blueberries, this cake was a very satisfying end to a casual Father’s Day dinner. Jim said it was more than he deserved, and he is probably right.

To the Other Side of the World

May 21, 2008
Back in June!

Devil's Food White-Out Cake

Sunday, May 11, 2008
A few weeks ago, I saw that Melinda,Pink Nest and Evil Cake Lady started their own internet baking club. I horned in on it, and begged them to let me join their projects, even though they baked a fancy cake with caramel and peanut topping that looked really hard. They said I could join, but they had already planned May's project, which was another cake that also looked quite hard. I told them they could always make fun of me if my cake turned out to be really lame.
Melinda named their group the Lazy Bakers' No Rules Club. My daughter Sarah came over for Mother's Day today, and I told her about the group. She said, "But Mom, you love rules!" It's true. But once a month, surely, I could be a no-rules kind of gal.
May's project is from Baking from My House to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan. This devil's food cake requires baking a cake (naturally) and then slicing the layers in half. (Help!) You also make a marshmallow-like frosting (Help again!), ice the whole thing, and then artfully glom on cake crumbs. The picture (it's the cover picture on the cookbook) is quite beautiful. (If you want to make this cake and don't want to buy the book, you can google the name of the cake and get lots of hits, most of which include the recipe).

I tried to match the picture with my level of expertise at cake baking and decorating, and I couldn't. But I decided to slog ahead.
I had to buy some eight-inch cake pans. At Target, they were all out of eight-inchers, so I went to Williams-Sonoma instead. Maybe the shelves at Target had been emptied by people who went first to Williams-Sonoma and were appalled by the $18.50 price tag for the deluxe gold pan. That is $18.50 per cake pan. The lovely woman at W-S assured me that these pans would last me the rest of my life. That better be a good long time, I grumbled under my breath.

I decided to do everything exactly as directed. Normally, I would just spritz some Baker's Joy on the cake pans. But the recipe said to butter the pans, flour them, and then line with parchment. And so I did. Often when a recipe says to sift the flour, baking soda, etc., I ignore it. But today I sifted. Cake recipes that specify adding the dry ingredients in three installments, separated by two additions of milk, seem a little silly to me. But I obeyed. (Sarah pointed out that I was being a little rule-bound considering this was a No-Rules Club. I said I wished I was a little better at the no-rules thing, but maybe I'd improve as I went along).

I was hoping that the layers would be nice and thick so that cutting them in half wouldn't be so scary. But they weren't. And it was really, really scary. I remembered an old trick about putting toothpicks along the middle of the cake layer to guide the knife. If I hadn't done that, God knows what I would have ended up with, but I did manage to cut both layers more or less in half.

If the cake wasn't scary enough, there was still the frosting to contend with. Frosting that required a candy thermometer, boiling sugar, beating egg whites at the same time the sugar is boiling, and pouring the hot sugar-water into the beaten egg whites. I told Sarah that I had a bad, bad feeling. She said, "What are you worried about?" I said, "Everything. It's all going to be bad." She told me again that I was lacking the devil-may-care spirit implicit in the Lazy Bakers' No-Rules Club.

I'll admit the frosting turned out to be quite pretty. It has a whole tablespoon of vanilla in it; at first I thought it was too much, but it married well with the chocolatey, chocolatey cake (cocoa powder, melted bittersweet chocolate, and miniature chocolate chips). And, although I am not a good icer, the frosting was pretty easy to handle.

When the whole cake was frosted, I still had one layer to crumble, and throw on the sides. I was feeling a little giddy by now, and I really did want to throw the crumbs, but I just kind of patted them instead.

Three layers of chocolate cake, filled and frosted with airy, fluffy frosting--my Mother's Day present to myself.

We all had a piece mid-afternoon. Actually, Jim had two, which is how I know he liked it. I restrained myself, but the rest has to go in to work, or I'll be in serious trouble.

Potato Buttermilk Bread

Saturday, May 3, 2008
Since I started baking, I've learned that the search for new recipes is divided into two categories: buttermilk and non-buttermilk. The buttermilk search is for when you have a half-used quart of in your refrigerator and MUST USE IT UP. Non-buttermilk is when you're free.
Buttermilk servitude is not the worst thing in the world. Most things you bake with buttermilk end up being pretty good. Still, would it really hurt to make it available in one-cup cartons? It's not like most people just glug it down.
So I got out The Bread Bible, and looked in the index under "buttermilk," where I found potato buttermilk bread. I was about to ignore it because, though I had buttermilk, I had no potatoes, butI remembered that it took potato flour instead of cooked potatoes. And I still had some potato flour. I heard Rose's voice asking me how old the potato flour was, but I ignored the voice because I didn't want to think about it. (I'm at the age where I feel a lot of empathy for anything or anybody that's considered too old. It's the only reason I'd think of voting for John McCain).

Ha! The too-old flour came through just fine.
This bread is pretty simple, but it does take some time, mainly because the biga needs to be made either early in the morning, or, preferably, the night before. Since I forgot to make it the night before, I was able to hurry things along just a little by using the "proofing" cycle on my beloved Wolf oven. I set it at 85, and it stays cool enough that I can put my plastic proofing bucket into the oven with no fears, but it's just enough warmer than my kitchen (in early May anyway) so that I don't have to worry about lagging dough. And we had the bread in time for dinner.
Usually, I prefer to have bread be the main course because it usually outshines whatever else we're having anyway, but I had dinner all ready to make so the bread had to play second fiddle. Since it was chewy, flavorful, and delicious, it didn't play the runner-up part all that well. I had a slice later that night with a glass of wine, and it was excellent. This bread has a much finer texture than the kind of bread you usually get in this kind of free-form round loaf, but it was a nice change. I hope my elderly flour is up to making one more loaf.

Onion Rye Bread

Sunday, April 20, 2008

This is the best bread I've made so far from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day--mostly, I think, because it has a layer of caramelized Vidalia onions in it. Caramelized onions improve almost everything, except maybe ice cream. I hadn't decided what bread to make this week, when a friend asked me on Saturday if I'd ever made onion rye bread. I had to admit that I hadn't.
When I was leafing through cookbooks later that day, I saw that Artisan Baking had a recipe for onion rye, so it seemed fated that I should make it.
This bread follows the standard Artisan procedure of mixing a large amount of dough, letting it rise for a few hours, and then putting most of it away for later.
For the onion rye, you use the amount for one loaf, roll it out into an oval, cover with caramelized onions, and roll up, jelly-roll style.
This would have turned out to be a handsome loaf of bread, except that I had a brain lapse that made me roll it up on the counter instead of on a parchment-lined baking sheet. It had already risen beautifully when I came to the realization that no matter how carefully I tried to lift it and place it on the pan, it was going to collapse. And I was right. So instead of the high and handsome loaf I was anticipating, I had a squat and dumpy one. And that's why there is no photo of the whole loaf. Even the squad and dumpy loaf tasted excellent, though, and the bonus is that I have two loaves of rye bread in the refrigerator just waiting to be shaped.

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

My hero, Rose Levy Beranbaum, was in Minneapolis this week to make a DVD for General Mills in conjunction with her new cake book. When she told me she'd be in town, I asked her if she could squeeze in dinner with us, and she accepted. As you can imagine, I was thrilled--it would be like having Julia Child in your own home.
But then I was struck with dread. What if I invited the best baker in the world and one of the best cooks for dinner, and I made something inedible? I sat myself in the middle of all my cookbooks and looked for worthy recipes. I got a lot of suggestions, few of them helpful:
--Why don't you do a Minnesota church supper? You know, tuna hot dish with potato chips on top and Jello salad?
--Couldn't you just order pizza?
--How about hiring someone to cook and pretending you made it yourself?
--Maybe you could come down with leprosy.
As I said, not particularly helpful.

I finally decided on rack of lamb. Jim and I went to Sam's Wine Shop, where the friendly wine seller, who may or may not have been Sam, recommended a 2004 Rosso di Montalcino. He also recommended The Wedge, a Minneapolis co-op, for the lamb. When I called The Wedge to order the lamb, the nice man from the meat department told me that their lamb was so tasty because it was raised by Doug and Connie, who not only raise the lambs, but also grow everything the lambs eat. Doug is also a champion sheep shearer, which probably has nothing to do with quality of the lamb, but added to the idyllic nature of their lamb-raising enterprise, at least until I remembered what actually happens to the poor gamboling lambs at the end.
When I picked up the package of lamb on Wednesday morning, I was disconcerted to see the price tag: $77.20. I was so disconcerted that I almost ran a red light on the way home from The Wedge. The idea of shattered glass on my $77 lamb sobered me up, however.
I decided on rosemary focaccia as an appetizer. I've made it so many times now that I had no fear.

I've already recounted my first mishap with this bread, after which I fired off an email to Rose demanding that she remove the recipe from the next edition of The Bread Bible because it was impossible to do it successfully. I've done an about face, and now believe that if you follow the instructions very carefully, it is impossible to do it wrong.
I also made some Syracusan baked olives from Paula Wolfert's The World of Food.

These were very nice, although, to be honest, they tasted a lot like marinated olives that I might have bought somewhere, rather than olives that required soaking, mincing, pounding, basting, and baking.

Just as I put the appetizers on the coffee table, our dinner guests arrived.

Rose's assistant, Woody, Rose, and our daughter Sarah.

Rose praised the focaccia, which is sort of like having Shakespeare tell you that you've written quite a nice little sonnet.
Woody not only drove, but he also brought dessert: a wonderful lemon almond cake from Rose's new cake book that will be out next year. From our sneak preview, I can tell you that this cake alone would make the book worth buying.

Our guests also included Rose's cousin Peter, and his wife Anne. They live in the Minneapolis area and don't get a chance to see Rose very often, so it seemed natural to invite them as well.

Jim has a habit of taking candid shots when people are laughing, eating, or telling stories. This means I have a lot of photos of mouths open and eyes closed. He was also so busy pouring wine and taking pictures of people with odd expressions on their faces that he didn't get around to taking a picture of the salad course: watercress with roasted beets, walnuts, and goat cheese with blackberry vinaigrette, adapted from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook and buttermilk mashed potatoes, which Judy Rodgers, author of that cookbook, swears are the best mashed potatoes ever, but which I thought were not as good as plain mashed potatoes with butter and cream.
With the salad course, I served the spaccatini (little Italian cleft rolls that I made last weekend). Rose said she looked at my blog at General Mills and thought, when she saw the picture of my making the little cleft with the wooden spoon handle, that she had mistakenly been directed to a pornographic blog. I couldn't figure out what she was talking about until I went back to the last posting, stared, and laughed out loud. I'm not going to repeat the picture here.
The rack of lamb was stuffed with onions, swiss chard, golden raisins soaked in sweet vermouth, and pine nuts, then tied and slathered with Dijon mustard, rosemary and thyme. Jim and Sarah stuffed and tied, while I called out directions--my favorite role.
Then it went into the oven, with its sweet little bones looking like the swords at a military wedding.

What is it like having a famous person in your house? Or, as my reader and friend Melinda would say, what's it like having The Queen for dinner? It's like any other dinner party where you're lucky enough to have warm, friendly, smart, and entertaining guests. Midway through dinner, I realized I'd completely forgotten about being nervous. I'm not sure if The Queen would be good at making people feel at ease, but Rose definitely was.

Spaccatini

Sunday, April 6, 2008

These spaccatini, or "little cleft rolls," are another sampling from The Italian Baker. They are, according to Carol Field, from Lugano, and are "really something to sink your teeth into." I wasn't sure that sinking your teeth into was really a recommendation, but I wanted some dinner rolls that I could make ahead of time, freeze, and have for dinner on Wednesday, so I decided to give them a try.
These are very easy, except that they require a biga, so you have to start the night before you want them. The next day, after a rise, you divide them into sixteen pieces.

Or more. Or less. Because I am a direction-follower, I did 16.
Then the fun part--shape them into rolls, and then with a dowel, or wooden spoon handle, which you're more likely to have, make a deep indentation in the middle of the roll.

Turn them upside down, and let them rise again for about an hour. Then turn them rightside up, and bake, misting them with water three times in the first ten minutes. When they come out of the oven, they sound like Rice Krispies, with a lot of snap, crackle, and pop.
We tried a few tonight--to make sure that they were worthy of our Wednesday dinner guests. Fortunately, they were crusty and flavorful. As long as they survive the freezing, they should do.
Jim said they reminded him of the brochen he had many years ago, when he was stationed in Germany. It was the first time he had realized that bread could be crusty and delicious, not just something bland to slap peanut butter and grape jelly on. Over the years, these German brochen have attained a mystical quality in Jim's memory--the Platonic ideal of bread. If he thought they tasted like brochen, I knew they were good. And "spaccatini" is even more fun to say than "brochen."

Crocodile Bread

Sunday, March 30, 2008
This Coccodrillo, from Carol Field's The Italian Baker, was highly recommended by a woman at the Edesia cookbook panel in February. I tried it once before, and it didn't turn out too well--I didn't even blog about it--but I was determined to make it work this time.
It's a three-day process, and I rushed a few steps the first time. This time, I started on Friday night so I'd have plenty of time.
The Friday night step was just making a starter out of yeast, water, durum flour, and bread flour.

Mid-afternoon on Saturday, I made the second starter: more yeast, water, durum flour, and bread flour, plus the first starter:

I know. It looks a lot like the first starter. I let both of them bubble away for about 18 hours--36 hours of bubbling in all. This was one of several steps that I tried to fit into less than a day the first time I tried it.
The next step was mixing the second starter with more flours and some salt. I decreased the recommended 25 grams to about 18 grams because the first time I made it I thought it was too salty. Before I started baking bread, it really never occurred to me that bread was something that could be either too salty or not salty enough. Then it has to rise for four or five hours, being turned in the bowl every hour or so. One more step that I hurried through the first time I tried it.
I never could have made this bread successfully if I hadn't made Rose's focaccia. Like the focaccia, this is a very wet dough that doesn't come together easily. The first time, I followed the directions and mixed it in the KitchenAid on low speed for 20 minutes. I ended up with something that was a sloppy mess. This time, I mixed it on a slightly higher speed for a good half-hour until it finally came together--that stage that looks like melted mozzarella.

At this point, the dough acts almost as if it's alive. It's roiling and full of bubbles--like some alien thing in a 1950's outer-space movie. I half expected it to take over my kitchen.

Before it could, I shoved it in the oven, which tamed it quite nicely. My only complaint at this point is that the expensive all-natural parchment paper I bought at Whole Foods stuck to the bread. What's the point of using parchment if it sticks? After 35 minutes in the oven, the bread looked beautiful, even though I broke a couple of the pretty air bubbles on top of the loaves trying to peel back the parchment.

We couldn't wait for it to cool off before we sliced it.

As you can see, a little bit crushed, but still wonderfully hole-y and with a marvelous crisp crust.
Why is it called crocodile bread? Sarah claimed that she could see a marked resemblance to crocodiles. I don't see it myself, but I may just be lacking in imagination.
According to the book, the bread was "dreamed up by Gianfranco Anelli," a Roman baker. People supposedly come from all over the city to buy it. I wouldn't go to Rome to buy it, but I would certainly go to a bakery in Minneapolis. Fortunately, I don't have to. I just have to remember to start it a couple of days before I want it.

Easter Brioche

Sunday, March 23, 2008
When I started going to law school, Sarah was just a toddler and Elizabeth hadn't been born. My mother warned me that law school could cause me to forget to get Sarah an Easter basket. "Roberta [my sister] forgot all about Easter when she was in law school, and if it hadn't been for me, poor Tony wouldn't have had an Easter basket at all," she said. I promised her I would never forget to get my kids an Easter basket. And I never did. In fact, I kept getting them Easter baskets after they moved out of the house, although I've finally stopped now. But I almost forgot about Easter this year, what with the snow and the fact that Easter is the earliest it will ever be in my lifetime. And in your lifetime too, dear reader, even if you are much younger than I am.
But I did remember it enough to think that I should make something Easter-ish this weekend. I chose brioche. It has no Easter connotations that I know of, but it does have a lot of eggs in it, so there you go.
I chose a recipe from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. He has three versions: Rich Man's Brioche, which takes a full pound of butter; Middle Class Brioche, which takes a half-pound; and Poor Man's Brioche, which takes only a lousy stick of butter. I chose the middle class, of course.
They all start with a sponge:

This is a very rich, buttery dough. I'm not sure why I would ever want to double the amount of butter, which seems like it would be very hard to incorporate. But maybe that's a challenge for sometime when I need to gain weight, if such a time were ever to occur. The recipe makes two brioches a tete, or a lot of petites brioches, or a couple of loaves. I decided to make one real brioche and some rolls.
While I was shaping the rolls, I thought they might be good with some raisins in them, and then I thought that they might be good with mini chocolate chips in them, and then I thought that they might not be good with either of these additions, so I made some plain, some with raisins, and some with chocolate chips.

They are cleverly marked, to identify which is which.
The unbaked brioche a tete is in my sole brioche pan. The last time I made brioche, many months ago, the tete was frighteningly askew, so this time I was determined to have it look normal.

I thought that the egg glaze would make everything look beautifully shiny, and it did add sheen, but it also looked cracked. The egg glaze in this recipe instructed me just to beat an egg and brush it on. If I'm remembering correctly, other recipes for egg glazes specify adding some water to the egg. My guess is that this thins it enough so that it's not so prone to cracking when it's baked, but it's just a guess. Whether I'll remember to do this, in order to test my theory, the next time I brush on an egg is anyone's guess.

We ate these brioche rolls for our Easter breakfast. Jim made omelets with bacon, caramelized onions, and roasted red pepper. They were quite good, and so were the rolls.
That left us with the larger brioche to eat later in the day. We tried, we really did, but couldn't quite manage. I'll do the toast-test with some of the large loaf of brioche tomorrow morning. I was pleased to see that the tete made it through the baking still looking pretty normal.

Happy Easter to my dear daughters, even though I did not make you Easter baskets this year!

Chocolate Buttermilk Cake

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Our friends Doug and Mary invited us to their house to view some of their New Zealand slides, in preparation for our upcoming trip to Austrlia and New Zealand, and I said I'd bring dessert. Since I still had about a cup and a half of buttermilk in the refrigerator, naturally I wanted to make something to get rid of the buttermilk. A chocolate cake sounded good, and I found a recipe for chocolate buttermilk cake on the internet.
Now I know how you Brits feel (I'm talking to you, Melinda) when you have to change our recipe instructions and measurements. This cake called for 250 g. of butter, which is just slightly more than two sticks. It also wanted "caster sugar" (?) and "plain flour" (something like all-purpose?). It also called for 250 ml of buttermilk, which seemed like a lot, but didn't quite use up the remaining buttermilk. (It's gone, though).
It turned out to be a very nice cake. If you want to try it yourself, just Google "chocolate buttermilk cake," and it should appear.

The recipe suggested serving it with chocolate ganache poured over it, which sounded like a good idea to me. I am not much of a cake baker, but I've made ganache before, and it's always turned out fine. Even though it sounds very French and fancy, it's quite easy, and it actually never occurred to me that it was tricky. But this one was. Instead of turning out smooth and glossy, as a ganache is supposed to do, it got all dull and curdled. It looked like it couldn't be rescued, so I just dumped it on the cake, and hoped that people would just notice the strawberries and not the unpretty ganache.

Of course, if I'd been thinking, I would have checked out The Cake Bible, in which Rose tells how to rescue a curdled ganache. First of all, I could have used her food processor method, which she calls "foolproof." I don't know about you, but I'm always a little reluctant to tempt fate by trying "foolproof" recipes. And "overbeating causes curdling," she says, which I didn't know. "If the mixture gets overbeatan and grainy, it can be restored by remelting, chilling, and rebeating." I obviously didn't know that either, but I'm offering this hint to you, free of charge, in case you ever end up with a curdled ganache.
By the way, Doug forgot to check the light bulb on his slide projector, so we didn't see the slides of New Zealand after all, but we did enjoy the cake. And it was still good the next day, when I took it to my political group. And it was still quite good on Friday, when I took it to work, where the last piece was chopped up and divided until only crumbs were left. Finally, when no one was looking, the crumbs disappeared.

Five-Minute Peasant Bread

March 9 - March 16, 2008
After the pot luck where I brought the Irish soda bread, I came home and made a batch of Five-Minute Artisan peasant bread. First, I translated all the cups and tablespoons to weights, and then I mixed up a big batch of dough.

Although the book says just to stir it together without kneading, I couldn't resist kneading it for a few minutes because I thought that might develop the flavor more. In the morning I made one little one-pound loaf, which, because my photographer was away for the week, did not even get photographed. I managed to eat this baby peasant loaf all by myself in the course of a week, just by having a piece of toast every morning. I decided the one-pound loaves were a little too small, so I ended up making three loaves of bread from the master recipe, instead of four tiny loaves.
Yesterday, I made a torpedo loaf from half the remaining dough. I let it rise more than the recommended 40 minutes because that amount of time, directly from the refrigerator, results in almost no rising at all, and too much oven spring.

I put the shaped loaf in LaCouche's oblong pan, which Jim calls the Bread Coffin, and let it sit for a few hours. It still didn't do much rising--I think because it had been in the refrigerator for nearly a full week.
After a week, the flavor is definitely different. A little funky, or more fully-developed, depending on how you want to look at it. Jim loved the crust, but was not in love with the taste.

Sarah, on the other hand, could have eaten the whole loaf, although she has developed the Marginal Utility theory of eating, which holds that the first few bites of anything are the most satisfying, and your second helping of even something delicious will never be as good as the first helping. Once you have digested this theory, so to speak, you should be able to stop eating before the marginal utility goes down. She's going to write a diet book on this theory and make millions. I cut two pieces of bread for everyone, however, and she ate two.

You're supposed to be able to keep the Artisan bread dough in your refrigerator for two weeks, but I was a little doubtful about whether it would keep for another week, so I chopped up some Kalamata olives and tossed them in the last bowl of dough. This was an excellent idea.

Blended with the olives, the bread no longer had that sort of funkiness that it had on its own. (In fact, it didn't have it when it was toasted, either, which makes me wonder if I was imagining it). I also think this olive bread turned out to be the handsomest loaf of the bunch.

I'm still of two minds about this Five-Minute bread. The upside (having three or four loaves of bread at the ready) is, for me anyway, also the downside: being committed to having the same kind of bread for a couple of weeks. I really enjoy going through books and magazines, figuring out what bread I'm going to make this weekend, so having a giant bin of one kind of bread dough takes a lot of the fun out of bread-baking for me. But if you like having a familiar bread always ready to take out of the refrigerator and bake, I guess this is not a downside for you.