July: Bread

 

Best loaf of bread I've had in a long time from Stone Circle Bakehouse. Great texture. Sturdy and chewy without being too dense.

Weekend Baking: Olive Oil Almond Cake and Feta Sun-Dried Tomato Focaccia

Extremely moist though the substitution of flaxseed meal made the mini-loaves a bit crumbly and less attractive than the original. Easy and healthyish.

Recipe: Olive Oil Almond Cake from Sassy Radish
Substitutions: flaxseed meal for eggs and omitted zest

Focaccia was a reprise of the earlier King Arthur Flour recipe but with feta and sun-dried tomato. Made the mistake of placing the tomato on top of the dough and it just got burnt and fell off. Third time makes perfect! Love the sun-dried tomato which I ordered online though.

TNT #6: Focaccia

My second attempt at focaccia was finally successful! An earlier attempt never rose, leaving me with a dense hard loaf that was finally binned after a couple of days. While this didn't rise as much as expected and the inside never achieved the open, holey texture of a typical focaccia, I am still chalking this up as a success, as a decent, edible loaf of bread was created. The added cheese cubes did make it a bit tricky extracting the loaf from the pan. Definitely a good starter recipe to adapt and improve on.

Recipe: Blitz Bread: No-Fuss Focaccia from King Arthur Flour
Changes: added provolone cubes

Weekend Baking: Savory Ham and Cheese Bread

Easy and quick to bake, this will make a nice addition to the weekday lunch box. Basically cheese and bread held together with a bit of flour.

Recipe: Savory Ham and Gruyère Bread from the New York Times.
Changes: substituted mozarella for gruyere and water for milk.

Weekend Baking: Sweet potato and walnut bread

Leftover mashed sweet potato led me to this recipe from Chow for Pecan and Sweet Potato Bread.. Wanting to take this in a more savory and healthy direction, I substituted walnuts for the pecans, oil for the butter, vanilla yogurt for the milk, garam masala for the spices and cut way down on the sugar. Contrary to the comments this did not lead to a dense loaf. The bread turned out to be very moist and soft with a pleasant heat from the garam masala. Definitely a winner! A bonus was the very pretty orange colour of the bread. My baking so rarely turns out looking like the photo accompanying the original recipe, but in this case was almost identical.