BBA #2: Artos (Greek Celebration Breads)--Christopsomos

Another product of the housebound period of last week's winter storm: bread #2 for the BBA Challenge. The base recipe for Artos is an enriched bread (it has eggs, honey, olive oil, and milk) with spices and flavorings--cinnamon primarily, with nutmeg, cloves, allspice, almond extract, and orange or lemon zest or extract. I needed my lemon zest for something else, had no orange on hand, so I used a touch of lemon oil. I decided to do the Christopsomos options, which adds raisins, dried cherries, and walnuts to the bread--but i skipped the raisins because the folks next door aren't fond of 'em. I have to get rid of all this bread somehow, you see...

Fist up was the barm, a term I've been seeing on people's blogs without knowing what it really is, other than one of several flour-water mixtures mixed up ahead of time and added to bread for flavor. Barm, in Reinhart's usage (I understand that the term maybe has some other definitions) is a sourdough starter, really. After reading through all the instructions for the multi-day project of starting your own with wild yeast, I saw the line "[over] time the organisms indigenous to your region will gradually take charge of it...a starter made from a seed culture imported from Egypt or Russia will, over time, produce bread that tastes like a starter made locally from scratch." Aha! My sourdough starter, purchased several years ago from KA and fed 1:1 by weight, surely has by now been taken over by indigenous microorganisms. It should be the same thing I'd get if I followed the make-your-own steps. All I need to do is feed the starter the night before I want to bake bread, and make sure I have enough volume for the recipe.

This dough was very well behaved. All the ingredients went in the mixer bowl, on went the dough hook, and eventually there was a lovely ball of dough. I didn't knead the full 10 minutes because the texture looked so good. Come to think if it, I also skipped the windowpane test and the temperature test...I'll try to do better next time...but it felt right.

The dough rose nicely to double, if slowly--I'm getting used to these room temperature rises instead of my usual practice of using my warming oven's proof setting, which makes things go much faster. Reinhart maintains the slower rise gives more flavor, but says if you need the speed, use whatever you need to to give the dough a warmer environment.

To shape the Christopsomos, the dough is divided 2/3 - 1/3, and the smaller piece goes in the fridge. The larger piece is formed into a boule and allowed to double, then the smaller piece comes out and is used to make the decorative cross and curlicues. Except...I misread and formed the decorations before the second rise. I guess if I'd followed the directions I'd have had better definition in the curls.

There's an optional sugar-syrup glaze which I skipped in fovar of a little butter rubbed over the warm loaf for some shine.

Taste results: a lovely bread, very nice flavor with the spices in the dough. The cherries are a great bread addition (my weekly challah almost always has dried cherries in it). It was great just plain, with butter, or toasted. I might make this one for a breakfast bread without bothering with the fancy shaping.

RHC: Double Chocolate Whammy Groom's Cake

Atlanta got hit with a winter storm this week, as you may have heard. Sunday night to Monday morning saw about 4-1/2 inches of snow and sleet at my house, and then it got cold, so the usual "gone in a couple of days" storm stuck around. This is the South where such events are rare and the equipment to deal with it isn't in place. Soooo....schools have been closed all week. (The kids next door are thrilled.) My office was closed 3 days, and opened late today (but I could work from home). All you guys from places where snow is a regular occurrence, please snicker quietly so I can't hear you.

Until some melting started yesterday I was housebound--I'm a Southern driver, and I know better than to get out on the roads when things are very snowy/icy. The cats were thrilled, as I must be staying home to provide extra attention and playtime for them, right? Or maybe it would be a good time to do some baking. I could have done a cake for the free choice week we're in, but I'm down to 5 cakes Marie has done that I haven't. The banana cake needed cream cheese, not on hand. No cream of coconut for the Heavenly Seduction coconut cake, no cream cheese for the Whipped Cream No-Bake Cheesecake (which sounded like way too much trouble in any case--custard? Italian meringue? Not this week, thanks). No piles of berries for the chocolate trifle or the berry shortcake. Not looking good...but there's the Double Chocolate Whammy Groom's Cake. Marie isn't going to schedule it for HCB because it's in the wedding cakes chapter, but she made it during our first free-choice week last February and as a chocoholic I knew I was going to have to bake it sometime.

It's a gimmick cake, really. Make a pan of very fudgey brownies. Cut these up into little cubes. Fold brownie cubes into a chocolate cake batter. Bake (Rose used a specialty pan shaped like a stadium to emphasize the "manly groom" aspect <g>) and serve.

Brownies, maybe just a little underbaked. Younger niece assured me that was fine, as they would bake again in the cake.



Oh look! My cooling rack has made a 1/2" grid on the brownies to give me a cutting guide!



It makes quite a pile of brownies, even after niece steals one. Her verdict: skip the cake, eat the brownies now.



Is that all the batter, and can it possibly cover all the brownie cubes?



Guess it can....



I went with the old-fashioned Bundt pan to minimize the amount of odd crevices I'd have to pack the batter into, and to avoid thinner edges that might scorch. Even so I had a few air pockets on the cake.



Baked up beautifully, but again maybe underbaked. I went with the 190 degree mark given for the brownies and for butter cakes in general, not trusting my ability to pick the "springs back when pressed" moment. But you know, having to scrape some goo off your slicing knife after each cut isn't such a bad thing in a brownie-cake. Maybe I should have gone to a plastic knife like I use for brownies.



Tasting results: No complaints about this one, except for the general "why not just make brownies?" I had hoped to be able to see the brownie chunks in the cake, but they are only perceptable by the moister texture compared to the cake proper. On the other hand, there's really not much cake there anyway, so mostly you do just get brownies.

BBA #1: Anadama Bread

First bread for the BBA Challenge 2011! This is the Anadama Bread, a standard white-flour loaf enhanced with some cornmeal and flavored with molasses. The cornmeal is soaked overnight (thus it's, logically, a "soaker" in this bread-baking terminology I'm learning to use)--that was different from anadama bread I've made in the past where the cornmeal was just added to the flour. Reinhart's version calls for polenta grind cornmeal.

Notes:

I used garden-variety "Grandma's" molasses, that being all I had on hand. I think I'd prefer this loaf with the lighter molasses Reinhart recommends--the molasses flavor was a little too strong. Or maybe I should have tried that leftover pomegranate molasses...not sure what the relative sweetness levels are, though.

I mixed and kneaded in the KitchenAid (I may do a post on 'how I do bread' to cover my level of experience and my usual methods), and found as others did that the recipe needed more flour than the recipe called for to get past a quite sticky dough to merely tacky.

I did a half recipe (one loaf) and used the slightly oversized 10 x 5" corrugated loaf pan purchased from King Arthur. The loaf took quite a while for the second rise, then I forgot it and let it over-proof slightly. I still got some oven spring, so perhaps it was no big deal.

The bread had a nice texture, very light. The molasses and cornmeal combo, though, just doesn't do much for my taste buds, so I suspect I won't repeat this one.

The BBA Challenge bread list

I'll update this post to track my progress on the BBA Challenge 2011.

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Anadama Bread
Artos: Greek Celebration Breads (Christopsomos)
Bagels
Middle-Class Brioche
Casatiello
Challah
Ciabatta (choose one variation)
Cinnamon Buns and Sticky Buns
Cinnamon Raisin Walnut Pecan Bread
Corn Bread
Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Bread
English Muffins
Focaccia
French Bread
Italian Bread
Kaiser Rolls
Lavash Crackers
Light Wheat Bread
Marbled Rye Bread
Multigrain Bread Extraordinaire
Pain à l’Ancienne
Pain de Campagne
Pane Siciliano
Panettone
Pizza Napoletano
Poolish Baguettes
Portuguese Sweet Bread
Potato Rosemary Bread
Pugliese
Basic Sourdough Bread
(Sourdough) New York Deli Rye
100% Sourdough Rye Bread
(Sourdough) Poilane-Style Miche
(Sourdough) Pumpernickel Bread
(Sourdough) Sunflower Seed Rye
Stollen
Swedish Rye (Limpa)
Tuscan Bread
Vienna Bread
White Breads (choose one variation)
Whole-Wheat Bread
Potato, Cheddar, and Chive Torpedoes
Roasted Onion and Asiago Miche

Starting the BBA Challenge....sort of

As we're on the downhill slope of the Heavenly Cakes Bake-along, I've been thinking about another online baking project. French Fridays with Dorie almost seduced me, the Gutsy Cooks would keep up the connection with several HCBs (though I wasn't grabbed by the cookbook they are using), but I decided I was better off sticking with a baking emphasis. The Bread Baker's Apprentice Challenge is out there, the cookbook (Peter Reinhart’s book, The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread) had been on my wish list for a while, so I decided to go for it.

Why not The Bread Bible, which I already owned? Size of project: BBA has 43 recipes or so, plus a few variations. The Bread Bible has 84 recipesand (I suspect) many more variations, and while I've done some baking from it, I have to confess that Rose's level of detail in some of those recipes may have crossed the line from helpful to 'I can't pick out the next step from all this verbiage'.

The main BBA Challenge started back in May 2009 with a rather different setup than some of the other Internet cooking groups. They don't bake together: each baker works on their own schedule. The only rule is that they bake all the recipes in BBA in the order presented in the book. The "in order" part may not get followed--we'll see. I first thought it was because the cookbook presented the recipes in some sort of logical order like requiring increasing skills, or contrasting different recipes, but it turns out that the recipes are presented in (wait for it)....alphabetical order. That rather changes my perception about the basic premise of the BBA Challenge from "has a purpose related to baking" to "akin to fraternity initiation ritual".

OK, small digression there, sorry.

The BBA Challenge quickly got too large for a "blog roll" approach and was frozen at 200 members. New joiners can just start baking, and post pictures, blog URLs, or questions to a Facebook group or a Flickr group. When they're done, they stop--rather like the Caucus Race from Alice in Wonderland, really. There's a new BBA Challenge 2011 group, just started this week, that is trying to do a more structured approach of bread a week, but I'm still uncertain about the "do 'em in order" thing so I'm debating whether to join.

Anyway, I may not bake these in order, though I did start with the first one today. I'll make another post with the list of breads and try to keep it updated as I bake.

RHC: White Velvet Cake with Milk Chocolate Ganache

I was very glad that this week's cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cakes bake-along was on the quick-and-easy list. I attended my local filk convention this weekend, and so baking had to be either before or after that trip--I do go stay at the convention hotel even though it is in Atlanta, because filk convention activities run late into the evening. Or really, into the wee hours of the morning.

I think I started the cake about 2:30 Friday afternoon and still made it to the opening convention session shortly after it started at 7, including the time to pack, finish laundry, clean up the kitchen, photograph the cake, taste it myself, deliver it to the folks next door for them to taste later (with instructions to email comments to me), placate the cats made unhappy by the appearance of a suitcase, drive the 30 miles across town, and check in at the hotel. Add in the extras in the baking process of defrosting the frozen egg whites I'd forgotten to remove from the freezer, rescuing the ganache when it broke, and even digging out a pastry bag and star tip for at least a token amount of decorating, and you see that the actual cake-baking couldn't have taken very long!

(If I had known we'd have a winter storm in Atlanta Sunday night to Monday, keeping me home today, I could have reduced my Friday stress and baked today. Oh, well, I'm baking bread instead.)

The cake itself is a white cake (butter cake with egg whites only, no yolks), and is mixed with the usual method for RHC of blending the dry ingredients, adding the butter and some liquid (milk in this case), then adding the egg mixture in a couple of additions beating in between to create structure in the batter. Knowing my taste-test group and our usual reaction to Rose's butter cakes (a little on the dry side for our tastes), I did a half-recipe, baked in a 6" pan. I still used one of my Rose's (silicon) Cake Strips by clipping it with the ever-handy kitchen gadget of a binder clip to keep it tight around the pan. I've got sets of the Wilton cloth cake strips, but the silicon ones are so much easier to deal with if the cake pan is anywhere in the range that they fit.

My 6" pan was almost not big enough as it turned out, for this batter rose high during baking before subsiding a little to end up just completely filling the pan. It did end up with a very crisp edge around the top and a little bowing in the center of the edge of the cake, but a little trimming before applying the frosting took care of that.

The frosting is a milk-chocolate ganache, with some added butter and vanilla. After a search of several of my usual spots for superior chocolate, I was about to conclude that the higher-cacao milk chocolate called for wasn't going to be findable in this period of dark-chocolate mania. But Friday morning a quick stop at a smaller Whole Foods store turned up bars of "Endangered Species Chocolate" with a 48% cocoa content--even better than the 40-42% specified in the recipe. I was saved from having to mix the lower percent Ghirardelli I had in the pantry with some bittersweet.

For a change I actually followed the recipe's method of making the ganache--this time it was melt the chocolate in the microwave until almost melted, then stir until the melting was complete. Stir in warm cream until smooth....but my ganache broke despite care with the temperature. I rescued it by heating a couple of tablespoons of extra cream, adding a little chocolate, then adding some of the broken ganache. Stir, stir, stir, add this mixture to the rest of the ganache, and stir, stir, stir some more. Finally it all went smooth again. I used a small spatula instead of a whisk to incorporate the butter as the intent is not to add air to the ganache anyway. It was very hard to get all the little butter bits to blend in (and my butter was if anything too soft, so I don't know why), but most of them finally succumbed to being smashed against the side of my measuring cup I was using to make the ganache. I consoled myself by saying that a whisk would only have broken up the butter into even more little bits to stubbornly resist integration with the ganache. Don't tell me if there's some whisk magic that makes this wrong!

Once the butter and vanilla were incorporated, frosting went easily, if hurriedly at this point. I was worried that the ganache was too soft, but after a quick pause to finish my packing I came back to find it had set up almost too much. A stir softened it again, though, and frosting was completed with no more trouble.

Tasting results: I like this cake. The milk chocolate is a nice change, and the contrast with the white cake was nice. My brother agreed, liking the combination. However, the rest of the folks next door all felt the cake was dry (yeah, yeah, we always say that), though the ganache got praise. I certainly didn't think the cake was of the extra-moist type I really prefer, but eaten with the frosting I didn't find it unacceptably dry myself. Older niece said "not worth eating again because there are better options" (cake-of-the-week has spoiled these guys), younger niece agreed and noted that the cake part was "almost like white bread". Hmmm.....

Overall, a pretty good cake, but not in my list of ones to repeat. I may look for other opportunities for the milk-chocolate ganache, though.

RHC: Chocolate Bull's Eye Cakes

This week's cake-of-the-week for the Heavenly Cake Bakers is from the cakelet section, making 6 largish cupcakes using a specialty Maryann pan--that's a pan that bakes a little depression in the top of the cake or cupcake, suitable for filling with fruit or a topping. I have a Maryann pan inherited from my mother, never used until the Heavenly Cakebake-along started. It's nice to be able to get the right pan down from the top shelf, and not have to debate the purchase of something new.



I think this week's post will be mostly pictures--as others have commented, this is a pretty straightforward cake, even though it has 5 components: cake, syrup, glaze, chocolate cream, and drizzle.

The Maryann pan that will create cakelets with a depression in the top of each one.




The cake itself is a genoise, which means beating the eggs and sugar for 5 minutes in a stand mixer as the egg foam provides the lift for the cake.



At the end of the 5 minutes, a lovely fluffy mixture to be blended with the flour, salt, and browned butter.



Browned butter (not very brown--I got impatient at the end), with vanilla, about to have some of the egg mixture folded in.



The genoise is complete and ready to bake.



Just out of the oven, with the cakelets barely browning and just starting to pull away from the edges of the pan.



The syruping of the cakelets was not so photogenic, but here you can see the glisten that the apricot glaze gives. The glaze also seals the cakes to keep them moist with the syrup.



The components for the chocolate cream, a chocolate custard. This was really luscious stuff.



Cakelets are filled and ready for the last step, a drizzle of chocolate ganache for decoration.




Ta da! Chocolate Bull's Eye Cake.

Tasting results: very favorable. Nephew likes the way all the flavors came together (but my brother was less certain that it all melded--he liked the components but was unsure about the combination). The nieces liked it. We all thought the cake was nice and moist, a point where we often find RHC lacking. And S., a friend of younger niece's who was having a sleep-over, said "This cake is amazing!"