Chocolate Pane Francese

Yesterday during some downtime at work I stumbled across a recipe for a heavenly treat. It was over at Chocolate and Zucchini, but, though it looked so deliciously decadent, a sourdough starter is a teensy bit out of my comfort zone. However I was not to be deterred! Armed with this awesome bread idea, I turned to that bread baking cookbook my mom gave me to suit my novice bread making skills!

I took the Pane Francese recipe and altered it a bit to include the ingredient of the hour! Since I had never made such a bread before, I went light on the cocoa powder and added in some chopped up bittersweet chocolate.

We were having issues with our internet service so we had to wait around all day for the company to come out and reattach the apartment to the telephone line... Then we had to reset the router... Only the determined bread maker can maneuver around the modem and router that have taken up a temporary residence under my mixing cart!



Haha!

Let me say this: the bread smelled utterly amazing while it was baking. Kyle and I were chomping at the bit to try it. Normally I can control myself and at least wait until the next morning to slice into a loaf - but not this bad boy! It made it about 5 minutes before the knife came out and the beautiful crust was broken.

Oh. My. God.

This bread was heavenly. Chocolatey but not sweet, crusty on the outside and soft on the inside. Wow. Perfection in loaf form.

This is going to be a staple in my house for sure.

Chocolate Pane Francese
1 package active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
3 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 teaspoon turbinado sugar
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3/4 cup ice cold water
1/4 cup skim milk
1 ounce bittersweet chocolate, roughly chopped

In a small bowl, sprinkle yeast over warm water, mix with fingers and let stand until foamy. In stand mixer, using hook attachment, combine flour, cocoa, sugar and salt. Add yeast mixture, milk and water then beat on medium speed until well blended, adding bittersweet chocolate about halfway through. On low speed, beat the dough until elastic and shiny, adding flour by teaspoons if the dough is too sticky. The dough should be sticky, but touchable.

Cover bowl with plastic wrap, a towel or the lid to a large bowl (as long as the dough can breathe it's all good) and set in a warm place to rise until doubled in size, about 1 1/2 hours.

Sprinkle dough with flour and turn out onto a well floured surface. Knead by hand for a few minutes to incorporate the flour and make the dough easier to work with. Cut the dough in half and roll each half into long rectangles. Starting at the short side roll dough tightly, pressing down each seam as you roll. They will be long loaves, so don't worry!



Cover lightly and allow loaves to rise for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 475. Transfer loaves to greased cookie sheet (or sheets in my case since my oven is so tiny). Set aside for 15 minutes to allow them to get slightly puffy.

Place bread in the oven and reduce heat to 425. Bake 20 minutes or until crust is nice and crispy feeling. Turn off the oven, crack the door and allow bread to sit in the cooling oven for 5-10 minutes. Remove from oven and immediately transfer to a cooling rack. Then DIG IN!

Bread Mania

Like I mentioned earlier, it has been a BUSY month. My 27th birthday was a few weeks ago and my adorable cousins came in from out of town to surprise me at the bank!



They colored pictures, which I hung up by my computer.



They spent all afternoon baking cupcakes and brownies, which they decorated with fresh fruit, frosting and dark chocolate they shaved themselves! Mom and Grandma helped a little, of course!







And shared lots and lots of hugs!



We all went out to dinner that night, the girls, Mom, Dad and Grandma!







The girls spent the night with me, sleeping over in my itty bitty apartment. I forgot how much fun sleepovers were! We ate spaghetti (with my Grandma's delicious sauce), painted our fingernails and toenails (with only minor spillage), and walked to Dairy Queen for some much needed deliciousness!

The next night was spent at my mom's with pizzas on the grill along with spaghetti pie for dinner. The girls also put on a talent show they had been rehearsing for 3 nights!

It was a fantastic surprise brilliantly organized by my Mom, Grandma and Aunt. It was the best birthdays I've had in a long, long time!

I love you guys!

That weekend my mom gave me one of her old bread making books. Since then I've been trying my hand at breads, which is why I haven't been posting too many recipes. I still don't have a recipe today; the rye bread I made that was so delicious was just too crumbly.



Something I need to work on. It toasts up wonderfully, but it's a bit dangerous to grab out of the toaster!

I also did a retake on my Turbinado Wheat Bread, using some lime zest and reducing the sugar. It wasn't fantastic, too tart, but it sure looked pretty!





I love making bread, it's so very therapeutic. Plus I'm not as tempted to eat the batter! When I find a truly fantastic bread recipe I will definitely post it, don't you worry!

Turbinado Tornado

Do you ever have those days where the carbohydrate monster consumes you?



It rages and wars until you feed it? Does yours enjoy homemade bread as much as mine does? If it does, then you're in luck!

I've made challah bread before, but I wanted to try making a sandwich-type bread that I could toast without making an gooey mess. Or a crumbly, firey mess for that matter. I went to K3 Foods and picked up some stone ground wheat flour as well as some turbinado sugar, which I'd never used before. Then I turned to my trusty Kitchen Aid manual for some of their bread recipes!



I followed their recipe for Basic White Bread, but substituted in some of my wheat flour. The result was deliciously moist, but dense enough to hold up to slicing and toasting! Perfect with a swipe of almond butter with a morning bowl of Grape-Nuts! Mmmm! Fortunately for me, when sliced and toasted you can't see how lopsided the poor loaf is.



They'll be shaped better with practice! I promise!


Turbinado Wheat Bread
1/4 cup skim milk
1 1/2 tablespoons turbinado sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 package yeast
3/4 cup warm water (105-115 degrees F)
1 1/2 cups stone ground wheat flour
1 - 1 1/2 cups all purpose flour

Place milk, sugar, salt and butter in a small saucepan. Heat over low heat until butter melts and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and cool until lukewarm.

In a warmed mixer bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add milk mixture and all of stone ground flour and 1/2 cup of all purpose flour to equal 2 cups. Using dough hook on mixer on lowest setting, mix about one minute. Add remaining flour, 1/2 cup at a time. (I found that I used only that 1/2 cup more of all purpose along with a tablespoon of water - it was pretty dry and I was worried about how well it would mix. It turned out fine this way) Mix until dough clings to hook and cleans the sides of the bowl, roughly 2 minutes. Knead about 2 minutes until dough is smooth and elastic; it will be slightly sticky to the touch. (SLIGHTLY lol)

Remove and place into a lightly oiled bowl, rolling to ensure all of the dough is coated. Cover and allow to rise in a warm place for about an hour or until doubled in size.

Punch down dough and place on a lightly floured surface. I floured the surface with the little bit of millet flour I had left that wasn't enough to make anything out of. Using a rolling pin, roll dough out to about 9 x 14 inches. Starting at the short end, roll the dough tightly. Pinch to seal the seam. Pinch the ends of the roll and fold them under. Place the dough seam side down in a greased loaf pan. Cover and allow to rise again for about an hour or until doubled in bulk.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Bake the loaf about 30 minutes. Remove from pan immediately and cool overnight on a wire rack.

Mmmm... your carb monster will thank you!

Bluebeery Bread

I finally bought it!



The awesome Wild Blue beer of my dreams! Blueberry flavored beer! Mmm!!

Yeah I know, I hadn’t heard of it before either. But, you see, over at Sugar Plum, there is an awesome recipe for Brewberry Brownies. Since I read that post about a month ago, I’ve had a taste for the elusive beer. I finally discovered that my local Ultra (Skultra to those of us that live around here haha) carries it. I got the LAST CASE on the shelf.

Go me!



I wasn’t really in the mood to make brownies, so I decided on beer bread. I used a recipe from my Grandma’s Best cookbook, swapping out a few herbs for ones I thought would go best with the exotic beer.

It smells incredible while baking and turns out nice and crusty on the outside while wonderfully moist and blueberrylicious inside!



Bluebeery Bread
2 3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons baking powder
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon sage
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1 12-oz bottle Wild Blue beer

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease a loaf pan with butter and set aside. Mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, sage and ginger. Add beer and mix well. Pour batter into loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes. Let stand for 10 – 15 minutes and remove from loaf pan to cool completely.

Challah Swirl

Happy long weekend to you all! I love this time of year. Everyone fires up their grills and cooks up some awesome grub, Bobby Flay style! I love Bobby Flay, he's so fun to watch. I caught his story on that "Behind the Chef" thing on the Food Network one day, such an amazing story, too. You should try to watch it sometime!

Sadly I don't own a grill. I know enough people that do have one to sustain me for a while I believe. =) Such as my parents with their awesome grilled quesadillas!



My recipe has nothing to do with grills or meat, however. Oooh I just got an idea. When I get my own grill I could bake it in there! Perhaps it would first be a better idea to learn to not burn a hot dog on the grill as my first outdoor chef-ing experience..

I've been searching for a bread recipe that doesn't seem too complicated for my novice bread-making hands to conquer. After getting an email about 55 Knives, a blogging cookbook that was put together and just came out for download, I noticed one contribution was from a blog named Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy. I giggled at the name and browsed around her site. I stumbled upon a post for Cinnamon Raisin Swirl Challah. Now I've never had challah before. That I can remember. But it looked so good... this was my ticket!



I mixed up the ingredients and leaving it to rise while I watched my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dvds (the original tv series, mind you) and had an unfortunate little mishap. Despite the 90 degree weather we've been having, the one day I decide to make bread the temperature decides to drop to the 60s. Two hours later when I checked on the dough, it had definitely not doubled in size. I moved it to sit on my dinky little warm oven where it promptly rose the way a nice yeast bread should. Good little bread **pat, pat**. I didn't have time for the rolling process until today, but the recipe said I could leave the dough in the fridge for up to 5 days before I'd have to freeze it.



Now as far as the filling goes, I used three different options. Since I made only half of the recipe, I made some mini loaves. One with goat cheese and a jalapeno-peach "jam" I made up on the stove, one with cinnamon and coffee, and one cinnamon raisin. I had a few problems with the centers of the last loaves baking through, but humidity is a killer. Next time I'll just have to have the air on!



Challah Swirl Bread
(half recipe: makes 2 regular sized loaves)
1/2 cup plus 6 tablespoons lukewarm water
2 1/4 teaspoons active dry yeast
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
2 large eggs, whisked
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter (or canola oil)
3 1/2 cups all purpose flour

From here I just followed the directions posted on Sticky, Gooey, Creamy, Chewy (I linked the page a little earlier). She has great step by step instructions written up!

A New Take on the Bean Cake

I have this one really awesome ingredient in my cabinet.



Oops haha! I didn't notice that "keep refrigerated" type on there before.. oh well!

Anyway, I wanted to make something with these little guys! The poor things were starting to feel neglected, having lived in my cabinet for 3 months! As luck would have it, I remembered seeing a recipe for a garbanzo bean cake.

"Why couldn't I do the same with my adzukis??"

Well I could! And I did!

TADA!!



Man-o-man-o-man this cake is so moist and delicious! Who'd have thunk it?? Plus it has pretty speckles, contains lots of fiber AND it's gluten free!



Adzuki Cinnamon Cake
1 cup adzuki beans, cooked and drained
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup brown rice flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/3 cup pineapple juice

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Generously butter a one pound loaf pan and dust with granulated sugar.

Puree beans in food processor until smooth - mine were of a crumbly consistency since the beans were a bit on the al dente side. Pour beans into a large bowl; stir in eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder, cinnamon and pineapple juice until well combined. Pour mixture into the loaf pan and bake for 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. After removing from the oven, sprinkle a pinch of kosher salt on top. Cool thoroughly, slice and serve!

Tomato Basil Bread

I'm so proud of this recipe! The original recipe I discovered on Fran's House of Ayurveda (her Olive Walnut Bread) and thought it sounded delicious. Of course, empowered by my banana bread success, I sought to convert it to a gluten free recipe. I glanced in my pantry.. no olives. Why does this always happen? I did, however, have one sun dried tomato and one plum tomato. I changed changed a few ingredients here and there and Tomato Basil Bread was born! I know walnuts and tomato sounds like an odd combo, but the result was just divine. In the future I might add a tad more oil or take the bread out of the oven sooner to keep it a bit more moist, but on the whole I was pleased with the results!



Tomato Basil Bread
2 cups brown rice flour
1/2 cup GF all purpose flour
1/8 cup flax seed
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1 tablespoon dried basil
1 large egg
1 plum tomato, diced
1 sun dried tomato, diced (more if desired)
1 cup skim milk
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons agave nectar
1/2 cup walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 350 and grease a loaf pan. In a large bowl, thoroughly combine flour, flax seed, baking powder, salt, and basil. In your mixer, combine milk, olive oil, egg, and agave nectar until well blended. Add in flour mixture along with tomatoes and walnuts. Pour mixture into loaf pan and bake 45 minutes or until a knife inserted comes out clean. Enjoy with some hummus or walnut butter.. mmmm..

Banana Bread Bonanza

Last night I had a conundrum; I wanted to bake banana bread but did not have a gluten-free recipe for it. Sure, I had a recipe for regular banana bread (taken from the Grandma's Touch cookbook my mom bought me years ago) but I vividly remember the last time I tried to convert a recipe to gluten free. Let's just say it turned out to be chocolate GOO rather than brownies. Haha! But I really wanted banana bread.. so I gathered up my courage and converted it anyway! As I'm happily adding ingredients into my mixer, I was horrified to see that the recipe called for 1 CUP of bananas rather than 1 banana in itself. No wonder the mixture looked so runny. I grabbed some banana chips off the shelf of the pantry and crushed up a handful or so of them and threw them into the mixture hoping that would solve my problem. Well I don't know if it solved things or not, but the bread came out beautifully and is a big hit at the bank! Hooray for banana bread success!

Banana Bread
1 3/4 cups brown rice flour
1/8 cup flax seed
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
Handful crushed banana chips
Cinnamon, to taste
3 tablespoons olive oil plus 1 tbspn butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 mashed banana (I just broke up the banana and let the mixer mash it in)
1 cup skim milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, beat together oil, sugar and egg. Add bananas and milk; combine well. Add remaining ingredients and mix well. Pour batter into a greased and floured 5 x 9" loaf pan. Bake for 50 minutes or until inserted toothpick comes out clean.