Four years ago I used Wilton Kelly Green Icing Color to make the green bread. It worked well, but it was difficult to deal with since it was a paste consistency and did not readily spread evenly through the entire batch of dough. This is a simpler white bread recipe that I have made many many times. The liquid food coloring easily yields a bright and even green to the bread.
As of a few months ago I never thought much about baked donuts. I’m from New England, and a donut comes from Dunkin Donuts or Honey Dew. And it’s fried in SHORTENING. Forty some years ago I used to watch a terrific guy called Nello make donuts by hand in the back of the Dunkin Donuts by Riley Plaza in Salem Massachusetts. He was adament, “It’s SHORTENING, not fat. Fat doesn’t sound good!” A chocolate honey dipped warm from the SHORTENING was really a treat. I’d probably still not think much about baked donuts, but my wife found a baked donut recipe on Facebook she said I should try. I was skeptical, but intrigued enough to buy a pair of Donut Baking Pans (I bought two so I could bake a dozen donuts in the oven at the same time.)
Prior to these “Zesty Baked Lemon Cake Donuts” none of the baked donut recipes impressed me very much. These donuts are really great – my only complaint is the recipe makes six, not twelve. Continue reading
This batch of bread was to answer a couple of questions. Now that I have the dough whisk to get all the ingredients mixed enough to start kneading can I successfully knead a bit over 4 kilograms (almost 9 pounds) of dough? And after I produce that dough will my oven be up to the task of baking bread in four 9 by 5 pans at one time?
This photo answers both questions. The result was 4 nice loaves of Anadama Bread of about 34 ounces each.
The Cinnamon Swirl Bread in previous posts, pt1 and pt2, have come out quite tasty, but have had a tendency to unroll. This post is about an attempt to solve the unrolling problem.
As can be seen in this photo of the sliced loaf, the swirl is not continuous. It has been broken by non swirled areas where the bread is joined across the swirl, “gluing” the bread across the swirl.
Two loaves of Oatmeal Bread were made for this post, one with interrupted swirl for this post, and one just to eat. The recipe below totals 1845 grams of ingredients, too much for the bread machine, so I used the stand mixer.
The first time I saw a picture of a dough whisk I thought they had to be kidding. Who would want one, and then what would you ever do with it if you were foolish enough to spend money on one?
Then I started using a big spoon to mix the flour and liquid ingredients together before kneading them with the bread hook. It didn’t take me long to realize that a big spoon was not the way to mix the wet and dry bread ingredients enough so they could be kneaded. The spoon collected a big glob of dough on it, with dry flour in the middle, and it was hard work. I began to wonder if a dough whisk might not be such a crazy idea.
So I bought one. It was under $10 on Amazon.com, the one I bought is no longer available, but this one 
This picture shows my brand new never used bread whisk in front of the beginnings of 2700 grams of white bread dough to make three 900 gram loaves. My old stand mixer can handle about 1800 grams of dough, so this batch will be kneaded by hand.
This post is on White bread Variation 3 from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
One of my daughter’s kids was here helping me make some bread and said “Let’s make it green!” By that time we were already at the kneading stage so it was too late. Also, it was anadama bread with molasses in it so the bread is fairly dark and the green dye would have had some real competition. Then I realized that St. Patrick’s Day was almost here and that was the perfect excuse for bright green bread. I took a recipe for white bread, scaled it up to get two two pound loaves, and added in 4 grams of Kelly Green Wilton® Icing Color. The photo shows how it came out nice and green.
One of my daughter’s kids had a birthday party the other day. The kids had really enjoyed the bread I dyed purple a while ago, so I decide to make her a loaf of bread dyed a nice blue color. I used Wilton® Royal Blue Icing Color to provide the blue color. Oatmeal bread is popular with the kids, so that’s what this bread is. It was mixed using the dough cycle in my bread machine. This recipe works well with the dough cycle although it’s a bit too big to bake in the bread machine as it might overflow the pan.
The color comes in a one ounce (28.3 gram) jar, and I used 2 grams of the color. As the picture above shows, it gave the bread a nice blue color.
Peter Reinhart in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
In general, each post here deals with one batch of bread. This post deals with two separate batches. In the second batch I corrected some problems from the the first batch.
The left picture above is Variation 3. There was very little oven spring and as a result the slices were too short for my toaster. They didn’t stick out far enough when the toast popped up to pick up without touching the hot metal. So I scaled the batch size up by about 10% to 2000 grams. Looking at the right hand picture of the Variation 3a loaves you can see that I over did it, these slices are too big to fit all the way into the toaster.
In four earlier posts (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4) I experimented with cornmeal and molasses bread, switching corn into an oatmeal bread recipe and swapping molasses for honey. It was interesting, but left a lot of room for improvement. This version is based on the Anadama Bread recipe and formula in Peter Reinhart’s book The Bread Baker’s Apprentice
In my first try at making Cinnamon Swirl Bread the loaf came out with about 1 and 3/4 turns in the swirl. The swirl also cut a path through the slice so that it had a tendency to unwind. I wanted to get it to stick together across the swirl, so I rolled the dough thinner and got more swirl, but these slices tended to unwind as well. Since I was only making one loaf to try the swirl I used the bread machine again to make the dough. The recipe used was the same as the bread in the first try at Cinnamon Swirl.