After one year and 104 recipes, I finished the Brooks Bakes Bread Project on March 27, 2012. You can still find me baking and cooking at my new blog, Tangled Up In Food.

Archives: 25 September 2011

Bread Sticks
September 25, 2011

by stacy
Published on: September 25, 2011
Categories: Bread Sticks, Rolls
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“The bread sticks made from this dough taste yeasty and have nice crunch to them.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread

Flush with success from making it to the halfway mark of the Brooks Bakes Bread project yesterday, I wanted to bake some more bread.  I chose bread sticks since they would pair nicely with our dinner of salmon and boiled potatoes.

Ingredients:

Breadsticks Ingredients

The plastic bags in front are filled with poppy seeds and sesame seeds to sprinkle on the bread sticks.

Although very hands-on, this is a simple recipe: mix the ingredients together, knead the dough, and shape it into bread sticks.  Of course, I had a difficult time 1) dividing the dough into equal sections and 2) rolling the dough into decent-looking bread sticks.  As you can see, my bread sticks varied widely in length.

Breadsticks Before Baking

After a brief rising time of 20 minutes, the bread sticks were ready for the oven.  I used two oven racks, rotating the baking sheets halfway though the 30 minute baking time to ensure that the bottom bread sticks didn’t get over-baked.

Breadsticks

Despite their non-uniform appearance, the bread sticks were delicious: slightly chewy, with the perfect amount of salt and wonderful crunch from the sesame seeds.  Beard claims that they keep well for several days, but I doubt that we will be able to verify that–all the bread sticks will be gone well before then.

 

Golden Cake Batter Bread
September 25, 2011

by stacy
Published on: September 25, 2011
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“A light, rather sweetish, easy-to-make bread that is similar to Sally Lunn.”
-James Beard, Beard on Bread

Yesterday marked the official halfway mark for the Brooks Bakes Bread project: I made loaf number 52, Golden Cake Batter Bread.  The recipe can be found on the James Beard Foundation’s website.

Here are the ingredients:

Golden Cake Batter Bread Ingredients

The recipe starts out like a cake recipe: I mixed all the ingredients, except for 2 cups of flour, together with an electric mixer to form a thin batter.  Next, I mixed in the remaining two cups of flour into the batter to make a thicker, more dough-like batter.  I let this mixture rise for one hour, stirred it down, and let it rise for another 45 minutes.

Since I was concerned that my kitchen was too cool to allow for a good rise, I set my oven to “warm”, let it heat up, and then turned it off.  I placed the dough in the slightly-warmed oven for both of its risings.

Golden Cake Batter Bread After Second Rising

Mindful of the thick, tough crust that developed on my Sally Lunn bread, I pulled the bread out of the oven after only 25 minutes at 350 degrees.  It was perfect: fully baked and golden, but not overly browned.

Golden Cake Batter Bread

Golden Cake Batter Bread is very similar to Sally Lunn–perhaps a bit sweeter, but it shares the same rich buttery flavor and spongy texture.  When cooled, it makes excellent toast.

In the past 6 months, I have baked 52 bread recipes, most good, some mediocre, a few downright inedible (Prune Bread, I’m thinking of you!); washed innumerable dishes; hauled home at least a dozen sacks of flour; and logged hours blogging about it all.  It has been a lot of work, and sometimes additional stress.  But taste of fresh bread, the joy of discovering a new recipe, and the sense of accomplishment more than makes up for everything.  I can’t wait to see where the next 52 loaves take me.

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About the Baker
I'm a paralegal living and working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area. Besides baking, blogging, and eating bread, I love knitting and enjoying the Minnesota outdoors. My husband, Mike, is the Brooks Bakes Bread website developer, bread photographer, and chief taste tester.
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