Whole Wheat Loaves - TWD: Baking with Julia

Whole Wheat Loaves - TWD: Baking with Julia 

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Seventeenth Installment.  The recipe is Whole Wheat Loaves.

Ah, the saga of the whole wheat bread.  I had made this recipe before, and it was as easy as I remembered. I did a lot of baking with whole wheat recipes from The New Laurel's Kitchen cookbook, so this kind of recipe is very familiar to me.  I think the combination of malt syrup and honey makes it taste really good. I used my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, and it even managed to smoothly knead in the water I threw in late in the kneading because I forgot to add at the beginning.

 Apparently pride cometh before a fall, because in my over-confident state, I didn't read the baking instructions carefully, and didn't turn the oven down when I put the loaves in!  I set the timer for slightly less than the minimum time, and when I got to the oven, this is what the loaves looked like (eeeeeeeek!)  At least the bottoms of the loaves weren't blackened, and you can see from the sliced loaf above, the inside was just fine.

 I was a bit sloppy on shaping - I had run out of counter space due to three simultaneous cooking projects (gee, maybe that's why I mis-read the oven instructions :-), so I shaped the loaf in my hands in mid-air and stuck it in the pan.  It may not win a prize for its beauty, but the bread was very yummy. 

Nectarine Chiffon Upside Down Cake - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Sixteenth Installment.  The recipe is Nectarine Chiffon Upside Down Cake.

  This cake is great!  We had local nectarines, which made it even better.

 I had several phases during the multi-step odyssey:

1. Set up the fruit and brown sugar layer.  I was a bit apprehensive about putting the springform pan on the burner, but it went fine.  Feeling very concerned about the layer sticking to the pan, and wondered if I should use parchment in the pan, but just pressed on, following the recipe.

2. Cake batter layer - very puffy batter and barely fit in the pan.  The streusel was easy to make and very tasty (I liked the ginger and cinnamon combination). 

3. At this point in the process, I realized that when I separated the eggs, I put all six yolks into the batter, instead of only four!  Oh, nooooo....

All's well that ends well - the cake came out of the pan just fine, and everyone enjoyed it with some whipped cream.  I think it was probably slight more moist with the extra egg yolks, and maybe a little heavy - it definitely sank as it cooled.