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.

Popovers - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Fifteenth Installment.  The recipe is Popovers.

We love popovers at our house, so this was a hit with everyone.  Yum. We usually have these with breakfast, but we were away on vacation, so in the time crunch that happened, I made this as the bread to go with our salad dinner one evening when we returned.  It was a great addition to the meal.

Based on a prior experience with this recipe, I used a lot of butter to grease the pan.  Still had some sticking, and am wondering what the solution is to this.  I have had better luck with recipes where the pan is heated and then buttered and filled with batter, or even pre-heated with butter in it. 

Some sticking, but not too bad

Berry Galette - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Fourteenth Installment.  The recipe is Berry Galette.

This was so easy and so delicious!  I had local fresh blueberries, so just used those, rather than mixed berries.  The crust got rave reviews from my family, and it was a relief to have a positive crust experience after what happened last time.   I have made galettes before (lazy person's pie crust), but never with this combination of ingredients - sour cream and cornmeal.  The crust got rave reviews.

Before baking

I made the whole crust recipe, and took the suggestion in the book to make the cheese and tomato (another local seasonal food) galette for a starter.  Both were devoured in short order.   I wondered if the sugar in the crust would taste odd with the savory filling, but it was quite tasty.

Blueberry Nectarine Pie - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Thirteenth Installment.  The recipe is Blueberry Nectarine Pie.

Two reactions....Yummy!! and Arrghhhh!  

First: Yummy! I loved the filling of this pie.  I've never before made a fruit pie where I cooked part of the filling and added the raw fruit  - great combination of juice and chunks of fruit.  It did benefit from cooling for quite a while - I'm sure it held together better because of that.

This filling looked like jewels...

Second: Argh!  The crust drove me insane.  I made a half recipe (since the recipe made enough for two pies) and am starting to wonder if I mis-computed the quantities.  I have made many pies, and used various crust recipes, so I didn't expect to struggle with this.  Even after overnight in the fridge, it would not roll out and hold together.  You might want to look away, because this is ugly ;-)  I attempted to fold the crust over, pick it up, and put it in the cake pan, and this was the result:

I gave up on the cake pan, and pressed it into a pie plate, poured in the filling (skipped the butter dots - after wrestling with the crust, I had had enough of butter for one day), and patched together the top crust.

I'm still not sure why the recipe calls for a cake pan....

The happy ending to this sad crusty tale was that the pie tasted very good and the family enjoyed it.  These two fruits are in season here in Massachusetts, so I was able to buy local fruit, making for an even better result.

Semolina Bread - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Twelfth Installment.  The recipe is Semolina Bread.

This was an exercise in how long I could stretch out the baking project.  I was camping during the weekend when I would normally have done this baking, so I was already running late, and then once I got into my work week, I had barely any time to bake.  I mixed the sponge, left it overnight in the fridge, mixed the sponge into dough, left THAT overnight in the fridge.  The next day, I still didn't have time to rise and bake, so punched it down one more time and put it into the fridge for another day before finally rising and baking it.


Yum!  It actually turned out pretty well, which means that this recipe must be fairly forgiving with respect to timing.    I was surprised that it didn't seem too salty - usually I would expect to use only a teaspoon of salt in a loaf this size.  We enjoyed dipping it in olive oil and eating with fried eggs for breakfast.


Here's the loaf before going in to the oven.  I have a gadget from King Arthur Flour to slash the top (called a "lame"), and it worked well on this dough.

Hazelnut Biscotti - TWD: Baking with Julia

Tuesdays with Dorie: Baking with Julia - Eleventh Installment.  The recipe is Hazelnut Biscotti.

I love baking biscotti!  I feel like they are such a maximum payoff for minimum effort. Although it takes some time to manage the two stages of baking, the result always seems so special, compared to the easy preparation method.

Thank goodness for baking parchment - this was very sticky

I had made this recipe once when the series was on TV - I remember watching and being inspired to make them right away. This recipe delivered exactly as promised. The batter seemed sticky, but baked up just fine. The one twist on this recipe was the second baking on a wire rack.  No fussing with turning the biscotti over in the middle of baking.

First baking done, and one log cut up

I am just wrapping up an insane couple of months at work, and finally am free of the obligation to squeeze some work time into my evening, so I celebrated my liberation by enjoying this Independence Eve baking project for fun.  Biscotti in the morning tomorrow, with my coffee as I watch Wimbledon on my day off from work.  Yeah!