About a year ago I went biscotti crazy. I tried tons of different recipes looking for the perfect one. Believe me, there are a lot of biscotti recipes lurking on the internet. The biggest difference I have found is how soft the end product is. I’ve made ones that are so tender that they barely make it through the cutting stage and back onto the baking sheet and I’ve made ones that were tooth breaking hard. I think the harder they are the better they are for dipping, too soft and you end up with half a biscotti at the bottom of your coffee.

I really like this recipe because it’s right in the middle, soft like a cookie, but hard enough to hold up to the rigors of dunking in my tea. You could probably make them a little harder or softer by varying the time and heat of the second baking stage.

The base for this recipe is just Giada’s recipe and instead of pistachios and cranberries I added candied orange peel and and chocolate chips, along with a few minor tweaks.

Giada seems to think that these only last for 3 to 4 days. Personally I take a bunch with me to work and they hang out in my desk drawer for over a week sometimes two. I’m still here. My logic is that these are just cookies and cookies last forever right?

I linked to a candied orange peel recipe above. Candied orange peels are dead simple and taste great. I’ll try to write another post about them in the future. I didn’t really follow that recipe exactly because I only had two oranges. But I wholeheartedly agree that multiple boil and drain sessions are key.

The down side: I have to admit that after a few days the orange peels got really hard. If your aren’t going to eat them right away it might be worth experimenting with other candied orange peel recipes that leave you with a softer peel that might be less prone to drying out.

I was talking with my brother about this recipe and I think he said it best, it’s pretty hard to screw up bread pudding. I have to agree. As long as you hit the key bread, milk, eggs and sugar it’s probably going to taste good. So this recipe is more of a guideline than hard and fast rules. Feel free to change up the spices, skip the water bath, switch up the pine nuts, whatever, bread pudding is really hard to screw up. I liked using the muffin tins because I just popped them out and they were already divided and held up pretty well in the transfer over to a bowl. I actually threw most of them onto waxed paper and into the freezer once they cooled down. They come back to life in the microwave really well. So on a cold winter morning you can have a hot breakfast in a few minutes that isn’t oatmeal.

Here is a stop motion video of me shaping the buns from the previous post.

There has been a lot written about no knead bread at this point so I’m not really going to get into the history and details. I got the basic recipe here and it’s just the base recipe from this book, Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

I have a lot of trouble baking bread. I don’t know if it’s some kind of bread A.D.D., but going through all of the steps to create a perfect traditional loaf of bread kind of has me stumped. After trying this recipe (I only did a half for my first two attempts) I’m a firm believer in this style of baking bread.

Just a few last thoughts, For the buns I removed slightly large than golf ball sized chunks and shaped them into little boules. The steam part might seem a little weird but it’s really what is going to produce the perfect crust. And let me reiterate, the steam part is dangerous, be careful. In the bread bible aka Bread Bakers Apprentice goes into a lot more detail about the whole steam process and they suggest opening the oven and spraying the sides of the oven at 30 second intervals to really get a lot of steam going.

Now what should you do with these fine buns? I did end up smearing some honey butter on one of them but my favorite was this little bacon sandwich.

Here is a video showing how to shape the bread

I have fond memories of baum kuchen from a trip to Germany my family took when I was a kid. It translates to “tree cake” in english. It’s cooked in a special machine with a spit where layer upon layer of batter is cooked into a cake with concentric circles like a tree. It’s covered in a hard chocolate shell. It’s the best cake I’ve ever had.

My sister Anika has tried to replicate baum kuchen with her baum kuchen spitzen. Honestly she has had much better results than I have, I should have asked her for her recipe before setting out on my own. But I did get a layered effect and I think my mini cakes look pretty cool, even if they don’t really taste like true baum kuchen. But honestly I don’t think you are going to get true baum kuchen at home unless you can get that crazy spit cooker thing. Here is the base recipe that I used.

This is the icing that I used but I don’t think I’d use it again, it was just too rich and it didn’t set as hard as I would have liked but I’ll post it for reference.

They’re really just doughnut holes covered in tang icing and dipped in astronaut ice cream, but I think that warrants a weird name. I used this doughnut recipe. I probably got 50+ holes out of it. And all of the pictures were taken by my wife Rachel.

The initial steps with the yeast is a little weird, I’ve never really seen it done that way, but the doughnuts puffed up like they were supposed to, so I can’t really complain.

Toasted sandwiches are awesome. Also known as toasties or jaffles depending on where you are from. They’re like a hot pocket that doesn’t taste like total crap. I’ve wanted to make a waffle sandwich for a while now. I finally bit the bullet and borrowed my mom’s sandwich toaster. It’s an early 90′s contraption that we used now and again growing up but since then has been collecting dust in a corner of the pantry. The concept is pretty simple, make a toasted sandwich with waffles instead of bread.

Waffles. A few years ago my brother and sister in law bought me a waffle iron and I went through a half a dozen recipes before finding what I consider the best all around recipe. I know, I know, it’s Emeril. I don’t hate him, I just think his catch phrase is weak. I have dozens that I use when I’m cooking that are much better like the classic “fuck” or “shit” or “eh”. I don’t think those would fly on TV though. I can totally imagine Emeril brushing his teeth with some crest or what ever he is hocking at the time and yelling, “Fucking Shit! that’s some good toothpaste”. Ok, I’m rambling. One thing about these waffles, if you want them to look pretty, eat them fast because as they degas their steaminess they tend to get a little floppy. But we’re going to cook them again so who gives a shit. Bam.

*My, brother asked for a review of the taste. They tasted great. I think I would probably pour a little syrup into the bacon egg and cheese one next time before cooking it. I would also try under cooking the waffles a little bit because they didn’t fuse as well as I would have hoped.

Pretty… pretty shitty.

I already twittered about my tuscan bread failure so this is a little late. Over the weekend I made my first loaf of bread. I followed the recipe in Bread Bakers Apprentice (Google has the full recipe). I made a paste. Let it sit over night. The next day I mixed up the yeast, water, flour etc. Let the machine knead the life out of the dough. Then I let it rise (ferment). Punched it down. Let it rise some more. I rolled it out into two boules. Then Rachel and I had to run out to dinner so I decided to let it proof in the fridge over night. I don’t know where I went wrong (probably using AP flour for a recipe that said bread flour). End result the bread tasted kind of yeasty and bland and really just didn’t have the right texture. At least it looks like bread though.

To be continued…