Milk Bread

I keep making bread, and I keep getting better at it.  This one is a little odd, but it's delicious!  Not too sweet, but definitely sweeter than your average bread.  Not as fluffy as the bread in the asian bakeries, but definitely fluffier than most of my breads.

Based off of this recipe.  Note that it tells you to throw away half the starter or double the dough.  I'd recommend doubling the dough and using half of it for a bread loaf, the other half for rolls, and freezing whatever you don't want right away.

FOR THE STARTER
1/3 cup bread flour
1/2 cup milk (I actually used dairy milk this time around, but I suspect other milks would be fine)
1/2 cup water

FOR THE DOUGH
2 1/2 cups bread flour
1/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1/2 cup warm milk, plus extra for brushing
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for buttering bowls and pan

Mix the starter ingredients together in a small pot.  Cook over medium-low heat until thickened to be just a little thicker than gravy.  Make sure to continuously pull the bottom upwards -- it gets thick at the bottom & leaves the liquid on the top.  Put in a bowl, put plastic wrap touching the top, and set aside to cool.

Combine the dry ingredients in a large bowl.  Add 1/2 cup of the starter, the egg, and the milk.  Knead for 5 minutes.  Add the butter and knead for 10 more minutes.  I did this by spreading it over the top of the dough (with the spatula from mixing the starter), then folding the dough inwards (to store the butter inside), then repeating.  Your hands will be super gross; flouring them is helpful for the first round of kneading, but when the butter hits, it'll just grease your hands instead, which works great.  The dough will be not-at-all sticky by the time you're done.

Butter a bowl, butter the dough ball, cover with a damp cloth, and let rise until doubled, about an hour.  Punch down, reshape into a ball-ish shape, let rise another 15 minutes.  Generously butter your loaf pan -- I just buttered it normally, and the loaf stuck a bit & ended up tearing the bottom off.

Roll the dough out somewhat.  I did this by flattening it in the bowl it was rising it.  If making a single loaf, roll the dough up like you would for cinnamon rolls, fold the spiral ends underneath, and set in the pan seam-side down.  If making buns, either put a single ball in each cupcake cup, or make four small balls & set them in the cup together.  Cover with the cloth again & let rise until it's peeking over the pan, another 30-40 minutes.

Take all but the bottom-most rack out of your oven & preheat it to 350.  Putting it in the middle or bottom is important, or the top will cook too quickly.  Brush the top with milk.  Bake for 35-40 minutes or until it's slightly more golden brown than you'd expect, and you can knock on the top & hear it be somewhat hollow.  Let cool in the pan for about 10 minutes, then let cool on a rack until you're ready to eat it.

Too excited to try it to take a picture before cutting it!

New Year's Pretzel

Happy new year!  We've always had new years pretzels at home, but they don't seem to have spread beyond Germany/Pittsburgh, so I had to make my own this year.  I mostly followed this recipe, but have some tweaks I'd make for next year.  In particular, this recipe makes two reasonably sized pretzels, or one comedically large one -- if you only want one reasonable pretzel, halve this recipe.

Pretzel:
1 1/2 cups milk (the recipe calls for scalding -- as far as I could tell from online, scalding does nothing to non-dairy milks, so I just microwaved my almond milk until it was pretty hot)
1/2 cup sugar
1 stick butter, melted
1/2 cup warm water (yeast-rising warm -- you should be able to stick your finger in & hold it, but only barely)
1 tablespoon yeast
6 to 7 cups bread flour
1 tablespoon salt
2 eggs
vegetable oil
3ish tbsp cinnamon sugar

Toppings:
about 3 cups powdered sugar
1/2 tsp almond extract
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
water
chopped/ground walnuts
maraschino cherries

Put yeast, warm water, and a dash of sugar into a bowl; set aside for five minutes to get frothy.  In a separate bowl, combine milk, sugar, and butter.  Once the yeast is frothy, mix the milk mixture, 5 cups flour, and the yeast mixture together.  Keep adding flour 1/4-1/2 cup at a time until the dough holds together -- it shouldn't be as thick as bread dough, but it should be close.  Knead just a little to make sure it's well combined (1 minute maybe).  Put it in an oiled bowl, cover with oil, cover with a damp towel, and let rise until doubled, about an hour.

Punch down dough, then roll out into a long rope.  I made one gigantic pretzel this year; it would be able to serve 10-20 people, depending on the people.  Alternatively, you could split this into two.  Either way, roll it into a long rope, and see if you can make a pretzel shape.  There should be large gaps in the pretzel, since the dough is going to double in size again.  If you can't make a gappy enough pretzel, roll the rope longer.  Once it's the right length, lay it flat (not in pretzel shape yet!) and make a deep ravine (almost all the way through) down the whole length.  Fill with cinnamon sugar -- it should be deep enough that some of it is still dry & not touching the dough.  Now, roll the rope around the long axis to swirl the cinnamon sugar through & lock most of it in (so it looks like a real rope, with the twisty spiral around it).  Take your twisty rope & make a pretzel shape on the silpat-lined tray you're going to bake it on.  Cover with the damp cloth & let it double again, another hour or so.

Remove cloth & bake at 375 for about 20 minutes.  If you stick your finger into the pretzel, it should still feel moist but not sticky/doughy.  Let cool on a wire rack.

Take about a dozen maraschino cherries out of the jar and let them dry off a bit.  A paper towel under them for about 5 minutes should do it.  I'm not crazy about this glaze -- it tastes too sugary for me -- so consider adding some extra extract or lemon zest or something to make it less like sugar.  I also added too much water, so I added ~2 tsp corn starch to try to fix it -- I'm not convinced they did anything, so I've excluded them here.  In a small bowl, combine powdered sugar, extracts, and just enough water to make it into a glaze.  It should be thick enough that it holds onto a spoon for a few seconds, but thin enough that it still drips off.  Drizzle all over the pretzel.  It'll keep flowing a little bit after you finish, so try to keep most of it on the top -- the pretty drip marks will appear on their own.  Place the cherries along the top, then sprinkle with walnuts.  Let dry a bit, then mostly cover until New Years Day.  Don't completely cover, or the glaze will get too moist and flow off; don't leave totally uncovered for more than ~12 hours, or the pretzel will get stale.

This is my comedically large pretzel.  It was delicious, though!

Vegan Banana Oatmeal Cookies

While visiting home for the holidays, we baked some delicious vegan banana oatmeal cookies.  We had just a few too many bananas around the house, and these were a super delicious way to use them up.  We added raisins to the last batch of them, and those were good too; I'd guess you could add any pretty much any chopped dried fruit to these and they'd be tasty.

Based off the recipe here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/banana-oatmeal-cookie/

Vegan Banana Oatmeal Cookies
1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg (could be doubled)
3/4 tsp cinnamon (could be doubled)
1/2 cup applesauce
1/4 cup oil
2/3 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup white sugar
1 cup mashed overripe bananas (about 2 bananas)
1 3/4 cups old fashioned oats
1/2 cup chopped walnuts

Mix together the first 5 ingredients.  Add everything except the oats & walnuts, mix together.  Add the oats & walnuts, mix together.  Place cookies on a greased/silpat'd/parchment papered cookie sheet & bake at 400 for 15 minutes or until they look done.

Italian Herb Bread

I love baking bread.  I get to squish dough.  It makes the whole apartment smell delicious.  It makes me feel like a real baker, and I can multitask while it's in progress.  My bread usually doesn't turn out spectacularly, but it's not bad.  This recipe turned out ridiculously well though; we ate half the loaf before it had even cooled.  It's soft, fluffy, with just enough herbs to be tasty but not overwhelming.  The crust is thin and not too crusty.  I think I'm getting the hang of the steps of making bread.

First, the recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/italian-herb-bread-i/

Which I halved and tweaked into:

1 packet active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
1 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp olive oil
1.5 tsp salt
1 tbsp Italian seasoning
1 tsp garlic powder
1/4 cup Parmesan cheese (the dusty kind)
3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour (I find this sometimes dries recipes out, so I didn't want to use too much)
2 cups bleached all purpose flour

I basically followed the instructions on the page, with a few tips I've learned from other bread attempts.  First, fill the bowl up with warm water then dump it out, so that when you pour the water + sugar + yeast into it, the bowl doesn't make it too cold.  Add the flour slowly -- after the first 2 cups or so, add it about 1/4 cup at a time, so you don't end up with too much.  As you knead it, you'll end up putting more into it to keep it from sticking to your hands.  I have a habit of pacing around the apartment while squishing the ball of dough, rather than kneading it on a counter top, which means I only have to worry about it sticking to my hands and not the counter.  Make sure you actually do roll the dough in the oil when you're leaving it to rise, or it'll get a gross dried-out outside that doesn't squish nicely back into the rest of the dough; same about remembering to dampen the towel.  I found that this bread flattened out a little after I shaped it into a loaf; I'd recommend making it into a ridiculous looking tall-and-skinny loaf so it ends up a little taller than mine did.  Super tasty bread!