Peach ginger scones

After having apparently had a Hawaii theme to our last post, we have now packed up wholesale and moved to the islands.  At a farmers' market we went to recently, a vendor was selling locally-grown ginger.  While I didn't get any at the market (I waffled on it, and settled for the fresh ginger at Don Quijote), it did inspire me to try making one of the pastries I'd often get at a farmers' market out east: peach ginger scones.

I adapted a recipe from King Arthur Flour.  As you can imagine, Gold Medal flour works just fine.  I omitted the nutmeg they called for and used a bit of vanilla extract in place of the almond extract.  To get my ginger, I initially wanted chunks like the scones I'd had back east.  Unfortunately, I somehow never learned that ginger can be nigh impossible to cut.  For me, it was like the single time I tried to peel a butternut squash.  I ended up using a Microplane zester to grate something like 1 tablespoon of the ginger into the mix, but I must not have grated enough for it to be a really noticeable flavour in the finished product.

This recipe called for yogurt or sour cream and not something like buttermilk, which was fantastic since I always have Greek yogurt for breakfast.  I ended up using the 1/3 cup called for (I used Fage 2%), plus a bit of milk since the dough was mixing up exceptionally dry.

We could have done a lot better with the peaches we bought; these had been sort of dry and not very flavorful, though they had smelled great at the store.  I think that's more on us knowing when the ripest peaches might show up at the store or farmers' market.

To shape the scones, I used the "create a large disk and divide it like a pie" method (using a bench scraper to make the cuts before baking).  I had to bake these for a full 28 minutes before they got any kind of tan, rather than the 15-to-20-minute range called for in the recipe.  Fortunately, one of the recipe reviews had noted this sort of thing as well, so I didn't get too concerned as I'm usually pretty apt to do.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't actually split the scones apart that I had to bake them for so much longer?  Regardless, they didn't end up as doorstops, for which we can all be thankful.

Despite my changes and adaptations to the recipe, the scones turned out remarkably well; I may have consumed....a few....before Dom even got home that day.  These were not dry, dense, or rock-hard; they almost had a biscuit or shortcake consistency.  Unfortunately, because they were so moist, and because our apartment doesn't have air conditioning, the last scone from the batch went bad.  The solution, it would appear, would be to eat these quicker.  Or simply to wrap individual scones and freeze them until wanted.

Only one of [multiple] that were consumed on baking day.

When Dom saw the remaining [x]/8 of the disk when he got home, he asked if it was pineapple.  I had to admit it was made with a less-than-perfect peach, but next time, I might have to try using fresh pineapple chunks along with way more ginger!




Writeup background music: New Super Mario Bros. soundtrack.  We just picked up a copy of the game from a shop inside one of our local department stores.

Banh mi

Just the other week Caroline had gotten a craving for some Vietnamese sandwiches known as banh mi (there are some diacritics that I have not added - see this Wikipedia article for an introduction).  We were going to go to a Vietnamese bakery/deli last Sunday to satisfy that craving, but sadly discovered the place is not open on Sundays.  So, we checked out some books from the library and tried (and I would say succeeded) on making them ourselves.

We used The Banh Mi Handbook as our basis.  In the book is a recipe for the mini baguettes these sandwiches are named for, as well as recipes for the fillings.  Our sandwiches had marinated chicken, pickled carrots, cucumber, cilantro, and (on mine) jalapeno rings.  Here are descriptions of the things we made.

Bread:
The recipe goes on for a couple of pages in the book, but only because the author is very descriptive and includes nice pictures on how to form the rolls.  The dough is pretty simple - flour, water, yeast, salt, and a small amount of butter.  The recipe called for extra wheat gluten to be added, but we did not have that, nor was I ready to buy some at the store.  It did mention that if you used King Arthur brand flour, you wouldn't need as much additional gluten.  So, I picked up a small bag of the King Arthur flour for these rolls, and kneaded the dough a few minutes longer than called for.

The forming went very well following the instructions in the book, though I will admit that the three that Caroline formed (the recipe made six rolls) looked much better than mine.

The recipe called for the steam method of filling a pan with water while preheating the oven, but we just spritzed some water on the rolls before baking.  Twenty-two minutes of baking later, we had these:

A finished roll ready to be filled with tasty stuff!

The result, in two and a half to three hours of work: some light and delicious bread for sandwiches.

Pickled Carrots:
Pickled vegetables are standard for banh mi, so we chose carrots.  The book called for a combination of carrots and daikon, but we didn't have the daikon readily available, so carrots alone it was.  It was a simple process that I did while the dough was rising. First I added some salt and sugar to the carrot sticks that were about 3 inches long and 1/4 inch wide.  A couple minutes of working the salt and sugar in and the carrots were getting floppy.  At this point I diverged from the book.  It said to rinse the vegetables and then put them in a water, vinegar, and sugar (1/3 cup) solution.  I thought that sounded sweet, so I left the salt and sugar in the original bowl and put the rinse carrots back in with the vinegar and water.  I was later told that I should probably have gone with the sweeter route.  Ooops...

Chicken:
For the chicken, I did not look at a recipe.  We had some chicken breast tenders, and I made a marinade of soy sauce, hoisin sauce, minced garlic, and a small amount of oyster sauce.  The chicken marinated in that for about 4-5 hours in the refrigerator.  Then, just simple pan frying - we don't have a grill yet... :(

Pan seared marinated chicken - turned out extremely well for guessing on the marinade.

The end result:

Caroline's sandwich.

My sandwich. I took out some of the jalapeno seeds so that they didn't overpower the other filling ingredients.

These sandwiches were delicious and flavorful.  The bread was light enough that with the overstuffing you see above it just deformed around the filling and nothing fell out.  The crust was also strong enough that the hinge didn't give out.  Definitely make again!

Easter picnic

This being the first big holiday spent away from our families, we wanted to do something special for Easter.  There was no way I could prepare a ham for just the two of us, so we hit upon doing a picnic (or, as I like to call it after our Provence excursion last spring, "le pique-nique").  We figured that it would be a good way to explore the state a little more, but even if the weather turned out to be poor, we could just put our picnic blanket out in our living room!  Our menu consisted of sandwiches on homemade baguettes, avocado salad, orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad, and hot cross buns.

Sandwiches

For the sandwiches, we went with prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and a little drizzle of balsamic, all piled onto homemade baguettes.

• We made the baguettes from the Joy of Cooking recipe; the stand mixer again proved its worth for the mixing and kneading.

Nice crumb!

• We had previously made the mozzarella, though for whatever reason our result was more like a cream cheese spread than regular mozzarella (we have made mozzarella successfully in the past, so it wasn't a first-timers thing).  So we just figured that the cheese could be spread onto the bread before putting all the fillings in.
• The prosciutto came from Venda Ravioli in Providence.  This was our first time going there and it was, I'll admit, a little overwhelming.  It was like a whole emporium for Italian foods; there were even multiple options for prosciutto at the meat counter!  Apparently the "San Daniele" prosciutto was the one to get, but as the guy in front of us requested the San Daniele, we had to 'settle' for prosciutto di Parma so as not to hold up the line.  There were already a LOT of people in line behind us as it was the Saturday before Easter at an Italian market....but I was just really excited to buy prosciutto in the same manner than one might buy some deli turkey for the week's lunches.
• The balsamic also came from Venda Ravioli.  The ingredients list was just one ingredient: 100% cooked must.  So I figured it was the real thing, or at least as close as we can get to the real thing without going bankrupt.  It's sweeter and less overtly acidic than the regular balsamic vinegars.  Well worth it to try!

  

  This is but one reason why I like going to Italian markets.

I made my sandwich with prosciutto, balsamic (sprinkled onto the cut surfaces of the bread), mozzarella, and basil; Dom added sliced red peppers to his.  Both were quite tasty!

That's mine on the left.  Amazingly tasty.

Avocado salad

Just a simple mixed salad of avocados, corn, grape tomatoes, snap peas, and green onions tossed with a balsamic vinaigrette.  We used the regular balsamic vinegar, not the stuff we'd picked up at the Italian market yesterday.  A good mix of colours, textures, and flavours.

Spot all five ingredients.

Orange-lime-vanilla fruit salad

This recipe came from The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays as "orange vanilla fruit salad", though I scaled it down considerably since I didn't want 12 servings.  We used a half pint each of blackberries and blueberries, plus some strawberries and Muscat grapes (they were the same price as the green grapes).  The recipe is pretty flexible as to what fruits to use.

The "orange vanilla" part of the original recipe title comes from the syrup poured over the fruit.  The original recipe called for equal parts sugar and water plus the zest and juice of an orange.  I used less than a quarter cup of sugar, a bit of vanilla, a half cup of water, the juice and zest of one Cara cara navel orange, and the juice and zest of a lime.  I figured that since all the fruits I'd chosen were pretty sweet, the syrup could use some tartness from the lime juice.  There was something between a third and a half cup of syrup after reduction.

Syrup, after reduction.

The result was a very tasty fruit salad; if anything, I would have left the vanilla out.  In fact, I debated for several minutes whether I should even include the vanilla in the first place as the lime-orange syrup already smelled pretty good.  But in the end there were no complaints about the fruit salad!

I usually like fruit salad, but this was really tasty with the zesty syrup.

Hot cross buns

I'll admit it: my only knowledge of hot cross buns before this year came from the first named melody in the music books used by novice instrumentalists, and the incomplete explanation I got about what hot cross buns represent.  I didn't realize until this year that they are an Easter tradition!  And they didn't seem too difficult to make.

I used the Joy of Cooking recipe with inspirations from the version in Nick Malgieri's Bread.  So to the Joy recipe's cinnamon and nutmeg I added lemon zest, cloves, cardamom, and a pinch of ginger, and then instead of currants I threw in dried cherries (being a Michigan native and all).  In place of 1 egg I used 2 egg yolks.  So it was not exactly a traditional hot cross bun, but these were tasty nonetheless.

The icing was confectioner's sugar, water, and a little vanilla.  I had just enough for all 18!

The picnic site

We scoured a very helpful website listing public parks in the state to figure out where to go.  We finally settled on going to the park surrounding Conanicut Battery in Jamestown, which promised to have a nice view of the West Passage of Narragansett Bay.  We ended up having our picnic amid the earthwork fortifications of a Revolutionary War-era gun battery.  Neat!

Upper 50s, sunny, a light breeze, and too early in the season for bugs: could there be any better conditions for a picnic?  I don't think so.

Happy Easter!

Recipes used:

Baguettes: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 601

Fruit salad: The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays (2013), p. 108-109

Hot cross buns: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610; with inspiration from Nick Malgieri's Bread (2012), p. 208-209

Writeup background noise: first it was NBCSports's replay of the Chinese Grand Prix, because while the Red Wings were losing, I commandeered the TV; and now it's the soundtrack from Super Mario Galaxy. 

Croissants

I didn't particularly like croissants as a kid, but once I started, there was no stopping it: I was on a mission to find the best croissants in Ann Arbor.  Along the way, I discovered what gives croissants their unique structure; I also realized that perhaps there should be some kind of limit to how frequently I buy these.  Like any food that I take a shine to, I checked our handy Joy of Cooking to see if I could possibly make these myself; even knowing that croissants can be finicky, I was still a little put off by the fact that the recipe spanned 2.5 columns (their recipes are rarely more than one column).  I also didn't feel up to trying to combine butter with flour while also trying to keep the butter's temperature low.

I requested the Bouchon Bakery cookbook from the library to check out their macaron recipe, but it turns out that their croissant recipe doesn't require the step of combining butter with flour, so I thought that this was as good a time as any to try making croissants.

The entire process took about 19 hours; I started during the 4th quarter of a Monday Night Football game, and the croissants were ready for dinner on Tuesday.  Good thing I wasn't working when I made these.

16 December, about 11 PM: Poolish is now fermenting.  If ever there was a good time to use the lesser-quality Target brand plastic wrap instead of the superior Saran Wrap, this was it, since the recipe called for the poolish to be covered loosely at this point.

17 December, about 10.45 AM: The poolish looks like the picture in the book!

Dough, post-mixing: the dough-making process would have been a little easier with instant yeast (which is what the recipe called for) instead of active dry; I wouldn't have had so much issue with regulating the amount of liquid in the dough had I just gone out and bought the instant yeast.

About 11.45 AM: After some minutes of rolling and shaping, the dough is ready to rest for an hour.

This is a pretty good sign, so far.  It's ready to be rolled out!

This is why I feel the need to hit the gym every day.

This, I believe, was probably "Turn 1"; the recipe called for three such turns (roll/flatten the packet of dough, then fold like a business letter).  This entire process of turns (apparently called "laminating") took about an hour and 40 minutes total, since you pop the dough packet into the freezer in between turns to keep its temperature down.

About 2.50 PM: They look like crescent rolls, but better.  Now to proof for two hours!

5 PM: Ready for the oven!  They have a lot of potential here.  I was able to make two baking sheets' worth of croissants, with 11 or 12 on each one.

6 PM: A batch fresh out of the oven.  Unfortunately, they didn't puff as much as they should have.

Sad crumb, but the end result was something like a flaky brioche; the outer layers were flaky, but the rest of the crumb had a more uniform but very rich texture.

Of course, I didn't expect croissants worthy of a boulangerie on my first attempt, but it was still a bit of a bummer as I'd put so much time into these.  I have two hypotheses as to why these didn't turn out.  At first, I suspected that something had gone wrong in the laminating stages, like I'd let the butter get too warm, and thus it had become incorporated into the dough instead of remaining separate to give the finished croissant its flaky layers.

But then in chatting with my mom, we thought that perhaps the oven had not been hot enough.  The outer layers of the croissants were all flaky and certainly made a bit of a mess when biting into them, so I had done something correctly; then I remembered that I had seen distinct layers of dough and butter when I had cut the triangles for each croissant, so maybe it wasn't entirely my fault.  The recipe noted different temperatures for convection ovens versus conventional ovens, and I had made sure to use the temperature for the 'regular' oven.  In thinking about it though, when making macarons, I have had to experiment with higher and higher temperatures to see what works for my oven; my macaron book lists a temperature for convection ovens, and only notes that people with regular ovens may have to set the temperature maybe 10 degrees higher (which I have had to exceed).  So maybe oven temperature was the culprit?  Perhaps at a higher temperature, the butter on the insides of the croissants won't have as much of a chance to melt directly into the dough?

It's worth trying again, but it was a lot of time and effort, and I still have a bunch of frozen brioche-croissants in my freezer, since I didn't even think these were nice enough to give to friends.  But I suppose if I'm to make my favored type of almond croissant--dough rolled with almond filling, not day-old croissant split in half and filled with pastry cream--I should just do it myself as those tend to be more difficult to find than the pastry cream version.

And I still haven't found any croissants as tasty as those from Zingerman's, though the boulangerie at the corner of Rue Grimaldi and Rue Princesse Caroline in Monaco was a close second if only for its location.


Thomas Keller and Sebastien Rouxel, Bouchon Bakery (2012), p.236-243 (!)
Writeup background noise: New Orleans Saints vs. Philadelphia Eagles.  Saints win?!

Pita Pita

This had been something I had wanted to try for a while.  The recipe is from Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 344-345.  We baked these on the pizza stone, similar to the naan.  This experiment met with mixed success - some pitas came out amazing (see below) but others came out really thin and thus crispy.  The formula for success seemed to be having to roll the pita several times (adding flour each time) and keeping them smaller.  The larger pitas that didn't get as much flour added stretched too much in my hands and that is how they got so thin.  Therefor, next time I will just add more flour to the dough as I'm making it and be sure to roll them out with lots of flour on the counter.

Unbaked pitas as I was rolling them out.

This first pita came out decently well.

We took a piece "so that you could see inside"...

Perfect pita!!!  It eventually deflated but left an awesome pocket.

Verdict:  will definitely make again with the above noted lessons learned.

Naan

This flat-bread is one of the tastiest parts of Indian cuisine - at least in our opinion.  We got our recipe from Joy of Cooking (p. 608).  Overall the recipe isn't too difficult, if but a bit time consuming (though not nearly as much as the challah).  Note time!

Notes:

• Rising - the constant struggle with our winter baking.  Our apartment just doesn't seem to be warm enough to get dough to rise without warming the liquid first (the recipe called for the yogurt to be room temperature).  However, this did not seem to affect the result much.
• Baking is pretty easy, and quick.  The recipe called for us to preheat our pizza/baking stone for 45 minutes at 475 degrees F (!!!).  We did not do that - we just let the stone preheat with the oven to 475 and then put the rolled out dough on the stone.  The recipe called for 5-6 minutes of baking, and we cut that down to about 4 minutes for the second batch, as the first was quite brown.  Next time we'd consider lowering the temperature to get a less brown and softer bread.

Result:  delicious warm and relatively soft flat-bread.  Would make again!  (I love putting that comment - and it seems to be the theme lately.)

Pictures!

A couple of pieces on the pizza stone.

Completely out of the oven.

You can see a piece taken out - and thus the inside.  It was pretty good, just probably not bake it so much next time.

Holla' for Challah

We've been wanting to try making this for a while now - and we finally got to it!  We used the recipe from our copy of Joy of Cooking (pp 600-601).  Everything went pretty well, so just a few notes:

Notes:

• We ended up with extra flour in the mixing bowl, though we suspect that was due to the dryness of the air (it is Michigan in the winter-time).
• We only baked it for 20 minutes instead of the 30-35 called for - but it was already browned quite nicely (as you can see in the picture), and had a hollow sound when thumped.
• The three ropes in the braid stayed pretty much separate through baking, so we are considering next time reducing or omitting the flour on the ropes that was called for in the recipe.

This recipe does take a decent amount of time as you have let it rise several times, but it is worth it.  See for yourself:

Just before baking - the braid came out quite well - except for the pinching together at the final end.  My bad...

Out of the oven - with a nice crust and delicious inside!

A nice view of the crumb inside.

Verdict - definitely make again!

Focaccia

We saw this recipe, surprisingly, in a French cookbook in the "Foreign Breads" section.  It sounded so good we made the easy decision to try it out.  We also had fun using the new kitchen scale we bought to measure out ingredients in metric units (and by weight instead of volume for solids).  The ingredients are pretty easy, as with most breads:  flour, water, yeast, salt, and olive oil.  There is a note below about the one less common ingredient (rosemary).

The bread turned out to very tasty, and as we were going over to my parents' house, we decided to bring one loaf over there for everyone to try.  It was well received - such that my dad was "OK" if we left what remained there.  For all the deliciousness, we do have a few notes:

• Dough consistency - I swear I followed the recipe to the 't', but the dough came out very wet.  I was supposed to "punch down" the dough and roll it out, but that wasn't happening.  Next time, I think I will add the water more slowly so that I can get the right consistency from the dough.
• Fresh rosemary to top - we did not have any, but our dried rosemary tasted just fine.  I'm sure the fresh herbs would be better, but it still is good with dried.
• There were a few steps to this, and so there was work to do over the several hours it takes to make.  You have some decently long breaks, but just be prepared to spend some time on it.

Conclusion - definitely a recipe to make again!

Photos!

Loaf number 1 out of the oven.

Loaf number 2 out of the oven.  We started with baking both at the same time with this one on the bottom rack, and then moved it up when the first loaf came out of the oven.

Loaf number 2 during slicing - this turned out to be a nice texture.

Le Cordon Bleu's Pâtisserie & baking foundations: classic recipes (2012), p. 322-323

Cranberry orange bread

To be fair, this was originally a cranberry walnut bread, but since I don't really like nuts in breads, we decided to omit those and just go with cranberry orange.  The cranberries just recently showed up at our local Kroger, unless they showed up while I was on vacation...in which case then no, that wasn't so recently that they showed up.

Anyway, our notes:

• Of course, we omitted the walnuts, partly because I don't like using nuts in bread, but also for a reason explained below.
• The recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar.  If you know us at all, then you know that we don't like too much sugar in our recipes.  We used something less than 1 cup and the end result turned out fine; one could probably use about 3/4 cup of sugar and it would still turn out fine.
• I have no idea how much orange zest I actually used.  Since I wasn't about to zest the orange and then determine how close to 1 Tbsp. I was, I just figured that the zest of 1 orange was sufficient.  The end result didn't seem to suffer from any lack of orange zest.
• Perhaps because of the layout of the back of the bag of cranberries (where I got the recipe), I somehow missed that I was to have "coarsely chopped" the cranberries before tossing them into the batter.  This didn't seem to adversely affect things, though it probably would have turned out marginally better had the berries been chopped.
• Also speaking of the cranberries, the recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups of them.  Somehow I assumed that this was the entire package, so not only were they not chopped, there were also way more of them than the recipe had said to use.  Oops.  Only after I'd dumped all of the cranberries into the batter did I notice that the serving size for the package was a 1/2 cup, and that there were 6 servings in the bag.  So apparently I was to have used only half the bag.  But then I realized that it wouldn't have been as easy to use the leftover half of the bag (all the other recipes on the bag used the entire thing), and since the final product was tasty, we figured that this wasn't a bad thing to have thrown all of the cranberries into the batter.  This was a contributing factor in the decision not to use walnuts; there was barely enough room in the bowl for all of those cranberries, so we figured that the batter wouldn't also be able to hold chopped walnuts.

This was definitely a recipe to keep, especially with our modifications.  I'd like to say that next time I'll probably make at least some effort at chopping those cranberries, but most likely I'll chop one or two handfuls, call it good, and then throw the rest in whole.

Whole cranberries.

Cloverleaf rolls v3.0

This recipe for cloverleaf rolls even says in its title that they are "fantastic".  This, unfortunately, was not my experience with them.  From an imbalance of liquid and dry ingredients to a lower yield, this was not anywhere near as good of an experience as I'd had on Wednesday with making cloverleaf rolls.

My notes:

• The recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour, but I ended up using a little more than 4 cups, and even then I did not really get a dough, but more of a stiff batter.  I didn't want to add more flour because of a dire warning in the recipe about flour amount.  Maybe this was a mistake on my part.

Cake batter?

• There was a lot of liquid in this recipe: 3/4 c. water to dissolve the yeast, 1 c. milk, 1/4 c. melted butter, and 1 egg.  By contrast, the recipe I used on Wednesday only used a little over 1 c. milk, 1 egg, and 6 (not melted) tablespoons of butter.  Maybe this is why I should have added more flour.
• However, it did seem like a good idea to dissolve the yeast in what amounted to sugar water.  Get the yeast to really start eating before it even got to the flour, right?
• Because of the point at which I'd stopped adding flour, I ended up with what was essentially a thick batter, but a batter with gluten (there was definitely gluten forming in this stuff).  By the time I finished dividing the dough into 12 muffin cups, I felt like one of those people in the commercials for the faucets that you only need to hit with your wrist to get to turn on.  I had anticipated this and had, against my environmental science bachelor's degree, turned on the water before I started dealing with the dough.

Before 2nd rising: they look like biscuits, or something.  There was no way this stuff was going to be formed into any other shape than 'blob'.

After 2nd rising: at least they look more like rolls, now. 

They may not be "cloverleaf" rolls, but they turned out to be rolls nonetheless.

These turned out to be more like brioche: soft, buttery, sort of eggy, a little sweet.  This would have been great had I been going for something like a brioche (which, honestly, had been next on my list of breads to try), but this did not make for good cloverleaf roll dough.  The recipe had promised 12 large cloverleaf rolls, but I ended up with 12 comparatively smaller brioche.  So, this turned out to be not so bad of a result as I had thought at the start; I might keep the recipe around for brioche, but then I might just find a recipe that specifically says that it's for making brioche!

Cloverleaf rolls v2.0

After the cloverleaf fiasco of earlier this month, I found four new recipes online and resolved to try each of them.  We tried one of those this evening, the results of which far exceeded my expectations.

Extended Narrative
The recipe calls for "1 cup plus 2 Tablespoons milk", which conveniently measured out to about 250 mL.  Huzzah for the metric system, right?

We also don't keep bread flour; the recipe calls for 4 cups of that.  I started out with 3 cups of all purpose flour and added just under 1 more cup during the mixing process.  The dough ended up being slightly sticky but not unlike our pizza dough, so I figured it was all right.

I was so excited about how things were turning out, even early on in the process, that I took way more photos than I usually do.

The stand mixer with dough hooks once again came through for us.

The recipe said something about running the stand mixer for 6 minutes; I probably came in at around that amount of time after having added that last cup of flour rather gradually.

I made sure to punch down the dough after the first rising which was not specified in the recipe.

When the time came to shape these I realized that this was a lot of dough.  Fortunately, I'd purchased a 12-muffin tin after the last experiment with these rolls, which worked out very well and had a nonstick coating to boot; as an experiment, I only sprayed half of the cups with nonstick spray.  The dough for most of the rolls filled the muffin cups (unlike last time).  I didn't bother to coat these with melted butter, mostly because I didn't feel like putting in that extra effort.

All cozy-like.  Rolls on the right are in the zone of nonstick spray, while the rolls on the left  are the control group.  As it turned out, there was no difference (statistically significant or otherwise) between the two halves of the batch.

Being somewhat paranoid, I set the timer for 30 minutes for the second rising, while the recipe called for 45 minutes. When the timer went off I realized that this would actually work out well as I still had to preheat the oven (our oven takes a while and there's no telling where it might be at any given point in the preheating process).  Here's the result of the second rising:

WHOA.

Rather different from that first time, eh?

These got baked for 14 minutes rather than the specified 15-20 minutes.

NOM.

About five minutes after this photo was taken, that roll on the top right was gone.  Soft, rich, and buttery; if there were any modification I'd make to the recipe, I'd probably add slightly more sugar--but that's really just trying to find something to have to change.  The recipe was fairly quick (edit: I should say that the active part of the recipe was fairly quick; obviously there was an hour and a half there where I didn't have to do much!); it didn't require a lot of ingredients; and it was pretty foolproof even for someone like me, inexperienced as I am (was?) with yeast breads.

Of course, I'd still like to try the other cloverleaf roll recipes that I'd found, but this is going to be hard to beat--but was it only because of the first failure that this success seemed so great?

The finished cloverleaf roll.  Look at that crumb.

Blueberry Cornbread

Hello all - this is a guest post is by Dom, so bear with the brevity - I'm but a simple engineer.

Background:

After we first made the delicious flour tortillas previously posted, I really wanted to try making corn tortillas.  However, this turned out to be much more difficult than the flour tortillas, and not as tasty (in our opinion).  Thus began a quest to find other recipes that use some of the 5 lbs. of masa corn flour we bought for the corn tortillas.

The recipe for the blueberry cornbread is from food.com.

Note:

We did not have buttermilk, so I used 1 Tbsp. of lemon juice with enough milk to make a cup.  I was supposed to let them sit together 5-10 minutes and then stir before using, but forgot - oops...  However, this did not seem to matter as I let the wet ingredients sit mixed while I got the dry ingredients ready.

Result:

Tasty cornbread that is gritty but not dry, with blueberry deliciousness in every bite!  We would definitely make this again.

Final Product - with a couple of pieces taken out.

22 July 2012: Addendum from Caroline!  After about three days this started to go bad, so we would recommend making this only if you intend to finish it quickly.

Cloverleaf rolls

Recently I became enamored with cloverleaf rolls.  The ones I had were soft, moist, at once pillowy yet dense, and more than twice the size of the muffin cups they'd been baked in.  So you see, I may have some unreasonable expectations when it comes to these things.

I really wanted to like this recipe.  I had the utmost faith in Joy of Cooking's methodology but the rolls I cooked up with its recipe came out more like hard biscuits than the pillowy creations I'd known before.  They didn't even fill the muffin cups of the pan when they came out of the oven.

Sad cloverleaf rolls.  At least the copious amount of nonstick spray worked as advertised.

This was my first time making yeast-leavened rolls; I've made biscuits in my time, but recipes for those can be summarized thus:

1. Mix.
2. Bake.
3. Consume.

I've also made pizza dough, but if I've been messing that one up, then those have been some tasty mistakes.

Looking back, perhaps it was a combination of errors that led to an unfortunate final product.  Let's see, shall we?

• It's probably best to make these on a day when it's cooler than 100°F outside; even with the air conditioning on, the rising times were altered and the 425° oven was not so pleasant.
• Punching down dough after the first rising is more important than I'd realized; we don't do this for pizza dough (and yet it's still darn tasty) and I haven't yet made many other breads.  Important!
• Just as it's important to let the dough rise, it's equally important to not let it rise for too long.  I suspect that this was the main culprit behind the hardtack biscuits that resulted.

So it's probably not the recipe itself that's to blame after all, but the ol' "user error".  We'll probably try this one again, but a lot of Interweb sleuthing has turned up four more promising recipes for cloverleaf rolls, all of which I intend to test.  Will I find a recipe that results in my vision of the ideal cloverleaf roll?  We shall see, shall we not?

Sad cloverleaf rolls are sad.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 610