Fall Spice Quick Bread

I know it sounds weird, but here's the deal. We get lots of potatoes with our CSA farm share. We only eat potatoes in small amounts (usually mixed in with sweet potatoes, beets, carrots and other roasted veggies) so I've been struggling to keep up with the supply. I searched the web for potato-based cakes and found very little (although there is a recipe for candy made from potatoes...intriguing). However, there are LOTS of sweet potato bread recipes out there. So, I figured regular potatoes should work, right?

The bread came out very moist and plenty sweet (I thought about increasing the amount of sugar since the original uses SWEET potatoes, but it wasn't necessary). You don't taste the potatoes, just the cinnamon and nutmeg with a hint of citrus. Feel free to add nuts or dried fruit; I didn't have any handy but maybe next time. The turbinado sugar sprinkled on top before baking gives the bread a great crunchy top.

Here is the original recipe that I adapted:

http://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/southern-sweet-potato-bread-with-pecans/detail.aspx

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups flour



• 2 tsp baking powder



• 1/4 tsp salt



• 1 tsp cinnamon



• 1/2 tsp nutmeg



• 1 cup sugar



• 2 eggs



• 1/2 cup vegetable oil



• 2 tablespoons milk



• 1/2 tsp orange zest



• 1 tsp vanilla extract



• 1 cup cooked and mashed potatoes


• turbinado sugar (for sprinkling on top)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325. Spray loaf pan with baking spray or grease with butter.



2. Mix first six ingredients (dry) in a large mixing bowl, whisk to make sure thoroughly combined.



3. Combine the rest of the ingredients, except potatoes and turbinado sugar, in another bowl. As always, make sure eggs and milk are room temp.



4. Add wet ingredients to dry and mix until ALMOST all combined. There may be a few pockets of dry stuff - that's okay at this point.



5. Add mashed potatoes and stir until just combined (lumps are okay but no pockets of dry stuff).



6. Pour batter into loaf pan and sprinkle turbinado sugar on top (I use a pretty liberal dose)



7. Bake until tester/toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean (no crumbs or smears) - about an hour.

A, B(rioche), C(roissant), D(oughnut)

It's been breakfast for the last week - well, in class, anyway. Last Friday we made the doughnuts above. They are part way between a cake doughnut and a raised doughnut. We made them with a sweet dough. The trick is to make sure your oil is the right temp or your doughnuts will be too greasy (too cold) or burnt on the outside and doughy in the middle (too hot). We also made cinnamon rolls, which I forgot to photograph.

We also made brioche - a great bread for french toast or bread pudding. Pictured above is the traditional "tete" shape with the little knob on the tob. Brioche is actually a pretty basic bread to make; I think I could do it at home with no problems.

Next up - danish and croissants! Both are made from the same laminated dough (think layers and layers of butter rolled into the dough), they get their puff from steam as they bake. As you can see, my pinwheels (above) were a little thin so the points started to get a little too dark. They are filled with cream cheese filling and maple pecan filling. Also, my croissant-shaping (below) could use some work (they still taste delicious, though!)

This last pic is a little tin of monkey bread (also called pull-apart bread). We're encouraged to use our scraps for monkey bread whenever possible; it's a shame (and expensive) to waste all that butter.

The Latest and Greatest

Here are some pics of what I've been up to lately. Above is the result of a temporary lapse in willpower - a whole bunch of new spice blends from Penzeys! Hopefully this will jazz up those winter veggies and hold me over until real spring arrives!

And now for some flatbreads.....


More focaccia! We made one with olives in it (ick, but I know people either love them or hate them) and one with fresh herbs incorporated in the dough. Very, very sticky dough!

Above are the tortillas I made in class last week. Let's just say that I won't be making homemade tortillas; they're a pain to make considering that you can buy good tortillas pretty cheap at the grocery store. Each tortilla takes quite a while, between rolling them out very thin and then cooking them in a dry pan.

The most exciting flatbread, and my personal favorite, is pizza! We didn't throw our dough up in the air all crazy, but we did get to use the pizza peel (wooden paddle dealio shown in the pic at the bottom) to throw our pizzas right on the deck oven. Delicious! I think I just might need to get a pizza stone for the home kitchen.

Below is an action shot of one of my classmates, Jon, preparing his pizza for the oven!

Breads Class and a Sweet Failure

Well, week one of Breads class flew by! I have to say that breadmaking continues to be a mystery to me. Oh, I understand about feeding the yeast and allowing gluten strands to develop and such. BUT - I still don't have a feel for when the dough is kneaded sufficiently, when the loaf is ready to come out of the proof box, or even when I should pull the bread from the oven. It doesn't help that the chef for the class is a man of few words. He seems to enjoy a quiet environment (makes sense, since bread bakers typically work early in the morning, when everyone else is sleeping) and singing, humming, and whistling are forbidden. Hmmph.

Above is a pic of the polenta bread we made this week. It is made with a sponge that contains cooked corn mush and rosemary. It's a very soft bread with a crunchy outer crust. The pic below shows Jewish Rye (without carraway seeds because they are gross), fougasse with sun-dried tomato and black olives, and a couple loaves of ciabatta. The fougasse and the ciabatta are very sticky doughs to work with.

Finally, below is a pic of my macaroon failure from earlier today. I don't know exactly why the same recipe worked when made in class and failed miserably at home. I have some theories though - either the oven temp was wrong, the almond meal was different, or making the cookies bigger messes them up. Anyway, I flavored these with orange extract (and tried to color them orange but you can hardly tell) and sandwiched nutella between them. They were delicious, even if the tops are cracked instead of smooth, there is no "foot", and they were a little dry in texture instead of chewy.