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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Pumpkin Yeast Bread

Nominee for Failed Bread of the Year

This bread had everything right in principle. I had read several recipes in books and online for a yeast bread using pumpkin puree and decided to use the collected ideas and do it my own way. However I made one silly but crucial mistake. Try to guess what it might have been.

Recipe
For two loaves
100 g rolled oats (ground for 30 seconds) (~1 cup)
138 g bread flour (~1 cup)
412 g whole wheat flour (~3 cups)
1½ tsp instant yeast
14 g salt (2 tsp)

32 g brown sugar (3 Tbsp)
1 tsp ground ginger
¾ tsp ground cardamom (5 pods)
73 g orange juice (¼ cup)
389 g pumpkin puree (1 cup)
27 g vegetable oil (2 Tbsp)
2 eggs

134 g whole wheat flour (~1 cup)

Ingredients

Dry and wet ingredients mixed with 1 cup of flour for later mixing

2:07 pm: Bringing it together

2:24 pm: Ready for first rise

The first rise was not impressive after more that 3 hours. That got me wondering and I realized what I had done wrong. There wasn't much I could do at this point to improve my chances of a good loaf. I decided to go ahead with the baking anyway.

6:25 pm: After second rise

I wanted to make a braid using this technique by smitten kitchen. I had also kept aside some butter and brown sugar to use as filling. However with my failed dough and the messy filling, it wasn't easy to shape the dough.

6:56 pm: Making a braid

7:02 pm: Bumpy braid trying to rise

The second half of the dough got a second rise before being shaped into a loaf.

7:53 pm: Second loaf got regular treatment

8:30 pm: Not an impressive rise

Post baking and after the braid lost a couple limbs to taste testers

Any guesses about what might have gone wrong?

Here goes: I had used whole wheat pastry flour instead of whole wheat flour! I store both bags in similar containers, and had picked the wrong one.

Can't have a post with only failures to note. So here are pictures from a holiday baking attempt.

Stained Glass Cookies
I made these cookies from a recipe on Simply Recipes.They were made to share at a Holiday Gift and Recipe exchange with some girlfriends. Mine look nowhere as pretty as the ones Elsie has in her post, but they weren't too bad.

Ingredients and materials

Crushing the LifeSavers

Cutouts filled with crushed hard candy

Cooling

The stained glass effect!

Happy Holidays!
-RPH

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