At the moment I stay often very long in the lab to finish the missing Experiments of my thesis. Around late afternoon/ early evening I often get hungry when lunchtime was already 5 hours ago. And when I am hungry and tired I am lacking motivation and concentration. That’s not good if I plan to work another two hours!

To prevent this I baked some wholewheat almond-honey crescents for the coming week. The original Idea is from “Das große GU Vollwert-Kochbuch”  but I changed the recipe so much in the last years that you can not recognize the original recipe anymore. I use more liquid and less yeast, I removed the soybean flour from the recipe and added a sourdough. The filling contains less butter, cinnamon and eggs but additional cacao and a pinch of salt.

I like the result very much: Delicious, filling with enough honey to give me a little more power. The long days in lab can come, I’m prepared now!

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And now the next recipe for people like me, who like to eat fresh rolls for breakfast without getting up very early in the morning.

This time its very easy, with yeast, water, salt and spelt flour.

The spelt flour and the long fermentation gave a very delicious taste to the rolls. The dough was rather wet, but with some flour I could handle it good and that a wet flour has positive results on the crumb I could already hear when I drew them out of the oven. The rolls crackled and sing and when I cut them I had a open crumb halfway to the open crumb of a ciabatta. They taste very good still warm with orange marmalade or cold later the day with some cheese and lettuce.

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There is not always space in my fridge for trays with rolls. Ok, to be honest there is nearly never room for a tray in my fridge. Even when I put two proofing baskets in the fridge I have to be creative. Normally I start to stack things on each other to make room for the baskets. And when my boyfriend wants to eat some cheese in the night? Then it’s time for Jenga!

That’s why I like recipes which I can keep overnight at room temperature . And since I bake the saffron stars I knew that I can even proof rolls overnight at room temperature as long as I use a really small amount yeast. So 1 g fresh yeast in the bagel recipe is no mistake. To improve the taste I also add a little bit sourdough. I did not dare to use a higher amount of sourdough, being afraid that the long and relatively warm fermentation  would turn the dough into sourdough.

But with the small amount it worked very well and the next morning I just had to place the bagels in boiling water and bake them. That’s only 30 min in the morning till we had fresh bagels for breakfast.

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It is done! Not my Ph.D. Thesis – I am still working on that – but the Paper to my side project is published. When I am thinking that this was “only” my side project, its amazing how often it played the chief part in the last  two years . After some rejections is finally accepted and now I can use all of my energy to finish my main project. When everything works as planned I will end the experimental part of my thesis end of this month and will start writing. That is the plan I have at monent … we will see what will happen. Life in lab is never easy to plan…

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The light and flaky layers of puff pastry, croissants or Danish pastry is created by enclosing butter layers in the dough, something called laminating. The butter layers seperate the dough layers and trap the steam during baking creating the typical honeycomb structure.

When laminating two different kinds of folding the dough can be distinguished: the single fold and the double fold

For the single fold the dough is folded in thirds like a letter.

For the double fold the dough is folded from both sides into the middle and then fold in half.

When rolling the dough after folding to a square again, I always roll in the direction marked in the photos above, starting in the middle to remove trapped air.

Its time again for a whole grain bread her in the Blog. The last weeks I baked mostly Breads I posted before but last weekend I created a new recipe, using two of my favourite ingredients: rolled oats and buttermilk.

I proofed the breads in baskets in the fridge and they develop a lot of aroma during the proofing. I was very skeptical in the beginning, when I read that in Tartine they proof sourdough breads in the fridge. Its a methode I used for breads made with yeast before, but I was afraid, that sourdough breads would be to sour. And I really don’t like sour bread. But nothing like this happend and now its one of my favourite proofing methods! It seperate preparing dough and baking and that is the perfect method in stressful times for me.

The bread has dense crumb and is rather moist, which enhance its shelflife. It’s a delicious and filling basis for lunch break.

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Heike wished for fried potatoes for her Blog-Birthday. I liked fried Potatoes in all variations, made of raw potatoes or cooked and cooled potatoes.

When my boyfriend asked for fried potatoes for supper it was the perfect moment to hit two birds with one stone. I could make him happy with delicious fried potatoes and could also participate at Heikes Blog event.

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Yes, this will be no post for all of us who new years resolution is  healthy wholesome eating. And I have to admit that after one slice of this bread I head to it a lot of fruits and vegetables to save my conscience. But (and here are now the excuses why I baked it anyway) it was love on first sight and I need a complex bread for relaxing because of all the stress I have in the last month before starting to write my Ph.D. thesis.

The idea for this bread had TXfarmer who baked some time ago a “Lamminated Sandwich Bread”. Her bread looks better then mine, she really knows how to bake laminated pastry. Her Croissants are a dream! The dough is a soft sandwich bread laminated with butter. After a single and a double fold the dough is cut into stripes and braided.

I did some modifications so that the recipe fits better to the weaker german flour. And this time I mixed the butter for laminating with some flour to make the handling easier. It works good for puff pastry for me and it helps here, too.

And how tastes this bread? A soft and evenly open crumb with a divine taste of butter, like a good croissant.

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I have to take one look back at christmas. Every year we have a cheese fondue with the family at the 26. December which normally is prepared by my grandaunt. It started once small with my grandparents and their daughters, but nowadays we have to rend a room because for all the children plus partners, the grandchildrens with partners and the contiously rising number of great-grandchildren is no space in grandmothers kitchen anymore.

I normally help my grandaunt with the her preparations (continuously stirring the melting cheese). This year she called to ask me if I could do the cheese fondue on my own because she fell down a stair and had some broken ribs. She already bought everything needed and would write me a recipe, and would be around if I had questions. I said yes, of course. The recipe get lost when she and my granduncle travelled to us, and so she wrote down the short version for me: 5.5 kg cheese, 3 litre white wine, 6 teaspoons starch for each pot (4 pots at all). This is the amount for about 25 persons – most of the small kids prefer chocolate fondue.

I calculated it down for 5 persons:

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And now we have 2012. I hope your new years eve was nice as the one we had!

We tried already our new year pretzel for a late breakfast, so there are no pictures of the pretzel as a whole.

This year I decided to bake it with a mild sourdough, water roux and less sugar. I kept the sourdough overnight at 25°C which gave it a delicious smell like yoghurt and slightly sour taste, which makes it perfect for a sweet dough.

The dough itself is very soft. Experience with handling soft dough is required, so for beginners I would suggest to prepare the dough with 50-60g less water. That would make handling much easier.

I kneaded the dough very long, so the gluten network was well developed and the bread could rise highly. Using Egg white keeps the crumb bright and white. I think its fit to the fresh new years morning and I used some frozen egg white from christmas baking.

The pretzel has a nice complex taste, a little bit of youghurt and has this slightly sweetness, that fits so well to both sweet jam and salty cheese.

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