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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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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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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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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I was very sad when Martin from Pain de Martin posted this summer that he would stop blogging. I liked Martins Ideas very much and his recipes often inspired me to my own recipes.

And so I was very happy when I saw some days ago that he started his new blog Lite mer bröd.  When I read the new entries I found directly one I wanted to try: long fermented saffron buns with an orange filling.

I decided to try a variation of this recipe for breakfast on Christmas. So I skipped the filling and reduced the sugar amount. For kneading I do it like I do all sweet dough: I knead the dough until medium gluten development without sugar and butter. Then I add the sugar gradually and at the end the butter. That yields a dough with a good developed gluten network because sugar and butter cannot interfere with it.

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The last Bread Baking  Day of the year 2012 has the theme “X-mas Edition” and is hosted at Cindystar. I get the idea for a bread fitting to this theme some days ago, when I was on my way back home from work. It was already very late, I had lunch about 7 hours ago and I was hungry. So I stopped at the bakery in railway station and bought a bun called “Little cinnamon almond cloud”. That sounds good, doesn’t it? But when I take the first bite I was disappointed. The bun was not stuffed with crunchy almond pieces but with very sweet marzipan in a very sweet dough overpowering completely the faint cinnamon taste. Not what I expected when I read the beautiful name!

When I was sitting in the train I started to think about how I would do such a kind of bread. And so I used the time to develop a recipe for a sweet bread seasoned with cardamom, Cassia buds and allspice and enriched crunchy almond pieces. Its a rich bread with a lot of egg and butter and its perfect for breakfast on Christmas mornings. I achieved a cloud like look with dusting the bread thickly with powdered sugar baking.

This bread with its delicate spices and almonds resembles much more my idea of an almond cloud

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After bewitching kitchen and tartine bread this is the third and last guest hosting of Yeastspotting, next week you will find Yeastspotting back at Wild Yeast.

After preparing the roundup I am more then ever impressed that Susan does this every week!

And now enjoy the roundup!

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Autumn means for me nuts, especially hazelnuts and walnuts. But I bake already a Potato bread with walnuts, Apple-Hazelnut Bread and Pain aux Levain aux grains mélangés e noisettes. And before everyone (including myself) get bored with so much breads with nuts I decided to bake a bread with cider for BreadBakingDay because Apples are strongly connected with autumn for me, too.

The recipe I created included a small portion rye, just enough for some nice taste but not enough to challenge my stomach. I used some rolled oats and whole wheat flour, together with grounded caraway seeds which gave the bread a very nice taste. And spiced bread belongs to autumn/winter for me, too.

I liked the bread very much, especially with a hearty cheese and homemade mustard.

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