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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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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Pudding pretzels or Pudding pastry are one of the best pastries you can buy in the bakery. They are so delicious that I even ignore that the boyfriend calls them “Eiterbrille” (that means pus-filled goggles). I know this term for them is common in the Rhineland but I don’t like it.

The pudding pretzels you can buy are made with danish pastry dough but when I made them last weekend I decided to use a simple challah dough instead. That saves some time and a lot of calories!

I filled the both of the loops of the pretzels with pastry cream and they bake very well. All of my fears of melting fillings that flood the oven did not hold true. I would have liked it if the filling melt a little bit at last so that the surface of the pudding would be more even. But it stays as rough as it was when I filled it in. Next time I have to take care to smoothen the surface! mehr…

Like Lutz I like to vary the basic recipe of the yoghurt sesame rolls very much. The Hazelnuts rolls were my first variation and a very delicious one!

When my mum asked me if she could bake the yoghurt sesame rolls with curd instead of yoghurt because she like the more sour taste of curd. I told her directly “What a great Idea” and go to the kitchen to create a recipe with curd.

Like in the recipe for this no knead wheat bread I added a poolish and fold the dough three times before fermenting over night. To fold the dough is a easy method to develop the gluten network which creates a nice crumb without kneading. Because curd contains not so much liquid as yoghurt I added some milk to the recipe.

The curd rolls taste aromatic and slightly sour and the crumb is soft and moist. The crust is nice but not as crisp as the crust of rolls just made with water, flour and yeast.

Because the rolls are not kneaded they fit perfectly for the theme of the 38. Bread Baking Day which is “no knead Bread”. I send the entry also to Yeastspotting, Susans weekly showcase of yeast baked goods.

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Finding recipes for the 37. Bread Baking Day was an easy task for me – it was much harder to make a decision what I want to bake because the topic “Bread with preferment/sponge” is really my kind of bread making. Nearly all breads and pastry I bake are made with one or more preferment.  One very delicious is JT’s Rustic bread with three preferments. It use three diffrent Preferments: Poolish, Biga, Sourdough. And this three diffrent preferments create an incredible tasty bread.

For my entry for BBD I planed something similar. Poolish, sourdough and Pâte fermentée make this bread very aromatic. With a nutty taste of whole wheat and the complex flavours of the preferments with a mild acidity in the background. The bread has a fine crumb and a thick crisp crust.

To get a nice crisp crust I used the convection modus of my oven and opend the door slightly ajar, so that the steam can escape and the cust becomes crisp.

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I planned to bake “Kletzenbrot” this year. Kletzenbrot is named after the Kletzen which are added to the dough and this Kletzen are dried pears. But then I remembered that I have to big glasses filled with dried apples in the pantry because this autumn  I dried a lot of the apples we harvest. (I mentioned before that we harvest lots and lots of apples this year, didn’t I?)

So I decided to use some of this dried apples in the bread instead of dried pears. And so I call it Fruit bread and not Kletzenbrot.  The dough I used is a simple bread dough with sourdough. The sweet of this bread comes from the added fruits and nuts. It tastes most delicious cut in very thin slices and spread with some butter. It is my favorite bread for breakfast at the moment and it keeps fresh for a long time because of the fruits and the sourdough.

This fruit bread is my post for the last Bread Baking Day of 2010, which theme is “Bread with dried Fruits”. mehr…

I belived that I would have to skip this BBD #33. There was so much work in the lab and I have to use most of my creativ potential to solve all the problems with my troublesome experiments.

But then I saw Köstritzer Schwarzbier during my weekend shopping and my brain started to work immediately. Some seconds later I had a recipe for a Schwarzbier bread in mind. And that was perfect because the theme of this month BBD is “Bread with Booze”. So I placed a bottle of Schwarzbier in my shopping basket and changed all of my plans for Baking.

The bread that resulted of this flash of inspiration has a dark colour and a crispy crust because of the beer. I can taste a subtle taste of Schwarzbier but its not to strong to overpower the other flavours. The sweetness of honey complete the taste of the bread.

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Apa269 of Family & Food & other Things choose for Bread Baking Day # 32  the theme “Italian Breads” . Thats a perfect choice for me because it is really hot at the moment and at hot summer days I prefere light breads like Ciabatta oder Pane Francese instead of my normal whole wheat breads.

At our last trip to Metro, a wholesale, I bought a kilogram of durum flour. So I decided to try Pane Pugliese.

But despite the high hydration and the three stretch and fold cycles the crumb was rather dense and not so wide open as I wished it to be. But the crumb was nicely soft and it tasted delicious so I was satisfied. The durum flour gaves a nice yellowish colour to the crumb.

We used a part of the bread for Bruscetta and it was perfect for this.

I submit this bread to Susans Yeastspotting, too.

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Last Weekend I saw a Mandelstuten – a sweet bread with almonds – at our local baker. But while I love to eat breakfast in the Café that belongs to the bakery, I nearly never buy bread there. I prefer to bake it at my own. But I make for my own: Bake Mandelstuten! And when I read the anouncement for 31. Bread baking day it felt as if Zorra from 1x umrühren bitte read my mind. The Theme she choose for the 3rd anniversary is Bread with nuts. Isn’t this perfect?

When I tried to decide which dough I should use as a basic for the Mandelstuten Paules post reminds me of the Hokkaido Milk Bread. This recipe use cream instead of oil or butter and I liked the idea to create a dough similar to the Milk bread. I included a preferment and add more cream to the dough and removed milk powder from the formula. And because the Mandelstuten at the bakery was braided and then baked in a bread pan so I braided my bread, too.

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Bread Baking Day’s Topic is “Breads with a Twist” and its hostess is Natashya form Living in the kitchen with puppies. While still thinking about a recipe I saw a show on TV where they explained how to make “Burger pretzels”. This is a local speciality which is selled mostly around the castle Schloss Burg and which is part of the “Bergische Kaffeetafel”. This is a tradition similar to afternoon tea in Greatbritain. The “Bergische Kaffeetafel” is served with Coffee from the Dröppelminna, the dark rye Schwarzbrot, sweet white bread called Stuten or Platz, heartshaped waffles, rice pudding with sugar and cinnamon, Burger pretzels, curd, sugar beet molasses, cheese and bacon.

This preztels have not the typical form of a pretzel we know from South Germany but its ends are twisted for four times.

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