Its nearly two weeks ago that I posted a recipe! At the moment my work is once again consuming most of my time, but hopefully this part of my Ph.d. thesis will be finished successfully in soon future. I will tell you more about it then.

The bad thing with stressful days is that it makes me always susceptible for colds. After I had a really bad at the beginning of October the second cold for this month sent me last week straight to my bed again. I drank a lot of tea, eats a lot of vitamins and now the fever is gone. I am just still very hoarse and coughing badly.

But I am fit enough once again for reading blogs and for baking. Paule baked Quitten-Schuedi this weekend, a cake with yeast dough and quince sauce. I liked the Idea of using some of last years quince sauce I had still in the freezer. I need new space to freeze my share of quince from my parents garden that at the moment is still waiting in a small laundry basket in my kitchen. mehr…

About one and a half year ago every german food blogger seemed to bake cacao rolls. Anikó blogged the tempting recipe and everyone had to test it, myself included.

When I saw the chocolate hazelnut rolls on The Patterned Plate I had to think about these rolls once again. But this rolls are also filled with hazelnuts (as the name suggested ). The description of a nutella-ish taste was so mouthwatering that I had to bake such rolls at the same weekend.

I decided to use another recipe for the dough because I was dreaming of heavenly soft and fluffy rolls. The dough is not so easy to handle but its worth the work because the rolls rise to be as light as a feather. I let them rise overnight in the fridge, it is a convenient method to get sweet rolls for breakfast without a lot of fusing in the morning and the slow rise contributes to the good taste, too.

I added some Cardamom and Cinnamon to the filling – just a tiny little bit to the spices in the background without overpowering the hazelnuts and the cacao. And I pour some boiling milk over the rolls after one third of the baking time, a trick I borrowed from the cacao roll recipe to make the rolls extra soft.

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In the different regions of Germany plain rolls have different names: In the north they are called “Rundstücke”, in the South “Semmeln” or “Wecken” and in the East they are called “Schrippen” or “Doppelte”, and in the West, were I live, we call them “Brötchen”. But as a friend who has to travel a lot told me some days ago, as long as you asked for “Normal” you will get what you want in every bakery.

I still try to create rolls with a fluffy and soft crumb. I will not give up this aim, someday I will get the ingredients in the perfect ratio like it work for the sandwich bread, too.

My newest attempt include some egg white, a little bit of milk and butter. I used some Pâte fermentée and knead until the gluten is fully developed.  The crumb is already much better then before, it is evenly regulary and softer then before, but not as soft as I whished for. The rolls proofed nicely and had a good oven spring. Pulling them out of the oven they started directly to “sing” when the crust cracked because of the soft crumb which shrink when the bread cool down.

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In this Region of Germany we call sweet Bread baked in a loaf pan “Stuten”. There are different kinds of Stuten, some are prepared with raisins, other are plain and seldom you can get one made with almonds.

I like the one with raisins – Rosinenstuten – very much, but because some person of this household don’t like them I decided to bake a plain one when I were longing for a soft sweet bread last weekend.

I used Pâte fermentée as a preferment like  in the other Braids und Challah-Rezepten because it adds a nice flavour and give strength to the gluten network. And like in the soft Sandwich bread or the Butternut-Squash Bread recipes a strong gluten network is a key for a fluffy bread with a regular.

The bread has a very rich taste because of vanilla and lots of butter added to the dough. Just the kind of bread I like for Sunday morning breakfast.

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I have the feeling that autumn is already knocking timidly on my door. I knew that it is still august, in theory it is still midsummer, but after all the rainy days in the past weeks and with the fact that the days already started to get shorter I feel a little bit like autumn. Don’t understand me wrong, I cherish the change of season. It is like George de Santayana says:  “To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” And I love the change from summer to autumn – maybe because I was born in this special atmosphere between theses seasons in September 29 years ago.

When my mom asked me if I would like to take the second half of a butternut squash I had directly the idea of putting the squash in a bread dough. I like butternut squash very much, it sweet and creamy taste and the stunning colour makes it to one of my favourite winter squash.

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The bakery in the small village in which we spend our vacation in East Frisia offered little braids made of a slightly sweet dough. They taste great with jam or honey or as a sandwich with cheese.

The kitchen of our small holiday home contained a oven. So I brought the most important things for baking with me: scale, bowl and my hands . And I tried to recreate the recipe for the little braids to take a little bit of our holiday memories back home.

I decided to use Pâte Fermentée as a preferment and a water roux for a fluffy crumb.

To make kneading more easy (I left the kitchen machine at home) I let the dough rest after mixing it together for 30 min – during this Autolysis the proteins in the dough are hydrated and developing a nice gluten network is then more easy.

The little braids are delicious – slightly sweet like the original and with a fluffy crumb.

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Some years ago, when I discovered bread baking again after a longer periode of not-baking, one of the first breads I bake was the Farl a la Paul Hollywood. I found the recipe on Petras Blog, Chili und Ciabatta.

But soon I like Breads with long fermenation and preferments like sourdough, Poolish or Pâte Fermentée more then the quick variants and so I forgot about the farl.

This weekend, when I thought about a bread for our barbeque at work, the Farl sprang back into my mind and I decided that I would tweak the recipe. I added a Pâte Fermentée and reduced the amount of yeast.

The dough was very easy to handle due to the lower hydration then my usual recipes – a good bread for beginners – and the bread was everything I hoped. Thin crust, regular crumb, with the flavours of a slow rising bread and a hint of buttery taste.

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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…

It seems like I would spent each wake moment in the lab. I try not to spent the nights there, but I start very early in the morning and at the moment I work very often one day of the weekend, too. There is a silver line on the horizon, promising that I will finish the missing experiments very soon and that we can resubmit our paper in near future. For me this means although a well deserved vacation!

Due to the enormous amount of work I have less time for Blogging. I still bake bread, take pictures and write down new recipes, but to put everything together as a post is not so easy at the moment.

When baking at the moment I use recipes that need not so much time each day. My favourites are those recipes that requires proofing over night.

This light sourdough bread is such a recipe. It taste very nutty because of roasted rolled grains and seeds, it is very fluffy and soft and it has a deep complex taste due to the two preferments and the long, cold proof.

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I don’t like it when I have left overs in the fridge. They tend to grow old and after some days I will throw them away. And I don’t like to throw away food! Normally I plan our meals so that we eat everything or that the left overs are enough to be packed as lunch at work on the next day. But this saturday there was some potatoes left. Nothing else, only potatoes. And we had a invitation for Lunch the next day, so cooking something with something with them was out of question.

I inspected the fridge and found following things: Some Pâte fermentée, made because I wanted to bake something but without any recipe in mind, a cup of buttermilk and as I told before, potatoes. Looking on these things I had a Idea at last: I would bake some nice rolls for breakfast on Sunday.

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