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my starter has died of black plague. either that or neglect. yesterday I dumped it out and started over. I really have a way with words, don't I?

anyhoo, I began with 3/4 cup white bread flour and 3/4 cup water. in yesterday's still pretty warm temperatures, it separated early on with much liquid on the top, and there was very minimal action there. I stirred it back in after about 12 hours and it had thickened some, but this morning at 0530, there it was separated again and still no real action. I dumped half out and mixed in 1/3 cup whole wheat bread flour and 1/3 cup white bread flour, and just a little less than 1/2 cup water. there is now a small bit of action happening, so I'm hopeful to have active starter again shortly. and it's really too bad it isn't good yet, because I have black bananas ready to go into a loaf ...

meantime, I made some very tasty cookies from the Quaker Oats website.

the real bonus for me on these cookies is that it only makes about 3 dozen, so you don't spend an hour hanging around in a hot kitchen, shuttling cookie sheets back and forth, in and out. I admit to being a lazy baker.

Oatmeal Cranberry White Chocolate Chunk Cookies

2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
2/3 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1-1/2 cups Old Fashioned Quaker Oats, uncooked
1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
One 6-ounce package dried cranberries
2/3 cup white chocolate chunks or chips

Cook’s Tip: To use Quick Quaker Oats, decrease flour to 1-1/3 cups.

Heat oven to 375F.

In medium bowl, beat butter and sugar with electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs, mixing well. In separate bowl, combine oats, flour, baking soda and salt. Add to butter mixture in several additions, mixing well after each addition. Stir in dried cranberries and white chocolate chunks. Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.

Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Transfer to wire rack. Cool completely. Store tightly covered. Makes 2-1/2 to 3 dozen cookies.

click the photo for the big view

The family was in town,which meant I had two things: free babysitting and more mouths to feed. That meant it was time for a baking bonanza!

I made:

Corn Bread

Orange Oatmeal Bread

Nubby Peanut Bread

Italian Bread

Struan Bread

And cookies. And enchiladas. And a bunch of other food.

I'll add links to all of these recipes as I get them written up.

I used the scone recipe posted by qahtan recently, when my grocery store had new strawberries for 98 cents a pound over the mothers day weekend, but that's about all I've done lately. I think I'm going to work on some baking powder biscuits and try using different fats. I'm not afraid of lard, so I'll try that along with vegetable shortening and butter versions. I've been looking around at another site, and would like to throw it into the links section, but I don't know how or if I can do that.

It's baking911, and for people like me, who can't afford to buy all the books (or really don't need another cooking book), it has a wealth of basic baking information available. It explains why things work (or don't) in simple terms. In design terms, the site looks too busy, but it's well worth a visit for beginners or the nervous looking for information. Recipes and tips are also included, and there is an associated cooking911 site.

Good sites if you don't have a cookbook library. Or for those leaving the nest and needing guidance.

A little bit of everything: oatmeal raisin cookies, banana bread, and pain sur poolish.

I tried baking some of the poolish bread in a ciabatta sized loaf instead of a baguette. We'll try it tonight.

I can't decide whether I am just really bad at shaping and scoring or whether my dough is too wet to score. I keep trying to score it but ending up w/ the blade stuck in the goo. So my loaves aren't pretty, but they've been tasting great.

I have always been fascinated by artisan breads, i wanted to explore the world of hand crafted breads knowing every single detaile of this art .So suddenly at age 30, i decided to educate my self by diging websites and searching through cookbooks and wishing to end with courses.
Normally i bake on weekends either for my home or familly gatherings. And the following photos shows my first attempt with pesto bread made from the (Italian Baker) by Carol Field.

Rised dough......ready to go to the oven.

Fresh baked bread.

Sliced pesto bread.

Crust & Crumb.

Notes: 1-The bread smells pesto but does not taste as pesto.
2-There was no crust at the bottom of the bread (Hmmmm.....) may be the baking stone was not too hot.
3- The bread was a little bit heavy....could it be the oil of the pesto. :-?

My first attempt at creating a sourdough starter. I used the raisin water technique because I wasn't sure I wanted some of the other things that could be found floating in the air around here. This is approx 48 hours after I started it. It now sits safely in my refrigerator until I get past the spring allergy season LOL

Well, I was going to tell more about it last night, but my husband distracted me. As Paul Harvey would say, "Now for the rest of the story."

I started my starter using what I had here based on Floyd's Featured Story ""When Yeast Attacks"

I had a box of california raisins from Wal-Mart and I used stone ground whole wheat flour (this was ground by a friend about 6 weeks ago). I started with the 3/4 cup of raisin water and 1 cup of ww flour. When I checked it about 10 hours later, it looked to me like there was a little bit of bubbling going on. So I added a cup of water and a cup of ww flour. Waited another 8 - 12 hours with it sitting in my cupboard with just a paper towel placed very loosely over it. It didn't look very promising when I checked it this time, but I figured I didn't have much invested in it and a couple more cups of flour wasn't going to break the bank, so I put a cup of wal-mart brand, all-purpose flour and a cup of water in, stirred it all up and left it to grow. I came back Wednesday morning to a very happy starter. I wasn't sure what direction I was going to go at that point, so I fed it (all growing babies need to be fed, right?) and let it sit until I took the pictures last night.

I probably won't be able to do any baking until Monday with it being Mother's Day weekend, but that gives me more time to search for "the" recipe that is going to knock my husband's socks off. He isn't thrilled with the SD bread that comes from the store, and I have to keep reminding him that my homemade from scratch food 99.999 percent of the time tastes much better than anything we buy at the store or from a restaurant :lol: I just know he's going to love this bread and I won't be able to buy loaf bread off the shelf anymore.

More to come next time on the Cookie Bakes Bread channel.

While coming home from a computer conference last week I managed to hit a couple of artisan bakeries.

The best one I stopped at was Wild Flour Bakery in Freestone, California (halfway between Sebastopol and Bodega in west Sonoma County... "the wine country"... find it on my bakery finder).

As the sign out front says, everything there is organic and they bake in a brick oven. Note the reflection of a grain silo in the front window. It is hard to tell in these photos, but the bakery is out in the country in the middle of a beautiful valley.

Unfortunately, I got there right about the same time that a bus load of people doing the winery tours stopped there and I had a car full of family, so I did not get a chance to talk to the bakers or get many good pictures of the place. I did pick up a loaf of their Fougasse, a picnic bread containing olives, onions, and blue, jack, and chedder cheeses. The loaf was still warm, and it was a great thing to munch while driving out to the coast.

They have wonderful looking scones and sticky buns too.

I took a quick snap of their menu (large image so it is easy to read).

I was going to make the valentine's day pain rapide au chocolat tonight because my boy wanted me to buy him chocolate chocolate chip muffins at the grocery. Well, I just couldn't see myself making mashed potatoes just for that, so I went to google and dug up two C-C-C muffin recipes and between the three recipes I came up with this. And they're quite good, like the bread recipe, not too sweet, but in the middle they have some melty chocolate chip goo that makes them just right.

1/2 cup sugar
1-3/4 cups all purpose flour
2 Tbsp. powdered milk
6 Tbsp. unsweetened cocoa
2-1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

mix all the dry ingredients together, and if necessary, squish out any hard, rocky lumps in the baking powder.

in a smaller bowl or 2-cup measure, mix together:

3/4 cup water
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 tsp. vanilla extract
I also splooshed in 2-3 Tbsp. Irish Cream, lacking rum or any other appropriate spirits

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the liquids, mixing just until blended--as usual for muffins, leave it slightly lumpy.
Spoon into a 12-cup muffin tin, greased or lined with paper accordion cups. Bake at 400F about 18-20 minutes. A toothpick should come out clean unless you've struck a chocolate chip.

and of course, you can use 3/4 cup dairy milk in place of the water/powdered milk ingredients.

I made another batch of bagels last night. My son dug the blueberry bagel we got from Safeway last week, so I decided to make a third of the batch with blueberries (bagel snobs: insert derisive comments here).

I thawed the blueberries and then tried mixing them in with the risen dough. Bad idea:

Yes, it does look like entrails. It really made quite a mess, with little strips of purple bagel dough refusing to stick together.

I was about to throw the whole thing into the trash, but I decided to try adding an extra 1/4 cup of flour, just to see if I could salvage it. Happily, it worked, and they baked up quite nicely:

It just goes to show, when in doubt, improvise. Worse case, I would have had to throw away an extra 1/4 cup of flour. Big deal.

Here's the poolish in the AM:

According to Artisan Baking Across America, the puckering in the middle is a sign that it is ready to use.

The baked loaves:

They were acceptable, but not great, this weeknd. I think I made the dough a bit too dry. I'll try again soon.