Artisan Sourdough Bread and Crochet Sandwhiches

Our Random Acts of Kindness experiment has gone really well.  The kids have really enjoyed getting involved, which is great.  Some of our random acts included cheering on the walkers for the Multiple Sclerosis relay, baking treats for shelter animals and our own furry friends, writing get-well-soon letters to the grandfather of one of Oldest's friends, and picking up trash at the nature center while we hiked.   When we started I thought 30 days would be hard to accomplish but now that we are almost to the end of our month long RAK, it seems like it all went pretty quickly.  Hopefully we have developed some "kindness habits" that will stick around for awhile.

I had mentioned in a previous post (although I don't remember which one) that I was knitting and crocheting play food for the kids to use in their toy kitchen.   Well, I finally got around to taking pictures of the sandwiches I made for them.

 

Peanut Butter and Jelly. 

 

 The jelly in the picture came out looking a little blue but in reality it's purple (grape).

Sandwich number 2.

This is the ham, roast beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato and pickle sandwich.

The bread and peanut butter and jelly pattern came from craft frog.  The ham and tomatoes I found on the lion brand website (free membership required).  The roast beef was my own adaptation of the knit ham from lion brand. However, instead of knitting in stockinette, I knitted it in garter stitch.  The lettuce pattern comes from the hook, yarn and needles blog.  The pickles were my own creation.  A simple crochet in the round pattern with single crochet stitches.  It took me a weekend to make and the kids LOVE it.  

I've also been baking more bread.  Making bread and noodles seems to be the majority of my time spent in the kitchen these days.  Recently I tried my hand at artisan sourdough bread.  

I really like the process of making the artisan style loaf, which is totally different than the traditional loaf I usually make.   There were fewer steps with this loaf of bread than the traditional loaves.  No kneading was necessary and it only had to rise once.   I appreciated that fact tremendously.  However, I've learned from this experience that I'm not a big fan of sourdough bread.  I do not like it Sam-I-Am and neither do the kids.  Hubbs thoroughly enjoyed it though.  He ate half the loaf on his own the first day.  He ate the other half the second day.  So for his sake alone, I'll be making it again some time.  For the rest of us, maybe I'll try a rustic white bread next time.  I think the sourdough flavor was just a little too robust for my liking. 

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

I made this cinnamon swirl bread for my father-in-law who really didn't believe that I knew how to make bread without a bread machine. He absolutely loved it though!   I ended up making four loaves, two for my in-laws and two for us.  The recipe is a basic egg based white bread except, instead of shaping it into loaves, you roll each divided half of dough into a 15x7" rectangle and sprinkle each with half a mixture of 1/2c. white sugar and 2 tsp. cinnamon. Then roll it jelly roll style, pinch the seams and place them, seam side down, into two greased 9x5x3 loaf pans.  I glazed one loaf with a basic powdered sugar icing and left the other plain.  We actually like it better without the icing. 

Egg based white bread is the only kind of bread my grandmother would make but darn is it good! Egg based dough makes a bread with a softer crust and there is a bit more firmness to the loaf, it doesn't smoosh as easily as basic bread dough.  It also ends up with a richer flavor and a slightly yellow tint to it.  I usually only make one loaf into the cinnamon swirl bread and make the other into plain white bread because it saves me from having to make another two batches of bread dough for things like sandwiches, french toast, etc.

Banana Bread

Hopefully everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving!  Our turkey day was pretty standard.  We had food and football, both in very large quantities.  I was in a food comma for most of yesterday and didn't manage to get much done except a little cleaning from Thursday's festivities and I turned some of our over-ripe bananas into banana bread with vanilla frosting. 

I used a different recipe than normal, a much less complicated recipe than normal, and it turned out really good.  I found the recipe for the banana bread on cooks.com.  The only change I made to the recipe was that I added a little bit of cinnamon.  Next time I may add some chocolate chips for the kids or you could add nuts if you prefer it that way. 

The vanilla frosting is just a basic vanilla frosting recipe.  Nothing fancy.  Very simple.  The recipe that I used for the frosting came from my one and only brain but you can find a very similar recipe on food.com.

The frosting recipe is basic enough that you can substitute the vanilla for almost any flavoring that interests you. Make sure to sift the powdered sugar first.  If you find that the frosting is a little too thick  just add a bit more milk and stir awhile longer and it should be fine.

This is a really good way to use up those bananas that are too ripe to eat anymore and kids love it.  Well, at least my kids love it but my kids are such ridiculously picky eaters that if they will eat it then that's a pretty good bet that almost any kid will eat it.

Cake Flour vs. Bread Flour

Ever wonder if what type of flour you use really matters? 

The above loaf of bread  was accidentally made with cake flour.  See, I buy my flour in bulk and keep it in the bags in a metal trash can (clean, of course) with a tight fitting lid.  When it was time to make bread this week I figured that I had plenty of flour in the can and I was right.  I still had at least half of a 50lb bag.  Without looking at the label I reached in and filled my flour canister and went about making the bread.  It wasn't until the first rising stage that I got a notion something may be wrong but I figured it was just not quite warm enough in the house since it is fall and it had risen some so I figured we'd just make do with a slightly more dense than normal loaf. 

Turns out it wasn't the loaf that was dense.  It was me.  When I pulled it out of the oven, instead of a nice, normal, slightly browned, light and fluffy loaf of bread I got that white rock in the picture. I had completely forgotten that I had cake flour at all and had just assumed that the flour I had grabbed was either the all purpose flour or the bread flour either or which would have been fine.  These loaves didn't just look terrible, they tasted terrible.  The only ones who would eat them were the dogs and I don't think they were really thrilled with it.

Now, after spending nearly 3 hours making bread the last thing I wanted to do was have to start all over but that's what I get for not being diligent in the first place. With the second set of loaves I made sure I had bread flour not cake flour. 

Now, this is what bread should look like (ignoring the poor quality of the image, of course).  Brown, not white.  Fluffy, not rock hard.  Nice loaf shape, not whatever that other thing was.  So now we all know that the flour you use makes a definite difference.