Skip to main content

Forever themes of my baking- artisan bread &sourdough

I do bake a lot of cookies, cakes and pastries; I found them extremely useful when I go to parties or simply want to please my foodie friends.  
Indeed, I can always find myself a justified excuse to bake. (Once I started to make the first birthday cake for my friend in lab, I unconsciously have set myself into this situation. So, I felt really relieved that I don't need to bake for the next coming birthday- that is my own lol.) But I don't 'consume' many of the sweet stuffs I bake; baking makes me more aware of how good 'calories' taste, so I actually lost some pounds since I started baking XP. 
What I do bake for myself all the time are sourdough artisan breads! They have even replaced rice totally to become my staple now. I just enjoy the aroma of grains so much and cannot have enough of those bread! I like to try different recipes of artisan bread, mostly changing the grains and nuts I put into the dough. It's amazing that combination of different grains gives you totally different flavors! 
This recipe has some Chinese elements- pine seeds and wolfberries. Wolfberries are those small red fruits on trees and look a little bit like grapes. They're often seen in Chinese herbal medicine recipes and are supposed to nurture your body. I do believe Chinese medicine a lot, but most importantly, wolfberries taste good! And it condenses all the flavors and gives a surprisingly wonderful caramel after baking(￣▽￣). With the pine seeds, as well as the aromas of rye flour- OK, enough self-advertising, let me grab another piece first!
Last but not least, linkage of the recipe (in Chinese) http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5e15a7120102dqu7.html
  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Continue the whole crepe theme: cocoa& banana infused crepe cake

I've been making crepe cakes in a row for three weeks! That sounds ridiculous even to myself, but I just like to keep practicing one recipe until I finally feel happy about it. As a result, I never get the have the 'beliked' cakes often. Now, after my crepe cake battle, I did learn some tricks, especially about how to have really thin crepes. Let's have some troubleshooting, shall we? For those who are not familiar with crepe cakes, or care only about how they taste but never bother to know how they're made, crepe cakes are assembled by layers of crepes, filled with cream in between. To make a crepe cake, you make the crepes individually, let them cool, and layer them to compose the cake with the cream as 'glue'. The whole process is nothing fancy, just get your 'bricks and cement' ready and be a good builder! What is tricky are the quality of your materials, in other words, to get your crepes as thin as possible. There are professional crepe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mooncakes from scratch: what I learn from both BAKING& EXPERIMENTS

Here comes my yearly tradition: making my own moon cakes! You know, it is Chinese tradition that everyone should make moon cakes on Mid-autumn Festival (Moon cake Festival)- just KIDDING... But we do eat those sweet& delicate cakes on that day every year, and you can always find them in Chinatown if you're ever curious how they taste. Since I moved to US, I've more&more realized that I never really appreciated things I easily reached to enough, such as moon cakes. I used to have tons of well-packaged moon cakes at home, fancy-looking and of so many different flavors. And I used to complain quite a lot about having to consume them while they're always too sweet for me. I NEVER imagined it is so complicated to make good, authentic moon cakes. Basically, to make your own mooncakes from scratch, you need to make some special caramel syrup for the dough, slowly saute bean paste to dehydrate them and render the filling, and last but not least to use extrem...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another summer-versioned cake: double-layered green tea cheesecake (For LOVELY I-Li >3<)

It was actually only until now when I am writing the post do I find that "This cake is TOO summer-y lol". I guess it is because it is a kind-of-chilled rainy Saturday morning now. (Love it so much btw!)  I don't know since when have I also fallen into the thought that "It is time to do fall-proper things now!". Apple tarts, pumpkin pies... plumy lip colors and purple eye shadows (=￣ω￣=) .  Hahaha can't believe I was searching for a dark lipstick in the market, though without buying one eventually. Going back to this cake, it was made purely out of my FOREVER LOVE for green tea and cheese. Composed of a tart base, one baked green tea cheese cake layer and one green tea cream cheese mousse layer. (I know I know, lots of green tea and cream cheese~~~) To add more texture and funs, I topped it with some toasted almond slices and dusted it with powder sugar (which is the secret to make everything look fancy!) Most importantly, it is for the LOV...
Post a Comment
Read more