Intro to Baking Recap: Week 9

Intro to Baking Recap: Week 9


One week before the finals! And one day after Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. They celebrate the holiday with challah, a sweet, buttery bread that's braided, and topped with sesame or poppyseeds.


Our project for the day: Challah Bread, Pumpkin Muffins, Spiced Banana Bread, Peanutbutter Cookies and Linzer Cookies.

I got started on the Peanutbutter Cookies while the other two started on the Banana Bread and the Challah Bread. After I mixed the Peanutbutter Cookie dough, I covered it and stuck in the fridge. The person doing the Challah Bread had to leave to take an important call, so I took over.
The dough was pretty heavy and didn't rise much, but that's to be expected from a fairly rich dough that contains butter and eggs. Chef showed us how to braid the bread two different ways: the straight way, and the turban. The turban looked really cool (I regret not taking a picture of the other group's bread), but the straight way was easier to cut into slices.
After braiding, the bread was proofed, brushed with egg wash, sprinkled with sesame seeds, and baked....

...Our lovely Challah. It was buttery and eggy, but not as rich as Brioche. I think I like Challah better than Brioche.
For our Banana Bread, we sprinkled on some brown sugar, chocolate chips, and cinnamon streusel topping...

....and the middle sank. This is what happens when one goes overzealous with the toppings. But it tasted excellent, good texture and flavor.
We put the chocolate chip streusel on the Pumpkin Muffins too. Chef really liked it--the other groups' had too much chocolate chips, which made the muffin too "chocolatey" and overpowered the pumpkin flavor.

Surprisingly, we ended up with extra time today (this is VERY rare), so Chef told us to bake Spritz cookies as well. Those are fairly easy to make, so we made the dough, and used a pastry bag to pipe the cookies into a cute spiral.
Our Linzer Cookies on the other hand, got pretty annoying. We used cookie cutters to cut out the shapes, but the dough got soft very quickly, and difficult to handle. We had to put the dough back in the freezer repeatedly.

Once baked, the Linzer cookies were filled with jam. They tasted great, even though they were a pain to deal with--great almond flavor, and the jam was a nice complement.

So here are all our products. We got a very good critique on Peanutbutter Cookies, they were nice and crisp, good peanutbutter flavor.

Everything went very well today. No mishaps, no culinary fiasco, no burned products...today was a good day.

Next week...the final.