Dark Chocolate glaze

Chocolate cake from Genoa

suitable for spring form ~ 28Ø

5 large eggs,
150 g sugar
80g flour
40g cocoa powder
50 g melted unsalted butter

Heat egss and sugar in a glass or metal bowl over steam until it becomes lukewarm.
Whisp in a mixer until trippled in size. Mix in sifted combination of flour and cocoa powder, take some of the batter out, add to melted butter, and combine with the batter again.

Do not mess too much with the batter, it will deflate.

Glaze


8 g gelatin
15 g chocolate
65 g water
125 g sugar
35 g cocoa powder
35 g heavy cream

Bloom the gelatin, melt and add to water, sugar, cocoa powder and cream. Bring to a boil and pour over the chocolate.

Baking for Maia

I made this chocolate cake for a friend's 3 month old child's baptism party. I have documented my trial and error in a thread at the eGullet community ( http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=88605 ). I have gotten loads of help and a lot of feedback over there.

The first cake went all over the kitchen as I dropped it before getting it in the oven. After two or three atempts, I got something that I was pleased with. I learned that baking a cake sure is different from making loaves of bread.

Timing the sourdough sponge

I usually make a sourdough sponge, from some inactive sourdough starter that I take out of the fridge, and a batter of equal amounts of flour and water. Most of the time my sponge develops overnight or while at work. Uptil now, the lifecycle of the sponge has been quite a mystery to me. The amount of leaven I put in has also been very "random", and I suspected that this really has an impact on the sponge.

In some areas timing is of less importance when working with sourdough, since everything is going at a slower pace. However; my experience when it comes to timing of the sponge, is that it's very critical. I've had some ruined atempts trying to bake with an inactive one, and I promise you that it's a recipe for disaster ( http://www.glennbech.com/2006/04/sourdough-disaster.html )

So, I did a little experiment, to see how the amount of "inactive" sourdough starter affects the speed of development. I also wanted to document the total lifecycle, from inactive to inactive.

This is how I set it up

• I took two measuring cups, labeled one "A", and mixed in 18g inactive sourdough starter with 100g flour and 100g water at 23c.

• I took the other measuring cup, labeled it "B" and mixed in 36g inactive sourdough starter with 100g flour and 100g water at 23c. I put a thermometer in one of them and setup up my "proofing lamp" so that the temperature is constant 28-29 degrees C.

• I then checked the experiment every 30 minutes or so, photographed it, and measured volume for each cup.

#	time	Delta	tot. Time	A	B
1	19:44	00:00	00:00	2.9	3
2	20:15	00:31	00:31	2.9	3.1
3	20:48	00:33	01:04	2.95	3.4
4	21:32	00:44	01:48	3.1	4
5	22:03	00:31	02:19	3.5	4.5
6	22:35	00:32	02:51	4	5.2
7	23:09	00:34	03:25	4.8	6
8	23:40	00:31	03:56	5.3	5.5
9	00:12	00:32	04:28	6	5
10	00:39	00:27	04:55	5.8	5.5
11	06:39	06:00	10:55	7	5
12	15:52	09:13	20:08	3	3

For a grahical presentation of the data, click here

To see the picture taken at a certain time, click the entry in the "time" column.

Thoughts and Analysis

• An interesting observation is that both samples, grew exponentialy, decreased in size before "puffing up" one last time with a lot of foam. You can clearly see this in the graph at sample 11 for "A", and 10 for "B.
  
  
• The 18g sponge peaked at 7 hours, the 36g one peaked at 9. This is usefull information if I know I'll be working late or doing something after work.
  
  
• It would be very interesting to know the best time to use the sponge. My best guess would be one the the "peeks" in activity. Since this is the time where you have the largest number of active yeast cells, and lb. Sf. Bacteria.
  
  
• It would be very interesting to know if my data is valid only for my current starter, or if other starters work the same way.
  

Please feel free to comment on this entry or discuss it in the eGullet baking & cooking forum .
You can also email me any comment at mail@glennbech.com

White leaven Bread

This is my experiments with the time consuming "White leaven Bread" from Dan Lepard's book "The handmade loaf". Since I did this on a weekday, I had "bulk ferment" the dough one day, shape and "retard" the loaves overnight in the fridge.

I baked one loaf straight out of the fridge, and let the other one come back to room temperature before baking.

The texture of the loaf that I let back to room temperature were just what I was looking for.

I did not have any strong flour at hand, so I added a tsp. of dried gluten powder.






The recipe

This is a basic white sourdough bread. The thing to notice however, is that only 20% of the flour is in the sponge. This makes the dough very slow. It needs 4 hours of bulk fermenting with fliping and stretching, and the same amount of proofing. The recipe also suggests keeping the temperature below 25c, that slows down the dough additionaly.

The dough is also wet and difficult to handle, so I suggest generous amounts of olive oil, and at least a 20 minute autolysis, leaving the salt out. My supermarket flour has vitamin C added, so I didn't bother to put in any extra.

200 g white fully activated sourdough sponge (100% hydration)
500 g strong flour
325 g water
1 tsp of fine sea salt.

Baker's percentages calculator updated

http://www.glennbech.com/bakerspercentage/index.html

It's now possible to "suggest" a recipe of a given hydration level. This feature makes sure that the flour in he leaven is about 33% of your total weight, and that the hydration level of your dough is what you want.

I also added the possibility to scale a recipe up and down using factors between 0 and n. (1.5 is an extra half, 2 is double, 0.5 is half etc.)

Play around with it .-)

Making proving baskets

Swearing to myself never to let dough stick to my cloth and ruin a loafI set out to make myself some wooden proving baskets.

A local "Panduro" hobby store had everything I needed. A wooden basket and 50 cm of linnen cloth. A few moments later, a couple of proving baskets were reality.

I floured these generously with rye flour, and tested them out on a barley bread from Dan Lepard's book "The handmade loaf". Progress report will follow :-)

Click the image for a full size version. On the top image you can see it on top of my very personal and hand crafted bread peel that I had a blast making a few weeks back.

Baker's percentages calculator

This tool is my gift for the lazy, and for those who flunked math. You can easily enter the size of your sponge and main dough, and baker's percentages are calculated.

http://www.glennbech.com/bakerspercentage/index.html

If anyone wonder; Baker's percentages are basicly the ratio of other ingredients, like water to the amount of flour. It's a great way to compare recipes.

Suggestions for new features are also welcome. Thins I've already thought of is ;

- A Scaling factor. Enter a number (for axample 5.4) and scale the recipe by that amount.

- Warnings and suggestions (When sponge is to small/large), hydration levels over 80% or below 50%, salt leves are too large etc.

Please go and play with it .-)

Making a shovel for putting pizza, baguettes and bread in the oven

I got a little bit inspired the other day and decided to create one of those baker's shovels that is used to insert bread into the oven.

I started with a piece of oak wood about 160 cm long. The process is pictures can be found here. it's not very beautifull, but it's something I made, and I'm very proud .-) You know, a little like the fact that every mother thinks their child is the most beautifull.

(Click the image on the left) for a larger version.

My next design, (when this one breaks) will be lighter, and I'll remember to use nails and glue instead of screws since the wood is dry and cracks when you try to connect the screw the boards together.