Diva Doings

From Saturday's Diva session our booty:

2 dozen orange rolls

8 nut roll loafs

12 Humongous cinnamon buns

1 failed challah with pears

We had a great time learning about and making some really yummy yeast products last Saturday. the ladies discovered that yeast is alive and treated to a little warmth and sugar-will grow quite nicely in your baked goods.

The Diva disaster of the day was the Challah bread. This is a perfect example of following a recipe leading to failure. I had made this bread twice before with fantastic results. it is a Martha Stewart recipe so I usually do not worry about her instructions as they are usually spot on. However in this one she failed miserably.

When I made it the first two times I followed my knowledge of bread making and put together the wet ingredients with the yeast at the right temperature, then added the flour one cup at a time. Her recipe calls for putting everything in the bowl. Since I follow a recipe when the Diva's are here-I did just that. What I got was a molten piece of lead. So-good lesson for the ladies and myself. There are generally accepted practices for bread making that need to be followed. See picutre of challah which I pulled from the trash to photograph. We pulled it apart in class and noted all its postive (dough was very tasty even though it was very very very very dense), and negative-inedible due ot density, attributes. I threw it away, then decided to photgragh for your viewing pleasure:

good bread gone bad. (first picture)

When you make bread in a bread machine one of the reasons you don't get the proper rise is because everything goes in the machine at once. the other reason is that you should use rapid rise yeast (which is different from instant yeast). However no one tells you that-so how would you know? frankly I am not sure why anyone would use a bread making machine-and if anyone wants mine-feel free to ask. its been in the basement for decades. And hopefully the ladies at the session will have theirs in thier basement after our session and seeing how easy it is to make truly delicious bread. Not something that resembles a combination football chef's hat and tastes like them too!

Excluding the Challah-everything else was absolutely scrumptious. I altered the dough recipe for the Nut Roll and it is just perfect. three days later it is still moist and lovely. So a good experiment. I altered it by using 2 eggs and 2 egg yolks instead of 3 eggs. I also added 1/2 cup of the water at the end. Made the dough very moist but with plenty of lift.

We ate well, and laughed well and forgot about the snow that was falling outside.