Honey Rye Sourdough Yeast Bread

Now that you have all made some great sourdough starters, or at least read my how-to, here is a recipe for a very yummy honey rye bread. It's one of our favorites and who knows, maybe it will be yours as well?!

It is a mixed flour bread, with both rye and wheat flour, so the rye is not too overpowering. Just enough to give your tummy something to work on. :-)

I'm going to start you off with a bread that has both sourdough starter and yeast. To ensure your success, although I have complete faith in you being able to do this!

A note about yeast: I use bread machine yeast (also called instant active dry yeast) which comes in the small glass containers. Once the bottle is open, I store them in the fridge. Since I bake bread almost every weekend, this works well for me. If you are used to baking with other kinds of yeast, fresh (Lucky you!) or active dry yeast, you can use this conversion table to figure out just how much to use.There's one more thing to remember about yeast: dry yeast can be added with all the other dry ingredients (like the flour) while fresh yeast will need the warm liquid to dissolve in before you proceed. There are a million different opinions on how to add the yeast to your bread - throw it in and hope for the best, that's how I do it!

These loaves are on the small side. I've doubled the recipe before, so you should be able to, and then just bake them a few minutes longer. Maybe double the recipe and make three loaves as my friend suggested.

Honey Rye Bread with sourdough starter
1 1/4 cups of warm water
1.5 tablespoons honey (I've used both raw honey and "regular" honey)
2 tablespoons rye sourdough starter
1 1/4 cups bread flour
6 - 7 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 1/4 cups rye flour
2 1/4 teaspoons bread machine yeast
2 teaspoons salt

Mix all ingredients in mixer (or in a bowl by hand if you want to!).

Run 3 minutes on low (Knead by hand for 6 minutes).
Run 9 minutes on medium (Knead by hand for 10 minutes).

Let the dough rest for 90 minutes with a kitchen towel covering the bowl.

Here is my dough after the first rise. It should double in size.

Pour the dough out on a floured tabletop and cut it into 2 pieces (or 3).


Form round balls with your dough, and then stretch them by turning and pushing the dough up on the underside....so that the dough stretches across the top.

Pushing the dough up on the underside while stretching with my hands.
Move the bread round in your hands to stretch evenly on all sides.

Stretched bread dough.

Let the dough balls rest for 10 minutes under a kitchen towel. Form into oblong shapes using this simple technique:

1. FLatten the dough by pushing down with your hands to form a rectangle.

Gently pull on the edges and flatten with your fingers
until you have a 10-12 inches by 6-7 inches rectangle.

1. Fold one long edge over to the middle.
2. Fold the other long edge over to meet in the middle
3. Fold the two folded edges together
4. Roll slightly to get everything to stick together

Place your loaves on a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper.

You can add a design by cutting with a sharp knife across the top - lengthwise.

Let the breads rise under a towel for 60-90 minutes - until double in size.



Turn oven to 480 F. (or as close as your oven gets!)
Put your loaves in the oven and spray some water into the oven. You can also add some icucubes to a tray underneath your bread.
Lower the temperature to 425 F and bake for 25-35 minutes.
Let your loaves cool on a rack under a kitchen towel.

Enjoy! If you bake this - please leave me a comment and let me know how it went!

223 pieces of bread

My dear friend came over a few weekends ago, and brought her KitchenAid mixer. It was time to bake bread for the wedding.
I had already decided on a simple recipe for good rolls, that wouldn't require a lot of hand-shaping or kneading for that matter. I made these rolls a few weekends before for my bridal shower and everyone loved them, so....I'm hoping everyone will love them for the wedding as well!!!
I froze some after the shower and they turned out fine, so hopefully being frozen for 6+ weeks won't hurt them.

Sean was busy outside with our neighbor's digger digging a trench for the flagstone walkway. It's going to look great. Gotta love a man that knows how to operate heavy machinery. :-)

With my Electrolux mixer (30+ years old, and still kicking!) and her KitchenAid, we made a dozen sets of dough. My mixer made 2 to hers making one, so we did pretty well.

The dough looked like little mushrooms rising under the towels.... This dough requires no kneading and after rising, all you do is tip it out onto a surface with some flour on it and cut each set into 12-14 pieces, irregular shape is fine.

We put parmesan cheese on some, some with sesame seeds, some with sea salt and some just plain. Then we baked them for 12 minutes or so, and voila - after at least 8 hours of baking (and cleaning) we had 223 rolls of bread.

Minus the three that I had right out of the oven.
Minus the three that Julie had right out of the oven.
Minus the four that Sean ate coming in from digging the walkway outside.
Minus the two that Kane stole off the dining room table when I wasn't looking. (with cheese of course.)
Minus the five that I let Julie take home with her.

Here's the recipe for wedding rolls:
3 3/4 tsp dry yeast (I use bread machine yeast, if you don't here's a conversion table)
500 ml or 2 cups + 3 tbsp water (body temperature)
100 ml or 1/2 cup of kefir, plain yougurt or milk
2 tsp salt
1 tbsp honey
5 - 5.5 cups all-purpose flour

Mix all ingredients except the flour in a bowl.
Add half of the flour at first and mix until you have a nice shiny dough. Add the rest of the flour.
The dough will be a bit looser than what you may be used to.
Place a towel over the bowl and let it rise at room temperature for 1-2 hours.
Turn your oven on to 425 F.
Pour the dough out onto a surface well dusted with flour. Do Not Knead!!!
Use a sharp knife or dough scraper to cut into 12-15 pieces.
Add toppings if you wish. Toppings tend to stick better if you brush the rolls with a little water first.

Bake them for 14-16 minutes, preferrably with a bowl of water in your oven to get some steam.
Let cool on a wire-rack.
Eat promtply with butter. Yes, butter. The real stuff.

Once they have cooled, you can freeze them if you wish.
Find a friend to bake with. I highly recommend it.

Wedding DIY Weekend - Part 1(Cake Bake & Test)

Can I just say how sick I am of cake right now? I normally have the biggest kind of sweet tooth (if it's chocolate and it's near me, it's gone), and now I really feel like I could do without seeing, or eating, cake until the wedding. This is, of course, better for my hips. :-)

My bestest friend Leslie came down from Detroit to help me make cakes, and also to get started on invitations. Leslie is a high school art teacher in Detroit (all together now: Bless her heart!)and we've been friends for 20 years. When I first moved to the US, my high school French teacher introduced us since Leslie had been an exchange student in Sweden. Twenty years later, through life's ups and downs, here we are. Still friends. I love her. Here she is hanging out with Kane :-)


I knew I wanted something with fresh berries - Sean and I both love blueberries, strawberries, raspberries etc. Sean had also indicated a strong hint for angel food cake which he loves. Since he's actually also in the wedding (ha!), angel food cake was one of the cakes we chose to bake. We also picked a recipe for "white cake" and I found a recipe for yellow cake at Bakerella's site here.

Insert HOURS of mixing, whipping, sifting, baking here. This is a quick view of what it all looked like:

The fillings ranged from Wilton icing with fresh strawberries (which made a very sweet mousse), various jams, fresh raspberries, fresh blueberries. We also attempted to make a blueberry mousse and a raspberry mousse, but that didn't work out too well. The mousses never gelled. Hence the pink mousse with the sad face in the picture above.

For frostings we made a cream cheese frosting, a white cake frosting, and we also made a recipe for buttercream frosting from a cookbook, and it didn't gel either. It was made with egg yolks, and turned out runny and yellow - not exactly what anyone wants to see on the wedding cake. That's the picture in the bottom middle.

Here's Kane, supervising as usual. He was also handy for whipped cream testing to ensure maximum quality consistency of course. I usually smear a little on top of his nose so that he has to walk around and lick it off...

Then we cut the cake into pie-pieces, added the various fillings...

Here are the finished angel food cake pieces.

The finished moist yellow cake pieces.

We labeled them with numbers and made a voting sheet for everyone....lol. Sean was called in from the Lakeside garden, he was out in the rain planting corn (and wondering who ordered so much corn.... "Errr....you did, honey!"):

Sean planting corn in the rain. I decided to not zoom in more.... :-)

It was time to taste. Each piece here is about a spoonful only. We had 3 different kinds of cake, 7 different fillings and 2 different frostings. Can you multiply all that up? 42 spoonfuls of cake. Each.

It was pathetic. I could only make it to 12 or so. Luckily I had already found my favorite....lol.
Sean and Leslie persevered. Such troopers.

Here's the aftermath. Crumbles and people full of cake:


We finally decided on this:

Bottom: White cake with fresh raspberries
Middle: White cake with chocolate mousse
Top: Angel food cake with blueberries
It will be a 3-tier cake, all covered in cream-cheese frosting and decorated with all kinds of berries: strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and red currant (if I can find them). I found a gorgeous picture here. This is what I'd like for it to look like. Nice. I'm almost starting to feel like having cake again when I see that picture. Almost.

Coming Soon: The invitation-making session.

Happy Memorial Weekend everyone - I hope you'll have a splendid weekend!
Sleeping Dog Bakery is officially closed for cake-baking.....at least for now.

Chocolate Bread

Chocolate!!!!

No, no, no.....this post is not about chocolate bread. Although that is a direct translation of the name of these cute little yummy cookies that I make whenever THAT chocolate need comes over me. So, I make these just about every day. Not really. But I wish I had the metabolism (and genes) that I could! :-) So today I had that chocolate need again. Since we're doing the Biggest Loser weight loss club at work, and yes I'm in it, I don't plan on eating too many of these. I'm gonna eat "just enough." I have no willpower. Just wait and see. Although that wedding of ours in October is a pretty strong goal for loosing a few pounds. :-)

Here's the recipe:

100 g of butter or margarine
0.75 dl of sugar (1/3 cup)
2.5 dl of all-purpose flour (1 cup)
1/2 egg (save the other half for later, or do like me, double the recipe!!!!)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 tablespoon cocoa

You may want to bring out your butter in advance to soften it a little.
Place all the ingredients in a bowl. Mix until crumbles form.
Take about half the crumbles and squeeze into a ball of dough (yes, with your hands).
Shape the ball into a long cylinder (roll against your counter), and place it on a baking sheet with parchment paper. With your fingers, flatten the cylinder until about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.
Whip up the remaining egg and slather on top of the dough pieces with a brush. I add pearl sugar on mine which is a large crystal version of sugar. You can use regular sugar or sprinkles or whatever you want. Nuts work too. Bake in the over for 10 minutes at 350 degrees F.
Let the cookies cool for a minute (really don't wait too long!!!), then cut on the diagonal, about 1/2 inch wide. Let them cool completely. Eat. Or as I'd like to do: inhale, chug glass of cold milk. Repeat. :-)

Now open for Dog Biscuit Business!

Sleeping Dog Bakery - now open for Dog Biscuit Business!!! :-)

My friend Steph and I are both interested in feeding our dogs the best food we can. Gracie, Steph's dog, is a rescue mutt of mixed origins - perhaps border collie and papillon? She is on all-natural Kibble and sometimes enjoys both Kefir and eggs as part of her diet.
Kane is on an all-natural raw diet. I feed him things like chicken backs, leg quarters, chicken necks, turkey necks, turkey wings, ground beef and sometimes we get lucky when my friend Maggie supplies us with rabbit. The amount he gets is based on his current weight and how much physical exercise we are doing at the moment. More about Kane's diet in the future perhaps, or on his Schutzhund Adventures blog.


We looked up a few recipes online and in a book I have and settled on a salmon "cookie" recipe and a baked liver treat. Both dogs WOULD NOT leave the kitchen while we were baking. They were smelling something good, and they were going to make sure they did not miss the taste-testing that could potentially happen.

The salmon treat recipe was made with canned salmon, whole eggs, parsley, sesame seeds, flax seeds, and potato flour. Recipe can be found here.


It was quite easy, and only took some time because I wanted to make pretty cookies using cookie-cutters. :-) Hey, dogs need pretty food too!!! :-)
We used doggie bones, hearts, stars and palmetto trees (for South Carolina.)

The second treat we made was done with chicken livers, molasses and parsley. It truly stunk up the kitchen, which means the doggies LOVED it! :-) The end result was a dried liver treat kind of thing.

Grace and Kane - eagerly awaiting the taste test.

We were really excited that they liked the treats. Both dogs are known to spit out purchased so-called "Gourmet" dog treats and it feels good to know what goes into the treat I give my dog.

What's your dog's favorite treat?

Hello, Hönökakor!!

Dear Friends who diligently read my Schutzhund blog,

As if I don't have enough to do (lol), I've decided to start another blog.

Second to training my GSD Kane, my other passion is all things creative that has to do with getting your fingers involved - ya know; gardening, baking, cooking, knitting, sewing and crafting. Things that make me exercise the other half of my nerdy engineering brain.

I've been duly inspired by a host of other fine men and women who blog about their adventures in cooking, crafting, baking and gardening. You can find a few of the ones I admire in my LINKS section and I'm sure I'll blog about (and link to) some of their great recipes.

For this first post, I thought I'd post something a bit more original, my recipe for swedish Hönökakor.

Hönökakor is from the island of Hönö on Sweden's west coast and (at least while I lived there) you could still buy them from small bakeries that baked this bread (yes, it's bread, not cake.....sorry if you're disappointed!) in woodfired ovens. I obviously do not have a woodfired oven (yet! ha!), but this recipe does have the taste that I remember. This recipe came from here, (in Swedish), but I've translated the measurements and ingredients for you. I use bread machine yeast or fresh yeast for my bread. Bread machine yeast keeps well in the fridge for a few months. I also use stoneground and organic ingredients to the most possible extent. I urge you to do the same if you can - you CAN taste a difference. Here we go:

Bohusländsk Hönökaka (makes 8)

3 oz. fresh cake yeast (or 7.5 tsp active dry yeast, or 6 tsp instant yeast) handy-dandy conversion table here

4 1/4 cups milk (1% or more)

1/4 cup canola oil

1/4 cup light cane syrup

1 tbsp salt

1 cup rye flour

8 1/2 to 9 cups all-purpose flour

If you are using fresh cake yeast, combine it with warmed milk and add the oil. Let the yeast dissolve. If you are using dry yeast, you can add it with other ingredients.

Combine all ingredients, including most of the all-purpose flour and stir until you have a nice, soft dough that "lets go" of the sides of the bowl. You can do this by hand or using a mixer with a dough attachment.

Cover the bowl with a dishtowel and let the dough rise for 30 minutes.

Remove dough from bowl and place on a surface lightly covered with flour. Knead it for a few minutes.

Heat your oven to 500 F.

Rise, rise!

Split the dough into 8 even pieces and shape them into round balls. Let them rise on a baking sheet under a towel for 20-30 minutes.

Use your rolling pin and flatten each piece to a round "cake" about 30 cm across (12 inches). Poke it with a fork and bake one or two at a time on either a baking stone, greased baking sheet or a baking sheet covered with parchment paper.

Bake for 4-5 minutes (just making sure you see this, people! 4-5 MINUTES ONLY!!!!)in the center of the oven. After you remove them from the oven, place them on a rack on top of each other and cover with a towel to retain moisture.

I prefer to cut these into cake-like triangles and eat them with some good cheese, a few slices of salami, som miracle whip or butter in a typical open-faced Swedish "smörgås."

Enjoy! Let me know how yours turned out!

Something smells delicious, mom!