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.
In case it seems like I never blog anymore, this is why.
The DIY AMAYC (As Much As You Can) wedding is only 8 weeks and 2 days away!
(Excuse me while I run off and scream into a pillow)
It's not that bad, really. But there are a lot of things to do. Kane may just not get a lot of training in the next two weeks. My garden might feel a bit neglected. I'm feeling bad already.... :-)
The favors have to be done, the bread bakes, the porta-pottys ordered (thanks, hon!), the shrug knitted, the invitations mailed, the shoes must be found, the decorations decided on and aquired.....
The most important thing is that we have a date, we have a minister and we are ready!
What else do we need, right? (well, yes, a license would be good to make it all official and all, I know)
It's going to be very busy, but fun at the same time. Sean is such a wonderful guy, I can't wait to make things official! :-)
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.
It's Christmas in March!
Look at what arrived in the mail just the other day....a new set of interchangeable circular knitting needles and some new yarn! I'm as excited as a child on Christmas morning!
I've had the book Fitted Knits by Stefanie Japel for a few months now. I picked it up at my local used/new bookstore for a few dollars less. I was very excited to find it there!!!
I've been knitting on and off since I was a teenager (waaay back when), but other than 2 sweaters (part of the 80s glitter/glam, pouffy type knitted sweater), it's been mainly scarves and other straight, rectangular and, let's face it, "easy" knitting projects. I'm a much better crafter with other things than I am at knitting!
My mom knits. my grandmother knits, my aunt knits (more on her in a later post as I am currently knitting a project with her yarn, spun by her, from her sheep. How neat is that?). They are all great knitters. Socks, complicated patterns, baby sweaters, caps etc. I finally started wanting to knit something other than a straight rectangle, and I've since had my grandmother teach me to knit socks (which I still have not actually done!), started (almost finished) on a baby sweater (yep, the baby is way too big for the sweater by now) and now I'm ready for the big time. I think. I hope.
See, I have chosen to knit myself a little bolero type sweater for our wedding this fall. It's going to be here at home, in the backyard. We're planning a laid back ceremony, and I'm not wearing a big, fancy dress. I've already found a nice and simple dress (yes, it's white) and I wanted to add some color to it by knitting this bolero. We picked the colors of apple green and dark brown, so that is what my sweater is going to be. Green for the body and brown for the ribbing/collar. It's labeled as one of the easy projects, so I should be able to finish in....oh, 7 months.
I have until October to finish it. But I promised myself I couldn't start until I finished my other 2 knitting projects - the scarf from my aunt's wool and the baby sweater. Sigh.....such temptation.
So - how about you - do you also have unfinished knitting or crafting business laying around?
Greetings from the newlyweds! :-) Yes, it's great although it really doesn't feel like much has changed. lol. Instead of the "When are you getting married?" questions, we now get the "When are you getting pregnant?" questions. lol. Oh and the "Mrs. Baaaaaaarley" wherever I go. Yep. You know who you are. I'm hereby letting you know that you're weird. And you should stop now.
Back home I ventured out in the garden to find that the bok choi and chard I had planted the weekend before the wedding had survived, the cabbage and broccoli that still needs to be planted has survived the neglect, the raspberry bushes and persimmon tree that friends gave us for the wedding are waiting for their "place" and I had a huge bounty of peppers! I think I'm going to make some pepper jelly this weekend and can it as holiday gifts. We have a mixture of Carolina Bell peppers, Banana peppers and some Wenk's Yellow Hot. I also have some cutie Lemon Drop hot peppers that aren't in the picture.
