For my final project, I decided to make a chocolate babka because I was craving something sweet and it seemed fun to make. I chose the recipe from the king Arthur flour website. I decided to half the recipe since there is only 3 people in my household and I decided to just twist it into a braid instead of making it into a wreath. This recipe took me 2 days to complete. The first day was making the dough and the second day was making the filling and assembling it to bake it. When making the dough, I was worried that it wouldn't turn out well because I don't have a stand mixer [so I have to do everything by hand] and it was very very dry. After adding the butter little by little it was still very dry. I had to knead the dough for around 10 minutes in order for it to be in dough shape. The next day I made the filling. The filling was very dry after adding the powder sugar. I think it would have been better if I sifted it before. It said that after resting it for 30 minutes, it would thicken, but after 30 minutes it looked exactly the same. Rolling out the dough was very hard because the dough was very tough but after 5 minutes of putting pressure on it, it started to work better. When I was putting the chocolate spread onto it, the chocolate looked very dry, so I microwaved it for 10 seconds to let it soften a bit. When applying it onto the dough, it seemed very thick. I didn't microwave it again because the recipe said it is suppose to thicken. Overall the babka went really well and my parents thought it tasted very good because it was nice and soft in the inside. I also didn't put the glaze on because my parents already thought that the babka was already sweet. The only problem/thing I would change when I make this again is that I would change something about the chocolate sauce. I would try using Nutella instead because when the babka came out, the chocolate was very crusty and it wasn't smooth or like melted. But it still tasted very good! I learned so much this year in baking. I improved on reading recipes and understanding what it means and I learned so many new techniques. Some of the techniques I learned are creaming butter/softening it when making cookies, putting a hot pot filled with boiled water and a bowl on top to melt ingredients, making choux pastry, and much more! recipe & timelineday 2
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Today, I made a Japanese cheesecake. I didn't expect it to turn out nice because it was my first time making it, but it actually turned out really well. I like how this type of cake wasn't to sweet and that it didn't need that much sugar. It needs 60g of sugar. Everything went really well when I made it. I even found out how to make cake flour. Cake flour is just flour and cornstarch. The cake doesn't look that appetizing but it tastes very good. It almost tastes exactly like the cheesecake from uncle tetsu in metrotown. One thing that I would change about it, is by putting in the oven for a little bit longer and maybe putting it in a circle pan because it would look a lot nicer. Overall it tasted very good!
Today I made chocolate chip cookies. Now that I make cookies so often it is very quick to make it. It only takes me 25 minutes to prep and bake them! The cookies tasted really good and I found out that when you press the cookies down a little bit it makes the cookies a little bit more flatter.
Today, I made double chocolate chip cookies. When I melt the butter, it was really hot but not to the point where it was boiling. After adding in the other ingredients, the mixture was still hot so I decided to put some of the mixture in a separate bowl with the egg. I put it there because I wanted to make sure the egg won't cook. After that, I added the dry ingredients to the wet. The cookie dough was really thick but everything turned out well and the cookies tasted amazing.
Today, I made sourdough bread with my sourdough starter. I chose to do the extra tangy sourdough bread from www.kingarthurflour.com and I half the recipe. I started by putting all the ingredients in one bowl and mixing it all together. I then started to knead it, and it was very soft!. After I kneaded it, I let it rest for 90 minutes. After 90 minutes, I split the dough in half and shaped it into oval shape. After that I let it rest for 60 minutes. I then put it in the oven for 25 minutes. The bread was really nice and soft in the inside. One thing that I would change, would be the outside part. The outside was really hard...but I know that sourdough is usually hard on the outside.
My sourdough starter is alive! I think my starter went really well, because it smells exactly like sourdough and it has that strechy gluey texture. One thing that I noticed, is that yesterday I saw this dry clump on the top of the starter. When I added more water and flour yesterday, I just left it in there because I didn't know if it was "normal". I think I'm going to make sourdough bread sometime this week. I will put it in the refrigerator for now and if the dry clump is still in there, I'll just take the clump out and throw it out. Overall, I'm excited to eat some sourdough!
This what my starter looked like after a day. I named my starter Benny. I also found that on the top of the starter, it was very dry. The starter was very stretchy and gluey. I added more flour and water into the starter.
This is what my sourdough starter looked like after being in the jar for a full day Today, I added more flour and water. I switched the jar into a bowl, because the jar was getting really full. The starter is really stretchy and gluey and it smells really good!
This is what my sourdough starter looked like after being in the jar for a full day. Today I added more flour and water. I found that after I added in the ingredients, it was really hard to get the bottom of the day 1's "dough". So I think for tomorrow, I am going to put the starter in a bigger bowl first, so that I know that everything is mixed well.
Today I started the sourdough starter. It was nice and simple. I found that there was a little bit of excess flour, but it still wouldn't stick or blend in with the dough. I then decided to put the dough in another bowl to make sure all the flour was blended in well with the dough. Tomorrow I will add more flour and water!
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AuthorHi my name is Avia and I am from Canada. My favourite thing to bake are cookies. I want to learn how to make macarons and cream puffs. Archives
May 2020
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