(The 2010 December Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Penny of Sweet Sadie’s Baking. She chose to challenge Daring Bakers’ to make Stollen. She adapted a friend’s family recipe and combined it with information from friends, techniques from Peter Reinhart’s book………and Martha Stewart’s demonstration.)

My grandmother was from Pennsylvania, and I remember her always bringing stollen for the holidays.  I’ve been talking about trying one for a few years now, but I always spend my days before Christmas frantically making chocolate.  This year, instead of chocolate gifts, I made jams.  The jams were done in advance, so I had plenty of time this year.

It wasn’t a difficult bread – it actually reminded me a lot of a cinnamon-raisin challah that a local bakery makes.  Just a basic egg yeast bread, slow-risen, with fruit.  I used candied peel and cherries from the grocery store, and raisins that were rehydrated in orange juice. 

Mixed and in my bread-rising-bowl, it looked like this:

I let it rise, then rolled it out into a big square.  It was almost too big for my silicone rolling mat:

I rolled it up from the long side, then formed it into a round.  I tucked one side inside the other, then "glued" them together with a tiny bit of egg wash.

I snipped around the outside, let it rise one more time, then baked.

Have a close-up:

It was very good. I remember my grandmother’s having more fruit in it, and a glaze on top.  Next year, I’ll make my own candied zest, which should make it a bit more citrus-y, and add another kind of fruit besides the raisins and a few candied cherries. And maybe I’ll replace the powdered sugar with a citrus based glaze, with more fruit on top for decoration.  But those are all just tweaks – it really was quite good just the way it was.

( see the recipe )

This may be the silliest recipe I’ve ever posted.

I saw it on Tasty Kitchen and I couldn’t resist the urge to try it.

Take one pint ice cream – I used butter pecan – and let it sit until it’s soft enough to be squished around with a wooden spoon.

Then add 1.5 cups self-rising flour.  Mix until it’s thoroughly combined.  Dump into a 8×4 loaf pan.

Bake at 350F for 45 minutes.

You get this:

Is it a great gourmet masterpiece? No. But it was solidly good.  I’ll probably never make it again, but it was a fun thing to do once.  And it would be a great project for a kid on a rainy afternoon!

For no apparent reason, I’ve been in the mood for banana bread.  I’d been putting it off until I went to the grocery store this weekend, where I found a bunch of 5 overripe bananas marked down to $.69.  I couldn’t pass them up, so they came home with me.

I have a really good banana bread recipe, with coconut and lime, but I didn’t really want something quite that complicated.  I’m not sure where this recipe came from originally – it’s one of those recipes that lurks in the depths of my recipe database.

I always cheat, and instead of mashing bananas by hand, I just toss them in the stand mixer for a few minutes. After they were sufficiently “mashed”, I took them out of the bowl, then creamed the butter and brown sugar, then added two eggs and put the bananas back in.

I never bother putting dry ingredients in a separate bowl – I just use a bigger measuring cup, and mix them in there.  In this case, I put the 2 cups of flour in my 4-cup measuring cup, and there was plenty of room to mix in the baking soda and salt.  I added a dash of cinnamon to the dry ingredients, but it wasn’t in the recipe.

The dry ingredients went on top of the wet ingredients and got mixed very lightly.  If you wanted nuts, you could add them here, but I didn’t have any.

Then the batter went in a greased loaf pan and baked for an hour.

This is one of the most banana-y banana bread recipes I’ve ever had.  The texture is perfect:

Not every recipe has to be complicated. Sometimes the simple things are perfect just the way they are.

( see the recipe )

I don’t think of bread pudding as savory – or at least I didn’t.  Then I found this Leek Bread Pudding recipe.

The recipe sounds just like bread pudding: toasted bread (I used challah), eggs, milk, and nutmeg.  But instead of sugar and raisins, it’s got leeks and cheese.

What you end up with, though, is closer to dressing.  In fact, it’s going on my list of Christmas side dishes for this year, to replace the bread stuffing that never seems to turn out.

I used about half a loaf of the challah I had leftover.  The leeks got sliced and caramelized while I cubed and toasted the bread.  Then everything got tossed together – the bread, some fresh thyme (I doubled the thyme, and I’d probably throw in some sage as well next time I make it), the caramelized leeks, and the fresh chives. 

The NYT recipe called for a 13×9 pan, but I tried Smitten Kitchen’s idea and put it in a large loaf pan.  I don’t have any clue how she managed to get it back out of the loaf pan in one piece, because despite using a non-stick loaf pan and butter, the cheese still stuck firmly to the bottom of the pan.

Whatever pan you use, layer in the cheese and the bread mixture, pour in the milk and egg mixture, let it sit for 15 minutes so the bread absorbs the milk, then put it in the oven.  The entire house will smell amazing for the hour it takes to bake.

Since mine refused to let go of the pan to be neatly sliced, I just spooned it into a bowl.

I served it with a beer-can chicken:

It’s definitely replacing all my existing stuffing recipes.  You could modify the spices to make it fit with pretty much any meal – the thyme and sage would go fine with poultry, but I don’t see why you couldn’t add other traditional stuffing ingredients, like oysters, apples, or sausage.

But I might not tell my Christmas guests that it’s bread pudding.  At least not until after it’s all been eaten.

( see the recipe )

I figured since the potato bread had come out so well, I’d try my luck with more bread this weekend.

I saw a recipe online for a Leek Bread Pudding, so the logical first step was to make a loaf of challah.

My challah recipe comes from an old friend, and it’s about as simple as bread gets.  I was careful this time to bloom the yeast for the full 10 minutes, and it looked fizzy and healthy before I started adding everything else.  I took that as a good sign.

I added the rest of the ingredients – oil (I use olive), more water, more sugar, and two eggs, kneaded it in the stand mixer, then let it rise.  I put it in the oven with the door closed and the light on, and that seemed to work perfectly.  It was doubled in 2 hours, and I punched it down and let it rise another 45 minutes.

The braiding is easy – just split the dough into thirds (I never get them quite even), lay them out on parchment paper, and braid them.  I usually only get a few twists in.  Tuck the ends underneath to make it look neater.

Then let it rise one more time, and add sesame seeds and egg wash to the top, and bake.  I didn’t want the sesame seeds in the bread pudding, so I left them out this time – the picture above is from an earlier loaf.  I was sloppy with the egg wash – my egg-wash-applying-brush was in the dishwasher, so I tried to use a spoon, and it got messy:

But it was still good. And it made amazing bread pudding…but that’s the next post.

( see the recipe )