To Blog: Why? What? and Pumpkin Coconut Sour Cherry Bread

So here I am again a few days later than I thought I would post this because I've been thinking about many things relative to this blog, the most salient being: why blog? Or more precisely, why blog about food in my case.

There are many posts out there about why blog. Some of them make a lot more sense to me than others but they're all valid to their own authors, and in the end I have to find the reason for myself. A while back I had whole new plans for this blog which all revolved around food, and of course as things are wont to do, things changed. Then I decided that I would post photographs and other things and write fewer recipes and that it would become a more general blog, and that got under way, but somehow I was driven back to more recipes and fewer other things than food, basically only food.
The thing is, dear readers, that I really love food, but I'm not sure I love blogging about it anymore.

When I started blogging about food almost three years ago, I'd been blogging for a year on another platform and was a bit frustrated with my blog because it was general and I felt the lack of focus meant that it was more of a journal than anything else, and between you and me, I've never been much of a journaler. At all. Then one day while doing a recipe search, for a cupcake recipe of all things, I discovered food blogs and started perusing them and loving them, because I love food, and after a while I thought to myself that the simplest way to create focus in my blogging would be to blog about food. Thus Saffron & Blueberry was born.

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Bread Pudding when I dream of snow...

Although I'd agree with anyone that there are just some kinds of cold days that are beyond miserable, I have to say I'm a cold weather kind of gal at heart. I love winter clothing, wrapping up in thick sweaters, trying different kinds of knots in my scarves every day (I wouldn't be a real French girl if I didn't have a drawer full of scarves and at least five different ways of putting them on), cradling a cup of hot chocolate or a steaming bowl of soup in my cold hands and then savoring them slowly, letting the warmth seep through me, all things I am happy for every time the calendar hits December.

Unfortunately, my ideal winter and the one I actually get here are two rather different things. I suppose I should be thankful that we don't get three feet of snow at a time the way my sister and her family do in Chicago, but a little snow once in a while would be nice, and by that I don't mean snow that I might see if I were up between 6:00 and 6:17am before it has essentially vanished, making one doubt it was ever here to begin with.
Last year there was one such day, unexpectedly. Granted, it caused the whole nation to grind to a halt and I did lock myself out of the house that morning while walking the "one who brings the crazy." But even while heavily pregnant, somewhat inappropriately dressed, trying to control one very spazzy dog reconnecting with something in her Dutch, barge-pulling, canine DNA, and walking over to the hotel nearby to call A. to come home and let me in, I was still thoroughly charmed by the six inches of snow through which I was trudging. Call me crazy.

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Norwegian Coffee Cake: A Yeast-Averse Story

If you've read some of my posts before, you've noticed that I don't make a lot of bread, and that on the rare occasions when I do, I mention my aversion to yeast. Well, maybe it's time I admitted that this aversion I have to yeast is mostly due to my often having a packet of yeast in the cupboard that, logically, hardly ever gets used resulting in the yeast becoming so old and ineffective that, when I finally get around to using it, a fair amount of cursing and imprecations is directed at said yeast when my dough still hasn't risen after 3 hours of pilot-lighting, oven-front sitting, steam bathing, etc...

So imagine my utter delight when, having purchased a brand new shiny packet of yeast a couple of months ago, all my bread endeavors now promptly ferment, bubble and rise and I obtain the bread I was trying to make, my kneading inability notwithstanding.
Really, there are two culprits in this newfound desire I have to actually make bread and brave yeast: their names are Jamie and Deeba. I mentioned both of them in the last post.

What you may not know about them is that Jamie has this fabulous recipe for a chocolate meringue coffee cake on her blog which was the catalyst of my old yeast/new yeast debacle, and Deeba pulls baked goods out of her oven like Mary Poppins pulls whatever she might need out of her bag. So when Jamie declared that she was hosting this month's Bread Baking Day and that the theme of it would be her birthday which was the 28th of January, I felt I really should participate both because she is a dear friend and because she got me to start baking bread. Deeba's contribution was to insist on posting bread after bread after bread, some from the Ottolenghi book which I gave her when she was here for FBC, which heightened my desperation for bread-baking success. 

So out came the Tassajara Bread Book which I purchased last summer with every intention of making a ton of bread, and which went unused until yesterday when I leafed through it looking purposely for a yeasted recipe (yes there is a whole un-yeasted bread section in there) and came upon this Norwegian coffee cake. Flavored with cardamom, which I love, at its simplest, it seemed just the thing to bake on a chilly Sunday.
I had a bar of Valrhona orange chocolate I needed to use and orange and chocolate being two flavors that marry well with cardamom, half of it went into the bread. I could choose any shape and having never baked challah or any other braided bread before, I decided to try a four-stranded braid. Though I knew I'd gone wrong about halfway through the loaf (past the point where the diagrams ended), it wasn't until after I'd put the bread in the oven that I suddenly understood how the weave worked.

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When my Stollen was Stolen

When someone suggested that I try making a German Christmas Stollen bread, it occurred to me that while I knew I'd had Stollen when I was little, I couldn't for the life of me remember what it tasted like (other than that it was obviously sweet) or what the consistency of it should be. Was it a cakey bread? a bready bread? The suggestion was accompanied by a translated recipe for Stollen from Dr. Oetker (specifically from an old Dr. Oetker recipe book) and, while yeast and I are not friends, the lack of yeast and the proportions of some ingredients in this particular recipe seemed a bit odd to me, so I decided to look up Dr. Oetker and see if there was an official "interwebs" version of the Dr. Oetker Stollen; indeed there was. The two recipes were comparable except for a few of the measurements including those relating to baking soda and baking powder.

As I am skeptical of my bread-making abilities at the best of times and under the most auspicious circumstances, I decided to go with the official web version rather than the translated version. I made a few very minor changes here and there: I added cranberries instead of currants and no candied peels as A. is not fond of them and, while I like them in some instances (e.g. coated in chocolate), in baked breads they make me think of English fruit cake which, frankly, I loathe. I also didn't put the butter and icing sugar on at the end, as I traditionally should have done, mostly because as I didn't know how sweet it was going to be, I didn't want to oversweeten it to my and A.'s taste buds by adding the icing sugar coat on the exterior. For us this turned out to be a wise move.

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Late DB Challenge November! - Tender Potato Bread (Fougasse)

Like the White Rabbit I am late! I'm late I'm late I'm late! - Comme le Lapin Blanc je suis en retard! je suis en retard en retard en retard!

Therefore, I am presenting to you a Daring Baker's Focaccia aka Tender Potato Bread as challenged by the lovely Tanna of My Kitchen in Half Cups as a photo-post.
Donc je vous présente la Focaccia (Fougasse) des Pâtissiers Téméraires aka Pain Tendre aux Pommes de Terre tel que défié par la charmante Tanna de My Kitchen in Half Cups en billet-photo.

First you bake the potato, then you mash the potato, and you mix potato water from cooking the potato with the mashed potato...
D'abord on cuit la patate, puis on écrase la patate, et on mélange de l'eau de cuisson de la patate avec la patate écrasée...

Then you add yeast and let sit for a few minutes, and then you add flour and salt (have I forgotten something?) and you mix, and then you let it sit for a bit...
Puis on ajoute de la levure et on laisse reposer quelques minutes, et on ajoute de la farine et du sel (ai-je oublié quelque chose?) et on mélange, et on laisse reposer un peu de temps...

And then you knead and you knead and you knead some more and you add flour so it doesn't stick and you knead some more, and then you let rise under some plastic film...
Et puis on pétrit et on pétrit et on pétrit un peu plus et on ajoute de la farine pour que ça ne colle pas et on pétrit un peu plus, et puis on laisse reposer sous du film alimentaire...

And if you're lucky (which I apparently seem to be especially since I am yeast-retarded), it rises and it rises and it rises until it's doubled in size...
Et si on a de la chance (dont j'ai l'air de bénéficier en sachant que je ne suis pas douée avec la levure), ça gonfle et ça gonfle et ça gonfle jusqu'à ce que ça ait doublé de volume...

And then you choose what you're going to do with it and I picked an olive oil, thyme and onion focaccia which you cover to let rise some more before you bake it, and...
Et puis on choisit ce qu'on va en faire et j'ai choisi une focaccia à l'huile d'olive, au thym et aux oignons qu'on couvre pour laisser gonfler encore un peu avant de la cuire, et....

An olive oil, basil and onion focaccia...
Une focaccia à l'huile d'olive, au basilique et aux oignons...

And then it bakes and it becomes golden and fluffy and thick, and you eat it...
Et puis elle cuit et devient dorée et moelleuse et épaisse, et on la mange...

You eat it by itself, or as a sandwich with mortadella and/or tomatoes and/or gherkins...
On la mange toute seule, ou en sandwich avec de la mortadelle et/ou des tomates et/ou des cornichons...

And you tell yourself that you'll try it with all sorts of other things next time in the dough itself such as dried tomatoes and cheese and herbs and so many other tasty things...
Et on se dit qu'on l'essayera une prochaine fois avec des tas d'autres choses dans la pâte même comme des tomates séchées ou du fromage ou des herbes et tant d'autres choses savoureuses...

And you encourage anyone who's made it through this whole message to see what other wonderful fancy bread creations the Daring Bakers have made by clicking through to the Daring Bakers' website.
Et on encourage tous ceux ou celles qui sont arrivés en bas de ce billet à aller voir quelles autres créations boulangères fabuleuses ont été imaginé par les autres Pâtissiers Téméraires en allant sur le site des Pâtissiers Téméraires.