More Swirly Goodness

Last Friday my friend and fellow avid baker Nicole came over to bake some loaves with me. We were both intrigued at how my last swirly bread turned out and wanted to try something more dramatic... White and Chocolate Swirl Bread.

We used a basic white bread recipe and a chocolate loaf recipe that I found on someone else's blog ( http://familynature.wordpress.com/2009/04/21/chocolate-loaf-this-is-something-everyone-should-try/ ). There are many recipes for chocolate bread and many ways to mix chocolate in with bread. some, like this one, are actual loaves of bread with cocoa in them. Others use chocolate pastes, sauces, or chips to create more of a dessert bread. We chose this particular recipe because it was very similar to the recipe we were using for the white bread. The procedure and ingredients were similar. This made for a simple and fun bread making experience that produced some great breads.

We ended up making a few different items. First we made two loaves of White and Chocolate Swirl Bread. The pattern turned out great and the texture between the two breads were consistent. It was awesome to see the contrast in colour between the white and chocolate breads swirlled together. Also, the cocoa in the chocolate bread was good enough to produce the lasting and delicious smell and taste of chocolate, yum!

After these two loaves we had so much leftover dough that we could have made a third loaf, but decided to split the dough and make a few other creations! Nicole made a bunch of cinnamon buns while I made a strudel using some leftover cherry filling I had in the fridge. These two creations were of course marbled with white and chocolate bread.

I look forward to more times when I can bake with and for my friends, it is a joy to share this experience with others.

Swirly White and Green Bread

Green and White!

Swirly!

Nice Shape!

Marbled Buns!

I wanted to try a different technique to the way I normally make a bread loaf. I found a book at a public library book sale called 'Artisan Baking Across America' by Maggie Glezer. This book has been very helpful in showing me some new techniques and also stories about various bakers and bakeries across North America. Normally I would just place the risen bread dough into the loaf pan without shaping it much before baking it. Instead I first flattened the dough out (after it had risen for an hour) into a large rectangle folded the dough so it was the length of the pan, then finally rolled it up. The result was a loaf that was quite uniform and familiar to a loaf that I would buy at the grocery store for making regular sandwiches.

Of course I just had to add a twist to the recipe! For quite awhile now I have been considering a bag of pea flour that I saw at the grocery store and what it would be like to use it for bread making. I imagined since the flour was green in colour, the bread would also be green in colour. But after reading the label I had the feeling it would not be as green as I was imagining it to be. So I also bought some green food dye to be on the safe side!

I followed a white bread recipe but included the pea flour and green food dye into half of the recipe. It was neat to work with dough that had such an unusual colour. After folding up the white and green doughs according to the length of the loaf pan I placed the green dough on top of the white dough. Then I trimmed the edges to produce a long rectangles that fit over each other perfectly. Once rolled it produces a nice swirly pattern with a green centre. With the leftover dough from trimming I made several small marbled buns.

Note: I don't have any pictures of the bread after it was sliced because I can't seem to find my card reader. But I assure you, it is quite white green and swirly!