This week I planned to bake the Chocolate Marbled Brioche Bread from Nick Malgieri’s “The Modern Baker”. The recipe seemed fairly straightforward, although I was skeptical of Malgieri’s use of a food processor to blend all the ingredients. I love my KitchenAid Mixer and would have preferred to use the dough hook. But I was willing to give Malgieri and his newfangled technology a try.

The first step was mixing milk, yeast and flour and letting it sit in a bowl for twenty minutes. It was supposed to have risen a little and gotten ‘bubbly’, but that didn’t really happen. It did seem a touch bigger, but there were no bubbles that I could see. Next, I started mixing butter and eggs in the food processor:

I added in various other things, including lemon zest and rum (!), and pulsed the mixture until it came together. The yeast mixture and some additional flour was added and pulsed. At this point, the dough seemed okay. It was elastic-y and looked like dough I’ve created in the past. The dough was kneaded a bit and then cut into three equal pieces. Two would stay plain:

And one would be mixed with a chocolate enrichment. This may be where I messed up. I melted the chocolate at the beginning of the recipe and then let it cool. Then I mixed water, baking soda and cinnamon together in a bowl and mixed it in with the cooled chocolate. I did this about ten to fifteen minutes before I needed it. When I went to fetch it, the chocolate had hardened up and looked, well, weird. So I popped in the microwave for fifteen seconds just to loosen it up. When I pulled the bowl out of the microwave, the chocolate was puffy…the baking soda had gone to work. But I mixed it back together and dumped it in the food processor with one of the dough pieces. It came out looking okay:

Next, one of the plain pieces of dough was pressed out into a square on a floured cutting board. The chocolate dough was pressed into a square on top of it, and the final plain piece was pressed on top of the chocolate, forming a sandwich of sorts:

The layered dough was then cut into three long strips, and those strips were cut into smaller pieces:

Those pieces were tossed into a bowl and sprinkled with a bit of water:

Next I was instructed to gently squeeze and press those pieces into a cohesive ball. This is where the real trouble started. Those pieces would not all press together. As soon as I got them to stick, they’d start separating. No amount of coaxing would get them to meld into each other. But I pushed them together the best I could, and then put them into a buttered loaf pan. The pan was left to rest for one to two hours, or until the dough had risen one inch over the top of the pan. Well, that never happened. After one hour, nothing. After two hours, nothing. I even moved the pan closer to a heating vent, hoping that the warmth would encourage the dough to rise. So I just went ahead and preheated the oven and threw the bread in:

The bread baked for 35 minutes. It didn’t rise in the oven either. It did turn a lovely golden brown color:

The pieces were still separated. They never joined each other. I wiggled the end of the loaf and one of the chocolate chunks fell out. It’s like each little cut piece baked separately and were only holding onto each other because of the constriction of the pan. I tried to slice the loaf and ended up with this:

Booooo. I was so upset by this one. The bread tastes pretty good, although it’s really dense and has more of a cake consistency than bread. I mean, I’ll eat some of it, but I don’t think this is one to be proud of. I can’t believe that nuking the baking soda was the linchpin to failure. If that was the case, then the plain dough should have risen and the chocolate dough shouldn’t have, as it was the only part with nuked baking soda. Maybe the yeast was bad? Although it was in a sealed envelope and less than two months old, so I don’t see how that could have been the case. Ah well. I do want to try this again sometime…I just need to wrap my mind around it.

I was feeling so bad about this bread failure that I decided to whip something else up instead. I settled on the Pear Streusel Breakfast Buns in the “More from Magnolia” cookbook by Allysa Torey. I didn’t have any pears on hand, but I did have apples, and she suggests that apples can be substituted. This started with a pretty straightforward mixing of butter and sugar, eggs, flour, salt, baking soda and vanilla. Coarsely chopped apples were folded in and then spooned into muffin cups. The streusel topping that Torey suggested contained walnuts. I didn’t have any on hand, and I don’t care for them anyway, so I found a blueberry muffin crumb topping online (flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon) and used that instead:

These baked for twenty minutes and came out perfect:

These are quite delicious and are definitely good for breakfast, as they are not terribly sweet. The apples and crumb topping provide most of the sweetness, and there is a very slight eggy taste to the buns (one whole egg and two yolks were included). Good to know that I’m not a complete failure. I just think that Brioche was out to get me.

I’ve decided that I want to buy the “Martha Stewart’s Baking Handbook”, but as it is $40, I’ve decided that I must make at least one thing from every baking book I already own before I purchase any new books. So next week I’ll be turning to “The Magnolia Bakery Cookbook” and making Orange Vanilla Chip Cookies.

This week’s project had a ‘meh’ turnout. The cupcakes weren’t terrible (or inedible like the cupcakes from a few weeks ago), but they weren’t spectacular or even exactly what I was expecting.

I decided a few weeks ago that I should try to make a cupcake that imitated the taste of a Hostess Twinkie. I knew I’d need yellow sponge cake and cream filling. I went online, thinking that surely someone had posted a recipe for this, but the closest thing I could find incorporated squash into the recipe. That’s right – squash. As in the vegetable. Now, I like vegetables as much as the next person, and I won’t turn down a good carrot cake, but squash in a cupcake?! That’s crazy talk.

So I figured I’d just create my own recipe. Find a yellow sponge cake recipe, find a cream filling recipe, put b. into a. and voila – Twinkie-style cupcake.

Alas, like many dreams, this one did not pan out.

For starters, the recipe called for twelve egg yolks. Yup, just the yolks. I have since learned that most sponge cake recipes incorporate the whites into the yolks. The whites from my eggs just went into the trash.

Into this egg yolk mess was added some water and that was beaten together for a few minutes. Sugar was then added and beaten, and the rest of the dry ingredients and vanilla were folded in. I ended up with a pretty thick batter, but I was still optimistic:

I filled up the cupcake tins and popped them in the oven. The baking time was a bit of a mystery. The original recipe called for pouring the batter into a Bundt pan and baking it for 30 minutes, so I started checking it at 10 minutes. I inserted a knife into a cupcake and it came out smothered in batter. I checked again at 15 minutes. Same thing. I checked again at 20, and at that point I had to take them out. The knife was still a little dirty, but I could tell the outsides of the cupcakes were dangerously close to burning.

The cupcakes were definitely in the oven too long, but I don’t know what I could have done about it. The outsides were baking a lot faster than the insides. They ended up waaaay too dry, although not inedible. It just takes a good amount of bite pressure to get through the crunchy outside. The cupcakes tasted fine, they just were too dry and heavy.

Next came the cream filling. Mixing it up was no problem, and it tasted fine. I put it into a piping bag fitted with a larger tip and tried to push it through the tops of the cupcakes. That wasn’t happening. The pastry bag tip would not penetrate the cupcakes. So I cut a little hole in the tops of the cupcakes and tried that. I thought I was filling the cupcakes, but I was not. There was barely any cream filling inside. So I ended up just frosting the cupcakes with the filling.

In the end, my tasters said the cupcakes tasted fine. They definitely did not imitated Twinkies, and I don’t think I’ll be taking the extras into work (the recipe made only 13 cupcakes to begin with) for my co-workers. I’m not that proud of this particular project.

Stay tuned next week when I’ll be turning back to bread and attempting to make a Chocolate Marbled Brioche Loaf.