Whole Wheat Croissant - not as indulgent, is it?

At last, I bought Advance Bread and Pastry book by Michel Suas after seeing many good reviews about it from online baking community. This is a very comprehensive book on bread and pastry gearing towards professional bakers, which is also highly beneficial for serious home bakers.

Flipping through the book made me feel like reading a university textbook. In fact, it is a textbook for bread and pastry students. The book is gigantic  (over 4 kg in weight) and covers aspects of bread and pastry extremely well. It is like combining all the books that I have in one. 

The first chapter I had a look was Viennoiserie (sweet enriched bread and pastry).  I was excited to see many varieties of croissant recipes. There are ones made with poolish, with preferment, with sourdough starter, and whole wheat croissants made with straight dough and preferment.

I have been practicing making croissants/laminated doughs for the past weeks and was intrigued by whole wheat croissants idea. Wouldn’t it be nice to include wholegrain into buttery croissant? At least, I won’t feel too guilty having them.

Lemon Madeleines - a yummy snack in a flash!

Madeleine is mini sponge cake baked in shell-shaped pan. It is one of the classic French cakes. It is very easy and quick to make yet so nice and attractive, almost effortless to make.

Tartine's Morning Buns - best eaten in the morning, every morning

I came across the famous Tartine Morning Buns when I was searching for croissant images of Tartine Bakery (as I was on my mission to perfect the croissant making, I figured I should look up to the bestJ).

Note:

Tartine Bakery is a famous bakery in San Francisco located in the Mission District. I don’t live in San Francisco, neither USA.Tartine is famous among artisan bread-making community for its holey grail Country Loaves. That’s why I came to know Tartine and bought two of their cookbooks.

The buns received rave reviews on the blogosphere and I was curious to find out myself how good they are. I just bought Tartine cookbook (the pastry version) recently and look forwards to Morning Bun recipe. However, the recipe wasn’t included in the book.  I managed to locate the recipe online on 7x7 website. The bun is an indulgence version of cinnamon rolls and made with laminated (croissant) dough. That’s perfect, another recipe I can try to keep practicing on croissants.  The rolls are filled with the mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon and orange zest. Doesn’t that sound like a recipe for success, buttery flaky pastry filled with orange cinnamon sugar? Indeed, it was the success. It tasted soooo good, pure heaven. 

Pain au Levain with wheat germ - shaped into 3Bs, boule, batard and baguette

I discovered toasted wheat germs in bread through a wonderful post by David Snyder (Dmsnyder)’on The Fresh Loaf. After having the first toasted wheat germ sourdough, I was hooked and have been trying different recipes with it since.

I made another wheat germ sourdough weeks ago and loved it. This time, I wanted to increase the amount of water (hydration) and included rye flour in the dough.

Instead of calling them wheat germ sourdough, I’d like to call it Pain au Levain with wheat germs (pain au levain is literally sourdough bread, only with fancier name). Taking the idea from Susan at Wild Yeast Blog, I shaped the dough into 3 Bs, three basic shapes; boule (round), batard (oval) and baguette.

Pistachio Macarons with buttercream filling - très classique et en français

I have a relatively long list of macaron flavours I want to make. Pistachio is one of them, though not really on the top. However, I moved it up the list as S’boss (a French-Australian) requested for some.

Pistachio (Pistache) Macaron  is one of the classic French flavour. I remember seeing macaron packs at CostCo (imported from France) with presumably four classic flavours and pistache is one of the four. The rest of the flavours are vanilla, chocolate and raspberry.

I followed the pistachio butter cream recipe from Jose Marechal’s Secrets to Macarons. The filling was made of ground pistachio mixed with butter and sugar, which produced relatively dry filling. I also substituted part of almond meal with ground pistachio in the macaron shell.

The creamy, sweet and nutty aroma of ground pistachio was wonderful. It was even more so when the macarons were being baked. It filled my house with fantastic aroma.  

Cranberry and Walnut Celebration Bread - fit for any festive occasions

I have a 1.2-kg bag of Craisins (dried cranberries) from CostCo that I am trying to use it up. Apart from enjoying them as a snack (they are tart, sweet and juicy and just nice as is), I also wanted to make bread from them.

I made cranberry and walnut sourdough some weeks ago, which I enjoyed the flavour and texture. This time, I wanted to make enriched bread with cranberry and, again, walnut, one of the classic pairing.

The cranberry and walnut celebration bread from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread caught my attention with its attractive double braided shape. Though, there wasn’t anything to celebrate, well, it’s not Christmas, it’s Easter, it’s none of those festive seasons, I decided to make the bread anyway. Any day can be a special day. Any day can be celebrated, nonetheless.

Soy and Linseed Sourdough - full of goodness and texture

Soy and linseed bread is supposedly good for heart health, at least it’s what the bread manufacturer is trying to tell us which I believe it has some merits. The bread is a healthy choice as it contains soy beans, soy flour and linseeds which  high protein, high fibre and omega-3.

I made this same bread before some months ago combining Jeffrey Hamelman’s method and Bourke Street Bakery recipe (not entirely). This time I followed Bourke Street Bakery’s recipe closely. Umm, closely, I actually increased the amount of both soy beans and linseeds substantially (double the amount for both soys and linseeds), upped the amount of water a little (hydration percentage) and replaced 10% of bread flour with whole wheat flour.

The recipe called for soy flour, which I didn’t use in my previous bakes. I didn’t think that I was able to find the flour and I was not a fan of buying a big bag of ingredient specifically for one recipe. However, I also like to experiment with new things/new flours and I came across soy flour at Asian grocery store. The flour has very interesting texture. It was moist, creamy and mushy. It felt almost like the blended soy beans, only drier.