Chocolate and walnuts breads

A great day starts with a great breakfast. For this morning I prepared chocolate and walnuts little breads, just out from the oven. And a fresh smoothie with pineapple, cantaloupe melon and strawberries. How about you? How do you start your day?

April 4, 2015

Good morning! Homemade croissants! (But I don’t get it right yet…)

Making croissants takes much more time than making bread, because every hour during 5 hours there is a manipulation to do. Not a difficult one, but you need to make yourself available. Last Saturday was the perfect day for it: grey, cold, gloomy, and making you wish that Sunday will be a better day and start with a good breakfast. So, I decided to challenge myself with making croissants. using my usual book, I followed the steps.

And made a few croissants for breakfast. The taste was perfect. Really the right balance of butter, sweetness and beautiful golgen crispy outer shell. But the dough didn’t grow enough (probably because the kitchen is too cold), so they remained tiny and a little compact. The cooking time also was not right. It took almost twice the time.

So, there much room for improvement, even if liked them very much. Sunday was sunny and warm, and the breakfast delicious.

If you have a good croissant recipe or hints I’m happy to learn!!!

March 28, 2015

Hazelnut cake for weekday's breakfast

Cakes are great for weekday’s breakfast because they last 2 or 3 days, are much more delicious than industrial breads and you can make any variation that pleases you depending on ingredients and season!
I bake a hazelnut simple cake this week. It’s a simple recipe base on yogurt cake but without yogurt. I use almond milk instead.
I mixed some flour, a little brown caster sugar, baking powder, salt, hazelnut powder, 2 eggs, a little of almond milk and a little of oil (sunflower).I mix the whole thing and put in a cake pan for 30minutes at 160deg in the oven. Can’t wait for tomorrow morning!!!

March 4, 2015

Sunday morning's English scones

Yesterday I’ve been busy cooking for dinner so I didn’t have time to prepare some bread for this morning. Usually when this happens I either cook crepes, pancake or English scones in the morning and in 30min we have a ready to eat breakfast.

This morning it was plain English scones. The recipe for a dozen 4cm scones is simple (based on recipe from BBC of course!!): 175g of flour, 1/2 tsp of baking powder, a bit of salt, 40g of soft butter, 80ml of milk or equivalent, 2tbsp of brown sugar, vanilla (I use exclusively fresh one, no extract, much tastier and love the black dots!!). After mixing all the ingredients and obtaining a nice dough I roll it in sticks of 4 cm diameter and cut thick slices of 1cm or more and line them on cooking paper. Bake in the oven for about 15min (depending on thickness) at 180deg. And ready to eat!! With butter, jam, marmalade…

This morning I served an apple-strawberry salad to complete the breakfast.

March 1, 2015

Breakfast with twisted orange bread, whole grain bread and smoothie

With Prunellia and Aurore visiting us I’m preparing a few samples of what we like to eat. The rice bowl with salad-acocado-tuna topping (see Prunellia’s post), nabe, cookies, smoothie, breads…

For breakfast I asked them to pick one bread they wanted to eat and they decided for a twisted orange bread. Excellent pick for breakfast!

This bread is a little sweet, with orange peels and orange blossom water. (250g of flour; 155g of water; 12g of dry sourdough; 2g of yeast; 20g of sugar; 5g of salt; 12g of butter; 12g of orange blossom water; 45g sugared orange peels. Mix everything together, until smooth, then prepare like regular bread, only in the end you twist the dough and bake in a buttered pan with a lid for 30min at 220deg.)

I also made a whole grain bread too (see previous post), and a green melon-pineapple-strawberry smoothie.

We ate the breads just out from the oven with homemade marmalade and butter. Deliciously warming on a rainy Sunday morning!

February 23, 2015

Sunday breakfast

For Sunday morning breakfast I like to eat homemade freshly baked bread, pancakes, crumpets, or anything alike, and fresh fruits in salad or smoothie. It’s a good start before spending the day out.

This weekend I prepared sugar bread, the recipe comes from Erik Kayser’s book, my reference for bread making (in French).

It’s basically bread base in which a little sugar has been added, and the final shaping is slightly different. After baking it it is also finished with sugar sirup.

Perfect with butter, jam or just nothing.

February 15, 2015

Crumpets

It’s been sometimes I wanted something that changes from the usual scones/pancakes/crepes… I often prepare for breakfast and I was longing for English crumpets. I checked on my usual resource for English recipes: the bbc website and thought I could make crumpets right away. Not so simple. You need circles to bake them and you need baking soda, and instant yeast something I not often use. I must admit that I had to do some research too about the differences between instant yeast, active yeast, baking powder and baking soda…

So I finally manage to gather everything and cook them according to the bbc recipe. It was a little more fastidious and time consuming than expected but it was really worth it!!!

Some of the crumpets ready to be eaten!

The growing batter

February 8, 2015