Walnut sourdough bread & peanut butter ice cream

It was too hot much of last week to bake, but the weather was perfect for a no-cook, same-day ice cream like peanut butter. Toward the end of the week, I also made a walnut sourdough, which is becoming one of my favorite breads.

Walnut sourdough

I've made walnut sourdough before, both with and without the long covered baker. After my weird (though tasty) sourdough last week, I felt like I needed to go back to the original recipe and not mess with the timing so much.

Walnut sourdough, cooked in a long, covered baker

I used the usual Josey Baker recipe, but added walnuts (maybe 1 cup). I deliberately kept the dough a little drier than it has been. I think I've been putting > 1 cup of water in there, but I used a scant cup this time. The toasted walnuts also might have absorbed some water. This dough was much easier to handle than it has been lately.

Walnuts ready for toasting

The conveniently pre-chopped walnut pieces came from Trader Joe's. Previously I'd chopped whole walnuts from Berkeley Bowl, but the TJ pre-chopped nuts are much more convenient, and they tasted just as good to me (after toasting, at least). I just tossed a bunch onto a cookie sheet, put the sheet in the oven, and turned the oven to 350.

I mixed in the walnut pieces (maybe 3/4 cup?) during what would normally be the first mini-knead. The dough was easy to handle, so I sort of picked it up and mashed it around to distribute the nuts.

After the last mini-knead

The rest of the mini-kneads were the usual Josey Baker process of picking up the edge and stretching it gently, turning the bowl a tiny bit, repeat 10 times or so.

A couple of hours after the last mini-knead, the dough had risen quite a bit and was ready to shape.

Ready to shape

I really need to take a shaping class, but here's what I did this time. I put it out onto a well-floured board. After making sure the dough wouldn't stick (using a dough blade to scrape it up, putting flour underneath, and turning it over a couple of times) I patted it into a rectangle. I folded the rectangle into thirds and let it rest. After a few minutes, I folded the dough in half again and rolled it a little bit. I then put it into the gheed baker.

The shaped dough in the long, ghee-brushed baker

2.5 hours later, it looked ready to go into the oven.

After rising

Rats! I forgot to slash it! No matter, it didn't seem to mind.

I didn't notice when the oven reached 450, and the color from the walnuts made it difficult to tell how brown the crust was. About 30 minutes after the bread went into the cold oven, I took off the top of the baker. I took it out of the oven about 10 minutes later.

Partial remains of the loaf

We had to take it to a friend's house (40 minutes away by car) while it was still hot, making the car smell heavenly. We couldn't resist tearing off some to eat. When the loaf was merely warm, we put it into a lunch bag for ease of carrying.

Greasy paper bag, thanks to the walnuts

The bread worked well cut thick and used to hold thin turkey burgers. The next day it was great as a base for tuna sandwiches. And, of course, it was great alone.

Timing details:

• Midnight or so Friday: refreshed the starter
• 9 am Saturday: mixed the dough and toasted walnuts
• 9:40: mixed in the walnut pieces
• 10:15, 10:30, 10:50: mini-kneads
• 1:45: started shaping
• 2:05: put it into the ghee-brushed baker
• 4:35: put it into the oven; turned the oven on to 450
• 5:05: took the top of the pan off
• 5:15: took the loaf out of the oven

Temperature details:

• The water I added to the starter was 88 degrees, by probe or by laser (pronounced LAY-zerrrrr). (The recipe called for 80 degrees.)
• The kitchen was 73 degrees when I started, 75 by the time the dough started resting at 9:10, and 79 by 2.

Peanut butter ice cream

Peanut butter ice cream is easy and quick to make, following the recipe in The Perfect Scoop. I had a request to make peanut butter chocolate, so I mixed chocolate chunks into most of the batch. I love PBJ ice cream, so I made a bit of that, too. Sadly, I had no Bonne Maman, so I settled for another brand of raspberry preserves. Both the PBC and the PBJ were very good, especially the first day before the ice cream hardened.

Sorry, no pictures.

Over-the-hill sourdough, spent grain bread, and whiskey-cherry-chocolate ice cream

I was out of town again last weekend, but managed to make a couple of breads and some ice cream.

The first bread was the usual sourdough, but with a starter that was long in the tooth. The second was a bread machine recipe that used the spent grain from my guys' initial attempt at brewing beer. I say attempt because it'll be a month before we know whether they succeeded. Thank goodness bread doesn't take as long.

Sourdough bread

Tired starter produces misshapen yet tasty sourdough

The sourdough was the same Josey Baker recipe I usually use, except:

• The starter had last been refreshed over 24 hours before, so although it smelled great, it was way past peak activity/volume.
• I refrigerated the dough after the last "knead" (on Friday), not returning to shape it until Sunday evening, and not cooking it until Tuesday morning.
• Since it seemed very wet, after shaping it I put it in the fridge with a kitchen towel over it, instead of plastic wrap.

Covered with a kitchen towel, not plastic wrap

I put it in the basket seam side down, meaning not to slash it. However, it was so nice and dry after its rest that I did end up slashing it, and it (for once) cut nicely. I probably shouldn't have slashed it, though, because it might have grown taller without the cut.

Before going into the fridge

Fresh out of the fridge, 2 days later: barely risen, with weird dry spots

The resulting loaf was wide and misshapen, but it still tasted really good. I thought it might be extra sour due to the acetic acid encouraged by extended refrigeration, but it wasn't, probably because the yeast was barely alive and the dough was on the wet side. (See Tips for Manipulating the Sourness of Your Sourdough and "Where does the sour flavor come from?" in King Arthur's guide to sourdough.)

The final result
It looks burned but doesn't taste like it

Spent grain bread

This was a good bread that I will make again, although perhaps with more interesting grains and fats. I used Hensperger's whole-grain daily bread recipe (p. 181), which calls for 3/4 cups cooked whole grains and 2 T canola oil. In addition to the usual salt, yeast, and gluten, the recipe also calls for honey, buttermilk (I used powdered) bread flour, a bit of whole wheat flour, and an even smaller amount of rolled oats.

Spent grain bread

I liked the texture and flavor, but the spent grains didn't seem to add much flavor, and the oil certainly didn't contribute any. Next time I might try farro and olive oil, or perhaps buckwheat and hazelnut oil. So many possibilities. I might also try real buttermilk.

Whiskey-cherry-chocolate ice cream

This ice cream was similar to the version I made before, except I used bourbon instead of rye, candied jarred cherries instead of rye-soaked fresh cherries, whole cherries instead of quartered cherries, and TJ's semi-sweet chocolate chunks instead of whatever I used before.

I also was low on cream, so I used some half-and-half and more milk than the recipe called for. All in all, the fat and alcohol content was lower, and this ice cream wasn't quite as delicious as before—I mostly blame the cherries not being chopped. We also overcooked the eggs, which might have affected the flavor and consistency (although we strained the mix, as usual, so at least it was smooth).

Next time, I want to try this:

• 3/4 cup whole milk
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 1 1/2 cups heavy cream
• 4 large egg yolks
• 3 T whiskey
• 1 cup chocolate chunks
• ~1 cup quartered candied cherries (TPS p. 185), perhaps with a bit of their syrup

Sorry, no pictures this time.

Sourdoughs, buckwheat bread, and cold stuff

Last week I made a bunch of bread, plus some frozen goodies. All the bread turned out well, though not without incident. The ginger ice cream was delicious, like before, the waffle cones were fine, and the mocha sherbet was... well let's just say it was great in a shake.

Breads

First, let's cover the breads. I made the usual adjustments to the recipes, generally reducing the salt and yeast (if any) by half.

Sourdough #1

I made the first sourdough Friday from dough that had been in the refrigerator since Sunday. By the time I was ready to bake, the dough smelled slightly alcoholic. This would be one sour loaf of bread! But in a good way.

The temperature in the kitchen was mild

I shaped the bread around 9:30 a.m. I smooshed it flattish (it had risen fairly high), folded it in thirds, and then started moving the edges under, to create a tight surface.

After shaping

By 11:20 it had risen quite a bit.

During the final rise

I put it in the oven around noon.

Scored and ready to bake

I forgot to put a pan over the bread, so it cooked faster than usual, but otherwise I couldn't tell any difference. It's possible that the crust was harder than usual, which is not a bad thing for me. The inside was still moist.

The crust sang again!

By Saturday night the bread was all gone.

Sourdough #2

Sunday morning I mixed the dough for a loaf of sourdough with poppy seeds and toasted sesame seeds (both of which I'd soaked in hot water the night before). I'd tried making this bread before, when I was just getting started with Josey Baker sourdough, but I'd accidentally omitted the salt, and the result was inedible.

Unfortunately, when I happened to notice that the cookbook's definition of the weight of the required amount of dough (375 g) conflicted with the flour bag's definition for the same volume (300 g), I chose the flour bag's definition. So this was one very wet loaf. I couldn't really slash it.

Just after "shaping"

Shaping was a messy affair, but we managed to roll it in seeds and plop it into a basket. This was at about 12:40, just before I left for a baseball game.

When I returned, at about 4:30 (A's won!), the bread had risen above the basket. Yikes! It wasn't that warm out (maybe 68 degrees), but this new sourdough starter is very enthusiastic. I put the dough in the refrigerator while waiting for the oven to finish preheating.

The end result was very tasty and had a nice texture, but it was very flat. I'll make it again with the full amount of flour.

Buckwheat bread with cinnamon and pecans

I made some buckwheat bread using a Hensperger recipe, but not from the usual cookbook. This recipe was from p. 38 of The Pleasure of Whole-Grain Breads.

Buckwheat bread with cinnamon and pecans

The bread was tasty and good, although everyone had been eating the sourdoughs so much that they rather ignored this bread.

Three-seed whole wheat bread

This half-whole-wheat bread from p. 116 of Hensperger's bread machine cookbook was supposed to have sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. I couldn't find the poppy seeds, so I substituted black sesame seeds.

1 T sesame seeds, .5 T black sesame seeds

Other adjustments I made:

• Used light sesame oil instead of sunflower seed oil
• Reduced the salt from 1 t to 3/4 t
• Reduced the yeast to a scant 2 t

It was a tasty bread, and I ate way too much of it.

Tasty warm, with a crunchy crust that'll no doubt go soft

Cold stuff

To help celebrate three birthdays, we made ginger ice cream, mocha sherbet, and waffle cones, all from recipes in The Perfect Scoop. I'd made the ginger ice cream before, but the other two recipes were new to me.

Ginger ice cream

This was delicious, just like before. It's so creamy and subtle that my son initially mistook it for coconut, but then the ginger bite comes on.

Mocha sherbet

This tasted kind of weird, possibly because I used King Arthur's espresso powder instead of real coffee. Or maybe the Dutch cocoa wasn't great. Whatever the cause, we didn't like it as an ice cream-type treat. It smelled and tasted like frappuccino mix instead like delicious mocha.

However... it made great milk shakes! We blended it with milk (no additional sugar) and topped it with whipped cream and a few candied cherries in syrup. Delicious!

Waffle cones

This was the first time we broke out the cone maker I'd gotten a year or so ago. Somehow, I'd thought it would make sugar cones, but it doesn't. It makes waffle cones. I don't really like waffle cones. They're too big, for one thing. If I'm going to have a cone, a sugar cone is the only kind I've ever liked.

Still, the machine and the recipe (from The Perfect Scoop) made reasonably good waffle cones, though it took us a while to figure out how to shape them without burning fingers or leaving a big hole at the bottom.

I'm going to see if I can find a sugar cone shaper and recipe.

Toasted almond ice cream and a lost sourdough starter

A week ago, in a minor frenzy of sourdough baking, I forgot to save some of the starter I'd been using for all my sourdough. It was a whole wheat starter using a Josey Baker recipe, which I'd converted from a Peter Reinhart starter I'd gotten from my bus buddy Andrew.

Ugh.

Fortunately, I also had a white sourdough starter from Lee. I hadn't been using it much, but I'd been waking it up and feeding it regularly, thank goodness. I used it to inoculate a new batch of whole wheat starter. Interestingly, the new starter was (at least initially) much more active than the starter I'd been using. Within a few hours of feeding, the starter would rise tremendously. It didn't hurt that the weather was quite warm (for here) the two days I was feeding it; the kitchen was 75-79 degrees much of the time.

I made a double batch of sourdough Saturday. It almost raised out of the bowl that I'd used before for a double batch.

Saturday night I shaped one loaf (rather badly). Sunday morning I baked it. By Sunday night that loaf was gone.

The crust sang again!

Other baking I did in the past few days:

• Coconut flour brownies (again)
• Almond cake with apricot jam and browned butter frosting
• I used the magically moist almond cake recipe on the back of Bob's Red Mill almond flour, which also calls for coconut flour
• The coconut flavor overwhelmed the almond flavor, but fortunately we all love coconut
• To make the almond flavor more pronounced, I made browned butter frosting (from Better Homes & Gardens New Baking Book) but used almond extract (a little over half a teaspoon, I think) instead of vanilla. The color was a bit gray; I would've added a little coloring—a drop of yellow food dye? coffee powder?—if I'd had more time.
• I used two 9-inch round pans to bake the cakes. They came out well, but it would've been better if the cake had been thicker—the frosting dominated the cake. (Even my frosting loving husband said so.) I don't usually like frosting, but this was pretty good.
• C.R.O.W.W. bread
• It came out very dark, probably because I (taking a shortcut) soaked some raisins in hot water before putting them in.
• It tasted good but seemed dry.

I also made two ice creams (from one batch of the base) from David Lebovitz's toasted almond with sour cherry recipe. They were very good but not great.

Toasted almond stracciatella

Here's what they both have in common:

• A delicious toasted almond base. No complaints there.
• Too much chopped almond mixed in. A few minutes before I finished churning, I add 1 cup of coarsely chopped almonds, as directed. Even for me, this was too much. Half a cup would probably be better.
• Stracciatella. Just before the end of churning, I added a stream of melted chocolate to make little chocolate chips. I thought this was kind of lost, but others disagreed and said they could taste it. I'd rather have larger chunks of chocolate or a river of soft fudge.

The first ice cream was just the above. It was good, but had too many almonds. The creaminess of the ice cream was overwhelmed by the crunch of the almonds (and chocolate).

While dishing out the second ice cream, I added candied cherries (as directed by the recipe). I made these from the Lebovitz's Sour Cherries in Syrup recipe, using Trader Joe's dark morello cherries.

Making sour cherries in syrup

People liked the cherries but felt that they overwhelmed the almond ice cream—that the ice cream might as well have been vanilla. (Not that there's anything wrong with vanilla; it's just easier to make than toasted almond.)

With candied cherries

I'll certainly make toasted almond ice cream again, using this recipe, but I'll skip the cherries and mix in half the amount of chopped almonds. I probably won't add the chocolate, either.

The next time I make cherry-chocolate whiskey ice cream, I might well use the sour cherries in syrup instead of booze-soaked cherries.

Cherry-chocolate whiskey ice cream and a bunch of breads

Last week was busy, due to choral concerts, so I never managed to blog about the ice cream and breads I made two weekends ago. I tried making baguettes for the first time, to meh results. I also made a white whole wheat bread and a yeasted cornbread; both worked out well.

This weekend I made my first bread with instant potatoes (but mostly with whole wheat flour): Irish potato brown bread. It also was a winner, but it didn't stay fresh for long, so soon afterward I baked a loaf of Swedish rye.

More excitingly, I unvented a new ice cream flavor: cherry-chocolate whiskey. It's like Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia, but with a better recipe and added rye. I also made a yummy chocolate peanut butter ice cream, with peanut butter chunks.

Ice cream

I started out wanting to make a fruit ice cream, to go along with a peanut butter chocolate ice cream I was already planning to make. Strawberries looked great, but the birthday boy wanted cherries, so I figured I'd make Ben & Jerry's recipe for Cherry Garcia ice cream.

This was the first time I'd tried Ben & Jerry's recipe book, and although it was good for inspiration, it seemed lacking in implementation. It called for shaved Hershey's dark chocolate, when I expected chunks of better chocolate. It didn't give any hint as to how to avoid having the cherries freeze solid. And it used whole eggs (not egg yolks) and didn't cook them—an interesting approach, but one I'm leery of. It's not even close to their own recipe, I suspect. So I decided to adapt a recipe from The Perfect Scoop.

Since the occasion was an adult's birthday where whiskey would be consumed, I got the idea of adding some sort of booze to the chocolate-cherry ice cream. My daughter informed me that bourbon and cherries go together, and I found some Bulleit in the cupboard. It was rye, not bourbon, but I figured it'd work.

Cherries and whiskey go together

I pitted maybe half a pound of cherries, cut them in half, poured rye over them, and put them (covered) in the fridge.

Then I got some good dark chocolate disks (from Berkeley Bowl), chopped them, and refrigerated them, too.

I made the rum-raisin ice cream base from The Perfect Scoop, minus the salt, and refrigerated it.

The next day, I churned the ice cream, substituting the cherry-infused rye for the rum. When it seemed to be close to done, I added the cherries (which I'd chopped a bit more because they were very alcoholic) and chocolate. The alcohol in the cherries seemed to unfreeze the ice cream, so I had to churn it another 10 minutes or so.

If you like whiskey and boozy ice cream, this is delicious! The cherries were perhaps overly boozy; I might try soaking them less next time. And there will be a next time.

An added bonus was that the alcohol made this ice cream stay scoopable, even after a couple of days in the freezer.

The peanut butter chocolate ice cream, on the other hand, did not stay scoopable, but it was delicious. I added little peanut butter disks to it. I might do that again, but I'd make them much smaller.

The only other difference from before was that I made the ice cream using Skippy "natural peanut butter spread" (no stirring needed) instead of TJ's unsalted peanut butter. I don't know if the difference was noticeable, but I tried the Skippy because David Lebovitz recommends against peanut butters that separate.

Bread

I tried to make baguettes, but they were disappointing—they didn't rise well. Apparently, they tasted good, though. I used the usual Josey Baker sourdough recipe, mixing the dough at 4 pm or so, and "kneading" it at 4:50, 5:15, 5:40, and 6:20. I expected the dough to be risen at 8:20, since it was warm, but by 7:30 it looked dangerously big, so I put it in the fridge.

The next day at 2 pm I took it out, and divided the 820 g of dough into 3 parts that I pre-shaped. At 2:15 I shaped it into baguettes, which I supported using rolled-up placements that were covered with parchment paper. I covered the baguettes with plastic. I scored 2 of the loaves and tried cutting the third into an epi, but my scissors were too short to do that well. Still, the epi disappeared first. People like bread that they can grab a chunk of.

I used rolled-up placemats to support the rising baguettes

The white whole wheat bread was a Hensperger bread machine recipe (p. 127). I might have used a delay timer. I used light sesame oil, which is currently my favorite oil for baking. The maple syrup was half grade A and half grade B, because that's what I had. I reduced the salt and yeast by one half. I don't remember much about the bread, except that I liked it, and it didn't seem very different from a regular whole wheat bread.

The yeasted cornbread was a Josey Baker recipe (p. 208). I used whole wheat pastry flour instead of Kamut flour, and sodium-free baking powder and soda. I don't recall whether I added any of the salt the recipe called for. People liked it, but I think I like regular cornbread better.

Yeasted cornbread

I'd been wanting to make a bread with instant potatoes, so I made Irish potato brown bread (Hensperger p. 117). It was nice but delicate, and it turned stale quickly. Like all breads with potato flakes, it can't be made using the delay timer.

Sunday's Irish potato brown bread was great for French toast Wednesday night

Tuesday night I set up some Swedish rye to be baked by 7 a.m. Wednesday. With fennel, honey, and citrus zest, that bread is a heavenly smell to wake up to!

Swedish rye, baked on the delay timer

The recipe (Hensperger p. 136) calls for orange zest, but we were low on that, so I used mostly lemon zest. This bread is delicious, whether on its own, in French toast, or as the basis for a tuna sandwich.

Swedish rye, the inside

Fail breads, great brownies, and more

It's been a while since I posted, in part because it's no fun to talk about failures. Here's what's happened since I last posted:

• I forgot to put salt into a sourdough poppy-sesame seed loaf (which I'd never made before).
• I didn't seat the bread pan well, ruining a sourdough buckwheat loaf (which I'd successfully made before).
• I made a pretty good rye bread from a new (to me) cookbook.
• I successfully made super lemon ice cream and chunky raspberry sauce (which I'd made a few times before, but not recently).
• I found a delicious brownie recipe that features coconut flour, and I made it twice.

Salt. It's the reason I started baking bread. I can't take too much sodium, and most bread has an awful lot of it. So I bake bread with about half the salt the recipes call for (halving the yeast as well), and it usually turns out.

Without salt, bread tastes anywhere from boring to downright nasty. The sourdough poppy-sesame bread tasted nasty. I can't be sure that leaving out the salt was the only reason for this bread's failure, since I'd never made the bread before (much less any recipes from Josey Baker Bread's sourdough section). Here are the problems with the bread:

• Nasty flavor, making the bread inedible. (Lack of salt was definitely a factor. It's also possible that the poppy seeds were bad.)
• Failure to develop gluten. The bread stayed wet, the gluten never seeming to develop. (Kneading helps gluten and this was a low-knead recipe, but so is the sesame bread that I've made successfully a few times. Salt makes gluten stickier and stronger, which is what you want in yeast-raised bread. More info: Fine Cooking's article about how to increase or limit gluten development.)
• Failure to rise in the oven. (This might have been as least partly because I didn't preheat the baking stone for a full 45 minutes; I was in a hurry.)

Here's what the dough looked like when it was supposedly ready to shape:

Here's the outside of the cooked loaf:

Not undercooked (nor overcooked)

Here's what it looked like inside:

Enough of that. I didn't take a picture of the failed sourdough buckwheat loaf, so I'll just describe it. Imagine a tiny ball of bread around one paddle, and a big lump around the other paddle. The tiny ball was hard, the other one seemed a bit compressed, and together they were smaller than when I successfully cooked this bread before. I threw out the bread without eating it.

If I ever hear the bread machine making a racket again, I'll restart the cycle from the beginning, rather than reseating the bread pan and letting it continue.

Here's the rye bread, which was from the Raisin Pumpernickel recipe in Rustic European Breads from Your Bread Machine, by Linda West Eckhardt and Diana Collingwood Butts (p. 175). I took the caraway seed option instead of raisins. I probably halved the salt and yeast... I don't remember.

My first slice attempted was timid, so I sliced again
(as you can see from the curvy line at the top left)

I messed up on the baking a bit, forgetting to decrease the heat from the 400 degree preheat to a 375 degree baking heat. Strangely, the instructions say to bake it "until done...or until golden brown and done through." How are you supposed to know that a dark brown bread is golden brown? I sense cut and paste.

I shaped the dough as a free loaf, covering it for the first 20 minutes of baking. If I make this bread again, I might just use a loaf pan, since the bread crust didn't stay crisp for long. And if it comes to that, why not just bake it in the bread machine?

Here's a picture of the inside.

 Great with tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil!

Changing the subject to ice cream, I made super lemon ice cream with chunky raspberry sauce, from recipes in The Perfect Scoop. I'd gotten a request for birthday ice cream the same morning. For most of the ice creams I make, this would be a problem, since I usually cook one day and then churn the next (so the custard is completely cool). I chose this recipe because it's tasty and it requires no cooking.

As usual, I used lemons from the garden.

You whir up the lemon zest with some sugar, and then you add half and half.

The raspberry sauce was also good, as always.

Ingredients for the chunky raspberry sauce

Finally, the brownie recipe. It's on the back of the Let's Do... Organic Coconut Flour package, and it's very similar to a King Arthur chocolate coconut cake recipe. Moist, deliciously chocolatey... it's a winner. It's gluten free (whatever) but definitely not low in cholesterol or fat—lots of eggs and butter.

I've made these brownies twice, both times adding chocolate chips. The brownies are OK cold, but they're great room temperature or warm. When I make them again, I'd like to try adding nuts or cocoa nibs—with or without chocolate chips.

Ice cream cake (again) and a fallen bread

Last weekend I made an ice cream cake and some black bread. Both were fine, although the cake crust was still too hard, and the bread collapsed in the middle.

Ibrahim's birthday cake

I had marching orders for the ice cream cake. It had to have:

• chocolate ice cream
• rainbow sprinkles
• whipped cream (lots of it, sprayed from a can)

I'd rehearsed last week with a yummy malted milk ice cream cake, and I applied what I learned. Most everything worked, but I'll change a couple of things next time:

• Make the crust thinner; I tried not packing it as tight and cooking it less, but it was still just as hard as before
• If I use sprinkles again, use bigger ones that aren't round; the tiny round sprinkles bounce everywhere! (I packed them around the side, which looked nice, and we sprinkled a few more on top of the whipped cream.)

And of course, for anyone but my nephew, I'd insist on a different ice cream flavor. Coffee or toasted almond or malted milk or peanut butter would all be great. Shaved or grated chocolate would make a nice coating for the sides and maybe the top.

Bowed Bohemian black bread

I don't know for sure why the Bohemian black bread fell. It did stay in the bread maker for a few hours after it was cooked (oops), but I'd think by then it would be too late to collapse. Maybe not.

Fortunately, it still tasted great. We used it for sandwich bread and out-of-hand eating, as usual, and also for bread crumbs in Sodium Girl's pork & fennel meatloaf. Yum!

Ice cream cake, two sourdoughs, cornbread, and C.R.O.W.W.

This week I made ice cream for the first time in months. I also made a sourdough whole wheat bread, helped make some sourdough waffles, took another stab at C.R.O.W.W (cinnamon raisin oatmeal walnut whole wheat) bread, and made some cornbread.

Ice cream cake

I made this cake for my friend Mia's birthday. I was happy to make it because (1) Mia is great and (2) it was good practice for my nephew's birthday cake next weekend. His ice cream must be chocolate, but we could do something more interesting with this one.

Malted milk ice cream cake

I used The Perfect Scoop's recipe for malted milk ice cream (p. 51), omitting the salt and reducing the malted milk balls from 350 g (2 cups) to 210 g. (The first time I made this ice cream everyone loved it, but it had so many mix-ins that it was hard to taste the ice cream.)

Two options for malted milk: Carnation and Horlicks

I used Carnation malted milk powder, since I could tell how much sodium it had (a fair amount, but not so much that I couldn't eat it).

Carnation has 100 mg sodium per 3 T serving.

I'd found some Horlicks in an Indian market in Berkeley, but its sodium contents were so shabbily labeled that I was afraid to use it. Seriously, why would you measure salt instead of sodium? And why would you measure it in grams instead of milligrams?

Horlicks has 0.5 g salt (200 mg sodium?) per 25 g (2 T?).

The night before churning the ice cream, I made a chocolate cookie crust in a springform pan, following a recipe for mock chocolate cookie crust. I let it cool overnight on the stove. The next morning, I put it in the freezer for about 20 minutes as I churned the ice cream.

Chocolate cookie crust in a springform pan

It'd been so long since I'd made ice cream, I'd forgotten little things like how to transfer the ice cream into the container, or setting something to catch drips. It didn't help that I was transferring to a much wider container than usual. I sprinkled on the chopped malted milk balls as I transferred the ice cream.

It worked out pretty well, although the crust was difficult to cut through. I'll do some things differently next time:

• Try not to pack the crust as much. (I considered not using as much crust, but everyone objected to that.)
• Smooth the ice cream with the underside of a metal measuring cup, as described in America's Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, p. 629. (I didn't find that recipe until after I'd made the cake.)
• Remove the bottom of the springform pan, as well as the sides, before cutting.
• Put the pie onto a flat plate before cutting. (To do: Find/buy a large, flat plate.)
• Press handfuls of rainbow sprinkles onto the sides, as ATKFC suggests. (My nephew specifically wanted rainbow sprinkles on his cake. For anyone else, I might use nuts or chocolate.)
• Put a plate under the springform pan in the freezer, to avoid drips of ice cream.

Sourdoughs

In sourdough land, I made a whole wheat sourdough bread and the sponge for sourdough waffles. Both were OK but could use improvement.

Whole wheat sourdough bread.

The sourdough bread (Hensperger p. 280) was marred by a too strong taste of molasses. I've used molasses before in bread and liked it, but (1) this was the bottom of the bottle and (2) the other molasses breads had strong-flavored ingredients like cocoa and coffee that probably masked the molasses. If I make this bread again, I'll use honey or sugar instead of molasses. The texture was fine, but the bread wasn't even tasty when toasted; it just smelled a little like burnt molasses.

Two sourdough starters in the bread machine.

The recipe calls for 1 cup of sourdough starter, preferably next-day white starter made with whole wheat flour. Instead I used about 2 T of a rather solid (Josey Baker) whole wheat starter. Then I added enough of a rather liquid white starter to make 1 cup. Other changes I made to the recipe:

• Reduce salt to under 1 t.
• Reduce yeast to 1 t.

The sourdough waffles, from this King Arthur Flour recipe, were going to be pancakes, but we couldn't find all the parts to our griddle. The mix was a bit thin for waffles, and they didn't cook up as nicely as usual. (No pictures: we ate all the evidence.) Next time I'll use less liquid or more flour. Or I'll make pancakes.

Cornbread

I made the same cornbread I made last week, but I used an 8-inch pan instead of a 10-inch pan. The cooking time was longer, but it was just as good. I like crust, so I slightly prefer the 10-inch pan, even though it's harder to handle.

Cornbread in an 8-inch cast-iron pan

This time I used a flavorless oil (canola or peanut) instead of hazelnut oil, and the cornbread still came out tasty. This bread was just for me, so there were leftovers, which were good for at least a day or two.

C.R.O.W.W.

I made this bread like last time, except for the following changes:

• Doubled the raisins (to 1 cup)
• Doubled the nuts (to 1/2 cup)
• Used toasted pecans instead of walnuts

1 cup of Berkeley Bowl's jumbo raisins mixed medley

1/2 cup of pecan pieces

The upshot? This is a tasty loaf of bread. Doubling the pecans and raisins was a good thing to do and didn't cause problems with mixing. (OK, they weren't perfectly mixed, but they weren't all on the bottom either. I call that a win.)

Slightly misshapen, as usual