I get a lot of emails asking me to spend my money, but rarely do I get one asking me to spend someone else’s money. So when BlogHer and HomeGoods offered a $50 card for me to spend on gifts, they didn’t have to ask twice. And letting me give away a second $50 gift card to one of you made the deal even better.
In my family, Thanksgiving is not the only important November celebration. My mom and my niece have birthdays one day apart, and this year the party called for cheesecake.
This is a creamy, melt-in-your-mouth kind of cake with a traditional graham cracker crust, adapted from the one we made at SFBI. The topping was inspired by this one at Epicurious.
I’m not a cheesecake expert, but here are a few tips I’ve learned that have helped mine be better:
Once again, among the things I was thankful for yesterday (and every day) are the people who bake all the amazing breads I get to show off here every week. I hope your Thanksgiving was lovely and you ate some amazing bread.
On Monday, December 6, I will post a special holiday edition of YeastSpotting. Please send your favorite holiday breads by Friday, December 3. These can be breads from your blog archives and do not need to include a link to YeastSpotting. Use the submission form as usual, and select the “holiday favorite” category. Please make sure post(s) submitted in this category include a recipe or a link to one. Last year we had an awe-inspiring array of festive breads; let’s make this year’s even more astonishing!
| Loaves and Rolls |
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| Flat Breads, Sweet Breads, and More |
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This is the recipe I said I would not post. At least, it’s the recipe for the cranberry bread I’ll be serving for Thanksgiving this year.
Three years ago I wrote (and re-posted for the two years following that) about why I never changed Thanksgiving dinner, why it had been the same reliable cranberry bread for years (along with the same turkey, the same stuffing, and the same potatoes), and would be for years to come. It was the recipe from the back of the bag of Ocean Spray cranberries; you could get it there if you wanted it, and I wasn’t about to go messing with it.
So this year, I messed with it, a little. Added some whole wheat flour. Took away some sugar. Made the loaf a little bigger. Converted everything into grams because that just feels better to me. Call it fine tuning.
In the scheme of things, it’s not that big a deal. And by the scheme of things, I mean that for the past year — and for the first time ever in my life – my household has consisted of just me. Throw a new home, graduating from baking school, and becoming adept at toilet repairs into the scheme, and messing with a cranberry bread recipe is just not that big a deal.
It’s all good, because even really fine, reliable traditions can use a little fine tuning every once in a while, and even really fine lives can withstand some major turbulence. Because even when the bread changes, the house changes, the life changes, and the plumbing breaks, I still have so much to be thankful for. (And if it makes anyone feel any better, I didn’t change the stuffing recipe at all.)
Have a beautiful Thanksgiving, everyone!
| Loaves and Rolls, first batch |
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| Loaves and Rolls, second batch |
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| Flat Breads, Sweet Breads, and More |
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This month it was my turn to lead the Bread Baking Babes into battle, and I wanted to do something to celebrate Thanksgiving, the holiday that many Americans consider our most important. I’ve also been wanting to experiment with dough sculpture, so I asked the Babes to make a cornucopia, a symbol of bountiful harvest and giving thanks, from slightly-yeasted decorative dough.
The light and dark dough recipes are adapted from Jeffrey Hamelman’s excellent book, Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes. Hamelman also gives instructions for creating a woven version of the cornucopia, but I opted for a simpler rope-winding method. Some of the other Babes chose to weave, and the results are spectacular.
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