Meet my new favorite snack…
… my new favorite gift food…
… and my new favorite Christmas tree ornament…
… all rolled (literally) into one crunchy little Italian wheel called a tarallo.
These taralli, which are a cross between a bagel and a hard bread stick and which Ilva assigned as the Bread Baking Babes’ December project, are better than the taralli I have made before. I attribute this to the greatly-increased proportion of olive oil, which gives a tender, crumbly interior texture while keeping the outside firm and crunchy. Oh, and there’s a lot more fennel, too, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a superior result right there. And then there’s the wine…
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.
For the second month in a row, the Daring Bakers were challenged with ice cream and cake, and I am not complaining one bit. (The only drawback is that these things are very tricky to photograph when the weather is hot, as it has been this week. And I’m not altogether facile with my camera. Which means I resort to photographing things like a carved soapstone fish on a plate as a stand-in to figure out the appropriate camera settings, while the sweet and meltable things rest comfortably in the freezer until the last possible moment. This will give the archaeologists something to wonder about when they unearth my photo collection a thousand years hence.)
