holidays

Cranberry Semolina Crown With Pine Nuts and Fennel

I served this semolina crown with cranberries, pine nuts, and fennel for Christmas dinner. It’s a variation on a favorite of mine, Semolina Bread With Fennel, Currants, and Pine Nuts. The crown shape and substitution of dried cranberries for the currants make it a little more festive for a holiday dinner. (OK, so I’m a little late posting this in time for Christmas. But it would be lovely for New Year’s dinner, too.)

With a cross-section similar to that of a baguette, a crown is a delight for crust lovers. To maximize crustiness, make sure you bake the loaf until it is good and dark. Any leftover bread can be sliced thinly and baked in a low oven until crisp for some toasts that are wonderful with your morning coffee or after dinner with a smear of goat cheese.

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Chocolate Panettone Baked in Folded Paper Baskets

I had three goals in making this Chocolate Panettone, a new bread for me:

To make a panettone that my daughter would like. M has an inexplicable dislike of fruit in bread, (indeed, in most baked things; this is inexplicable because she is my flesh and blood). Although fruitless chocolate panettone is not traditional, I have seen it now and then, and I thought M might give it a thumbs-up.
To bake a panettone that, unlike the wild yeast one I usually bake (and love), does not take a good 30 hours to make. While that is a delicious panttone that keeps quite a long time, and the weekend-long process is starting to feel like a necessary holiday ritual for me, sometimes you just can’t invest that kind of time, and why should that have to mean going without home-baked panettone completely?
To try my idea of making folded paper baskets to bake the bread in. You can of course buy paper panettone molds and other decorative, bake-in-to-give-away, paper “pans,” but they’re expensive (and I just like to make things).

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Cranberry Bread, Again

This post originally appeared on Wild Yeast on November 19, 2007. This year, Thanksgiving dinner will be at my sister’s house, and my niece will bake the cranberry bread. The sentiment, however, remains the same. Happy Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving With (As Always) Cranberry Bread

This is the bread I will be serving at Thanksgiving dinner this year. It is the same bread I made last year, and just about every year since I learned how to turn on the oven. It is the same bread you will see here next year if this blog is still around. It’s cranberry-nut bread, the recipe clipped from the back of a long-ago Ocean Spray bag.

The rest of the menu will be similarly well-worn: roast turkey with the same chestnut stuffing we’ve had since my husband and I shared our first Thanksgiving, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes with gravy, sweet potatoes, squash, creamed onions, apple pie, pumpkin pie.

I may vary the sweet potato treatment a bit from year to year. I add a brussels sprout or two if I the urge strikes me. I like to try new pumpkin pie recipes from time to time. But by and large, the menu is eminently simple and predictable.

This is not because I’m not an adventurous cook (although I’m the first to admit I’m not). It is because Thanksgiving dinner is not about the Cuisine, it’s about the Food. It’s about the familiar, abundant dishes you know will always be on your plate, year after year, dishes that come together to create what my husband calls “the perfect mouthful.” These are things that would be sorely missed if they weren’t on the table. This is food that tastes good without having to fuss with it. It’s food you know you can count on.

Now that I think about it, Thanksgiving dinner is a feast that’s a lot like the family I’ll be sharing it (whether physically or in spirit) with.

So no recipes today. The bread recipe is still on the back of the cranberry bag if you need it, but I suspect you don’t. Just make what you made last year.

Have a beautiful Thanksgiving, everyone!

The (Obvious) Pudding

Sugar High Fridays. If you have a sweet tooth (and I admit it, yes, I do), it’s hard to ignore this incredibly sumptuous and well-attended monthly sweet fest founded by Jennifer, The Domestic Goddess. But I bake bread, not desserts (Daring Baker challenges notwithstanding).

Even so , when I opened my inbox to discover an invitation from Zorra to participate in this month’s event, Pudding, I really wanted to, because, well, it was an invitation from Zorra.

So I thought, let’s see, pudding… There’s chocolate, although last time I made it, the texture was, shall we say, suboptimal … I love rice pudding and I might not screw that up… or I could probably handle plum pudding for Christmas, but I don’t really like it… [Fret, fret] what pudding can I make?

Duh.

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Panettone

I’m not sure when it started, but sometime after my husband and I were married, my mother came for Christmas and brought us a panettone for breakfast. Ever since then, this rich, sweet Italian bread has been a part of our Christmas breakfast (along with bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon). Last year, I decided to try making my own. And now it’s that time of year again!

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Pan de Muerto

The first days of November mark Mexico’s Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos), a lively and rich tradition in which departed loved ones are honored and the cycle of life is celebrated.

Although I have never had the opportunity to visit Mexico during this festive time, I wanted to try my hand at making Pan de Muerto (Bread of the Dead), which is traditionally sculpted in a representation of bones. I adapted this one from a recipe in Diana Kennedy’s My Mexican Kitchen: Techniques and Ingredients, as posted on Epicurious. My changes reflect what I discovered worked best for me in making the recipe twice.

The bread is sweet and eggy, similar in texture to a yeasted coffee cake. This one has no anise seed, although other recipes I have seen include it. I didn’t use orange blossom water, only orange zest, and the result was a subtly citrus-scented loaf. [Read more…]