I Killed the Easter Bunny

Inevitably there will come a time when a huge mistake causes a production delay.  These mistakes are rarely made twice.  I remember the time I forgot the salt in the whole wheat dough or when I added the yeast for the double recipe in the single recipe.  New bakers tend to make more mistakes than us well seasoned life-ers (because we made them way back when).  When a member of my staff makes their first big blunder, this is the story I share to make them feel a little better….

My first week at Amy’s Bread was a whirl wind.  I spent three days helping the baguette team shape and bake baguettes.  The fourth day, I trained on the rack ovens.  At the time there was one convection oven which held 30 pans of product.  At the start of the shift, all the rolls and sweet breads had to be pulled from the walk-in cooler and left on the production floor to proof.  The spaces in the racks proofed at different times so you had to constantly rotate, turn and move trays.  In addition, different spaces in the oven baked faster than others so the same tango had to be danced during the bake.  Typically, a new hire trains for a week on this position before being cut loose on their own.  I had one night!

My second night, my first solo night, on the rack oven was the night before Easter.  There was a huge increase in breads to be baked in the rack oven due to the holiday.  I had to bake about 100 dozen hot cross buns as well as several dozen cardamom egg rings.  The eggs in the cardamom rings were dyed bright colors.  The colorful eggs sit at room temperature and are baked into the bread uncooked.  They finish as hard boiled eggs.  If they are cold when they go into the oven they will burst open, like a chilled glass run under hot water.  

Most of the special Easter products had already been sold.  They were for orders that were to be picked up later that day in one of the retail locations. I loaded the entirety of the rings onto the rack to go into the oven.  If I remember correctly, there were at least 120 rings baking at once.  The rack oven is programmed with the bake times, temperatures and amount of steam to be released for each product.  There are several categories of products that bake at similar settings.  During my night of training, Jose told me what to bake on which settings...the chocolate twists bake on the brioche roll setting, and so on.  I couldn't remember on what setting the cardamon rings baked.  I put them in as 'hot cross buns'.  I figured, Easter Bread as Easter Bread, check.  

I walked away from the oven to set up more racks of product and when I returned I was horrified.  All the color from the eggs disappeared.  Wait, no, it didn't disappear, it ran off into the bread itself.  They were ruined.  What happened?  Doh, hot cross buns get steamed and cardamon rings don't.  The steam washed away the dye from the eggs.  I just killed the Easter Bunny!

How did I fix it?  Well, I didn't.  It was one of those times that I had to send out less than perfect product because not sending it would be a worse tragedy.  It was too late to make more dough and at the time I had no idea how to make it.  The night was almost over and the orders would be picked up in a couple hours.  The only saving grace came much later when I retold the story of killing the Easter Bunny to a new baker who burnt an entire stone deck of rustic French rolls.  Everyone gets initiated.  I've been told, you're not a real baker until you have a bread massacre under your belt.

Over the Easter weekend, I taught a class at the Patisserie on this bread as well as Hot Cross Buns.  The cardamon rings were beautiful and I have pictures to show for it thanks to Barbara Fiore, one of my students who is also an excellent photographer.  Her art is visible on her blog  http://barbarafiore-lifewithpeter.blogspot.com

Chocolate Cherry Bread

My husband ate the entire loaf of chocolate cherry bread the minute I brought it in the door.  He was so excited to see it at the bottom of the bag.  I only make it once in a blue moon because no one buys it.  I can't say no one because there are customers who consider this bread their favorite.  There's actually a list of people we have to call when it appears on the bread line.  These people will reserve 4 loaves at a time.  They know how great this bread is!  I think it is one of those things that you have to try before you form an opinion.  The idea of chocolate bread is hard to grasp.

The flavors in this bread complement each other well.  The chocolate comes from a dark Valrohna cocoa powder.  It isn't sweet, just chocolatey.  There are also bittersweet chocolate chunks throughout the interior crumb.  I mix in a couple shots of espresso which bring out the chocolate flavor and add a bit of robustness.  The dried sour cherries are soaked overnight in a mixture or brandy, kirsh and sweet cherry juice.  The dough also includes a healthy dose of sour culture and pate fermente.  These add to the longevity as well as the flavor of the bread.  Though this bread is technically a sourdough, the sour is not an 'upfront' flavor.  If you can resist eating the whole loaf straight out of the bag, this bread makes great French toast or bread pudding.  I like to spread mascarpone cheese on a warm slice.

This is not my original creation.  I have added to the different formulas I've encountered but the idea of it comes from Nancy Silverton of La Brea bakery in LA.  By all accounts, she was the 1st to bake and sell this bread.  Amy's Bread has a version that is made on the weekends.  She also makes small, roll size loaves every day at the Hell's Kitchen location.  Wegmans ssells a chocolate cherry bread as well.  The management at Wegmans thought it was a good idea to have the bakers stand out in the store and give samples of this bread to customers.  None of the bakers were really known for their people skills (hey---they're bakers, not salesman!).  The higher-ups would tell us the selling qualities of each kind of loaf before sending us out to the floor.  They would always say, "this one is great toasted with butter," as if there is a bread that isn't great toasted with butter.  One of the bakers, Dave, said that he was going to tell customers the chocolate cherry bread makes a great tuna sandwich.  Every time I bake this bread, I think of tuna sandwiches and have a little laugh thanks to Dave and Wegmans.

I attended an event for the Patisserie last year and this was one of the breads I brought for everyone to try.  One lady exclaimed "this bread sounds sooo gross but it's really good."  I don't know why it gets such a bad rap because it is quite fabulous.  It also ships well and keeps longer than most loaves (again, if you can manage to not eat the whole thing in one sitting).  That's my sales pitch for one of my favorite breads!  I'll send out a bulletin next time I plan on making a batch.  I made a suprise, impromtu batch on Christmas Day.  As mentioned, my husband was thrilled!

'Can'ettone

I just wrapped up the last of my holiday bread classes for the season.  This is my favorite class to teach because we bake my favorite breads to eat.  With the students, I make German Stollen, Italian Panettone and Irish Barm Brack.  Every culture has a holiday bread of some sort and they always have tons of fruit, sometimes booze, butter and sugar.  Most of them keep for longer than a regular loaf of bread.  In the case of Stollen, it keeps indifinitely.  As a matter of fact, you're not supposed to eat it until a couple days after it is baked.

Stollen comes from Dresden, Germany.  It is supposed to represent a swaddled baby Jesus.  My recipe is for an almond stollen.  It has a log made of almond paste and sliced almonds that resembles a breakfast sausage (according to my students and coworkers) running down the center of the loaf.  The dough encasing the sausage is made of flour, lots of butter, sugar, candied fruits and almonds.  At the Patisserie, I use candied orange and lemon peel imported from France.  This isn't the candied fruit your grandma puts in her fruit cake at Christmas.  No bright red cherries here!  This stuff actually has flavor beyond sweet, tons of it!

The best, most decadant part of Stollen creation....it's dipped in butter.  Does it get any better?  When the loaf is hot from the oven it is dipped in clarifed butter (ours is an 83% fat, cultured butter).  You dip it when it's hot so it absorbs more.   Once it's wet and gooey, it gets rolled in vanilla sugar...that's sugar with added vanilla bean.  I challange you to find a Christmas loaf more glutenous than this.  The butter and sugar crust actually serves a purpose.   This is how one is able to keep Stollen around for months without worry of decay.  Last March, we found a hidden Stollen I baked in December and it was still yummy!

Barm means yeast and Brack translates to speckled in Gaelic.  Barm Brack is a yeasted bread speckled with lot of fruit.  It wouldn't be Irish without the booze and this one is boozed up for sure.  The currants, raisins and candied fruit peel are soaked in whisky over night (for a non-alchy version you can soak the fruit in black tea but what fun is that?).  The fruit represents 200% of the flour weight in this dough.  That's pretty much unheard of in the baking community.  Neither I, nor my students, would ever believe the dough would hold all the fruit if we didn't see it happen.  Like a King Cake, this bread is baked with inedibles representing prosperity or demise in the comming year.  Yes, the incredibly optimistic Irish include misfortune in their bread lure.  Apparently you could find a matchstick in your slice...this means you will beat your wife or be a beaten wife for the year.  Better yet, you could find a piece of cloth which represents how empty your pockets will be. You may get lucky and find the ring and marry or the coin and be rich.  I think there are seven jujus in all.  Maybe the true fortune is not breaking your teeth on one.

In our class, we made chocolate cherry panettone.  This is not the traditional raisin, candied fruit peel bread that comes in the box in every department store around this time of year.  I included this modern version in my class to distinguish it from the other two breads.  It can get a little confusing jumping back and forth between doughs when they all have the same basic ingredients.  So, I folded some melted chocolate into this dough and it stood out from the rest.

Panettone literally translates to Tony's bread.  Legend has it, a poor baker named, you guessed it, Tony, won the heart of his society sweetheart's father by baking him this bread.  The two were married, ate lots of bread and lived long happy lives.  Now this bread is a customary Italian Christmas gift.  You can find it everywhere.  I saw the stacked boxes in TJMaxx last week.  I'm sure the quality of those loaves is outstanding.  My version is not meant to keep beyond a couple days.  This bread is not as dense as the other two.  It contains a lot of butter as in a brioche loaf and not nearly as much fruity bits as the other breads.  We baked mini-loaves in the class.  In order to demonstrate how easy it is to find alternatives to ring molds or expensive paper Panettone molds, I had the students bake their bread in soup cans.  This is how our bread became affectionately refered to as 'Can'ettone!