Saturday, January 10, 2009
King cake!
Here are pictures of my first king cake of the 2009 season. This was working off of my newly formalized and slightly modified recipe. I ended up adding more flour because though the recipe should only have been around 50% hydration it looked more like 80%... I'm not sure if I mis-measured something or if the flour was just particularly non-absorbent, I'll try one more before I make the change in the recipe.
I've also posted a picture of the original recipe, scribbled on notebook paper and stained with oil, complete with the sticker from one of the lemons I used one year (one lemon produces more than enough zest and just enough lemon juice for the cake, cream cheese filling, and icing and you should always use fresh lemons for such things rather than those lemon-shaped bottles of stuff).
Thursday, January 08, 2009
King cake season!
King cake season is here! Another Mardi Grad season has begun and today I have finally formalized my king cake recipe, which for the past three years has been pencil scratch ingredients with no directions on an oil soaked sheet of paper with a note from my grandmother on the back and the sticker off a Sunkist lemon on the front and various calculations from an earlier attempt at converting it to weight measurements scribbled all around it.
Today I sat down and looked at it and made it work. I have typed up a nice neat three page recipe with all the measurements in US standard cooking measurements and in weight by grams! (Weight by gram is a much more accurate way to measure flour and make bread.) I figured out the baker's percentages and figured out the hydration of the bread! I consolidated fillings and the icing onto one page, including cream cheese, chocolate ganache, and brown sugar with pecans. I also wrote out step-by-step directions!
I made one change, using water and powdered milk rather than milk, because I changed the recipe to use a poolish (preferment) and I don't want half a cup of milk sitting around for a few days. The new and improved recipe will be attempted this weekend for Sunday dinner at my parents house and if all goes as planned I'll make it available here. (Or I may just ask you to contact me by e-mail so I can send the nicely formatted file rather than making it work in HTML and the confines of my blog layout.
Klasinc&Loncar Duo (Just trying to help it get picked up by Google spiders, I maintain it for them)