El Cocuy/New Creations

Workspace plus the two bagels. My first time trying!

Finished bagels with poppyseeds, cut in half with butter. YUM!
Banana blackberry bread. I filled the loaf pan a little too high and put a few too many blackberries so it baked for three hours instead of one and was still a little doughy inside! Won't be making this again...

And. I baked granola for El Cocuy.

Bread and Bagels

Well the bread turned out surprisingly well despite the yeast mishap and my lack of remembering to put it in the steam oven thing first. It looks horrible but tastes good, that's all that matters! It actually tastes like normal bread, which is nice (not full of sugar). Making the bagels also SUCKED because they never rose! I put them in like three different warm places in the room and the yeast just like never activated...I ended up with nine mini bagels though, that were kinda decent, and gave three to a homeless indigenous person, gave three others away and came home with three (great math there, Anna). I don't have pictures because my camera battery was dead, but they were ugly anyway. I might go bake granola on Wednesday so that I have food while I'm in the mountains for nine days. Hopefully I won't starve!

Christmas Baking

Ahhh. Christmas baking. It's almost like we are back home, having a real Christmas with real trees and snow! One downside..it was about seventy-five degrees out. Now, don't get me wrong, the weather was totally amazing, but it was totally wrong for the day we had planned to Christmas bake! Lots of other things were Christmas-y though: we had a Christmas Classics radio station playing, a......okay, I guess that was really all that was Christmas-y. The tree was fake, the house was tiny and hot, and the recipes weren't American (I was baking with two German girls..), but overall it was nice to have a day baking with friends!

Our finished Linzer cookies, with the fake tree in the background. We had to make do with what we had, meaning no rolling pin, no cookie cutters, and only jam whose first ingredient was sugar, not fruit!

Holding the tray of cookies we made! The actual cookies weren't that sweet, but the super-sweet marmalade definitely made up for the lack of sweetness in the dough. I actually loved eating the dough before it was baked! :) But it seems that I always eat about half the cookie dough before I bake it, anyway.

We didn't have a scale or any method of American measurements, so we estimated the whole thing. They turned out pretty well despite having nothing that we would usually make them with. According to Zissy, they tasted nothing like German Christmas cookies... They definitely weren't my type of cookie, so I didn't take any home, but the whole experience was really fun.

A few recipes that have caught my eye and I hope to make this week:

Chocolate Banana Bread

Butternut Squash Gnocci

Berry Banana Bread

Mini Bagels (since I haven't had a bagel in six months!)

Bran Enriched White Bread

Pictures Of My Workspace And A Bread Mishap

A picture of the bakery at work with Zissy and Jannin. The big ovens are to the right, out of the picture, and the refrigerators are to the left, out of the picture.

The big oven and the rising chamber! I love the big oven, although I don't like that it is gas.

Me mixing the almojabana mass together. We only use our hands in the bakery! There is nothing electric used for mixing, only the scale for weighing. I am breaking the number one rule by wearing my rings--oops!

My attempted white bread that I wrote about in the last post...had a little accident with the yeast.

Basically what happened is that I noticed the bread wasn't rising properly...I decided to leave it over the weekend to see what it would do. When I got home though, I was reading baking blogs (but really, what else do I do?!) and I realized that "active dry yeast" and "instant yeast" were different things. I never knew that because I have only used fresh yeast while working in the Servimos bakery, so I didn't "proof" the active dry yeast. The recipe called for instant yeast, and in English I probably would have recognized that there is a difference, but because I buy the ingredients in Spanish I didn't recognize that they are two different things! Instant yeast doesn't exist here, so I need to start proofing active dry yeast when I want to make bread. I will try and bake this one anyway, but will most likely end up making a new mass on Monday. I feel like I am learning new things about baking almost every day, and that makes me so happy! I want to get to the point where I know exactly what each ingredient does so I can make up my own recipes :)

High Altitude Baking

So, I recently did some MUCH needed research (read, within the last ten minutes, after four months of wondering) and everything about baking here in Bogota basically clicked in my head. There are four basic rules that I noticed about any type of baking (cookies, cakes, muffins, quick loaves, whatever) that I had basically guessed needed to happen by the weird results I have been getting.

Number 1: lower the amount of sugar by 2-3 T. per cup.

Number 2: add 2 T. more of flour per cup

Number 3: add 2-4 T more of liquid per cup

Number 4: lower the amount of leavening agent (baking powder/soda and yeast) by 15%-25%

This makes so much sense now! Everything we were making was super sweet and got runny/dry very quickly. The scientific process goes something like this: Water evaporates more quickly at altitude, hence the need to add more liquid. When the water evaporates, it leaves the sugar in the recipe, which become very prominent. Flour is drier here because the air is drier, so more liquid needs to be added for that purpose as well. Also, there is less air pressure at high altitude, so the leavening agent works more quickly, but then deflates. Okay, so that isn't quite super scientific, but it's good enough for me to kind of understand the process better!

I am going to try and make my OWN yeast bread tomorrow, not one from the bakery. I am using a recipe from King Arthur Flour, which is credited to "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes A Day". I am planning to use only 1 T. of instant yeast instead of 1 1/2 T. and to do it more by feel instead of exact measurements, since that is what I do all day at the bakery anyway! Speaking of my work at the bakery, I made pan integral (wheat rolls) all by myself today! For the first time, I had absolutely no guidance, and I was proud to really be able to do it alone. Now I know I can definitely come home and make them...after I make the adjustments for baking at sea level!

Tomorrow I will post about how the bread goes.. :) I can't wait!

Baking in Bogota

Baking in Bogota is complicated. First of all, many ingredients don't exist (brown sugar, vanilla extract, allspice, pecans, dried cranberries, bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate) and others are very hard to find/really expensive (almonds, walnuts, cocoa powder). Bogota is also situated at almost 8000 feet elevation, which also greatly affects baking. I find that things are too sweet and that they aren't done when the wooden tester stick comes out clean. To complicate things even more in my particular case, I don't have an oven! They fry all of their food here, so an oven is not necessary in a lot of households. I luckily work in a bakery (where we only make bread) and am allowed to use everything there but the ingredients, so I still find a way to bake!

Unfortunately, nothing has ever turned out to my liking. I am a pretty picky baker, but also very un-exact at the same time. I only absolutely love a few things, and always have high expectations for myself (although that doesn't keep me from eating obscene amounts of whatever I make!). I still continue to try, though, and my colleagues generally like what I make because they never know how it is "supposed" to turn out.

Here are a few of the things I have made since being here!

Gnocci! With Amy. This was the first time I tried it, and it went surprisingly well considering all of the bad stories I'd heard about making it. All that bread making is doing me well! The pesto is also homemade :) by Amy! But without pine nuts, since they don't exist here.

My work space at my "Family Family's" house. TINY. But I make do!

THE BEST BANANA BREAD EVER! So plain, no spices, no brown sugar, no nuts. Just banana bread goodness. This is one of my fall back recipes and probably will always be! I am posting the recipe below.

Also, since this recipe is so simple, I have made it with many ingredient substitutions! I have used brown sugar instead of white, a mixture of the two, and honey instead of sugar all together. My favorite has been the honey. The brown sugar didn't add anything special to it, and the honey feels healthier without jeopardizing the taste at all. I have used three bananas and four, small bananas and large, yellow bananas and brown, and it turned out great every time. I have tried adding spices, chocolate chips and nuts, but plain still is my favorite! Have fun with the recipe :)

Best Banana Bread

courtesy of Elise at Simply Recipes

3-4 ripe bananas, smashed

1/3 c. melted butter

3/4 c. sugar (I prefer scant 3/4 c. honey)

1 egg, beaten

1 t. vanilla

1 t. baking soda

pinch of salt

1 1/2 c. flour

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mash bananas. Using a wooden spoon, mix in melted butter. Mix in sugar, egg and vanilla. Sprinkle baking soda and salt over mixture and stir. Add flour last and stir until combined. Pour into a buttered and floured loaf pan and bake one hour.

Why Start A Baking Blog?

Because I love baking, that's why! I have a feeling I will get very lazy with it, but I will do my best to keep it up for my own sake. I love being able to go back and remember how recipes went, and the pictures and detailed descriptions will help me. My baking is a little hindered since I LIVE IN A HOUSE WITH NO OVEN, but I will be doing most of my baking at work (in the bakery, duh) and at my "Family Family's" house, where there are ovens. I am hoping to start some kind of money-making thing from baking (no, not a job, just something to make money on the side) when I move back to the United States in three months. For now I'll try to post about everything I bake and about new baking things I'm loving.