Cheddar Chive Sourdough Bread

This cheddar chive bread is delicious for sandwiches, with spaghetti or ravioli for dipping, and for breakfast toast topped with fried or poached eggs. 

This recipe makes three 1 1/2 pound loaves of bread, but is easily scalable. If you decide to make all three loaves, just wrap the extra loaves in foil and then plastic wrap, and freeze them for up to 30 days.

Corn and Jalapeño Rolls

These corn and jalapeño rolls are soft, slightly sweet, and have a little kick from the jalapeño. 

These rolls are really special. They are a little bit sweet, completely soft, and wonderful paired with chili or used as sandwich or burger buns. You can even make them a little smaller for sliders! 

Crescia al Formaggio | Italian Easter Bread

This Crescia al Formaggio is an amazing cheesy Italian Easter bread. It's definitely a cheese lover's bread. 

I admit it. I'm always drawn to cheese bread. Given a choice between savory or sweet bread, I gravitate for anything savory.

Strawberry Danish Pastries

These Strawberry Danish have just emerged from the oven. They've been brushed with a hot glaze, and then drizzled with a fondant glaze. It's 10 pm and I just ate one. It's all I can do to not to eat the rest.

These Danish rolls are made with a croissant dough shaped into coils, filled with freshly made strawberry jam, and drizzled with a hot glaze. You can also shape the dough into pinwheels and little braids. It is so flaky, buttery, and amazing.

Detroit Style "Red Top" Pizza

Detroit Red Top Pizza is an amazing thing, especially if you love burnt cheese as much as I do. This pizza is encrusted with cheese, purposely pressed against the sides of a butter coated pan to achieve that crusty goodness. Ridiculous. 

60 Percent Kamut Sourdough Bread

I was really nervous about making this Kamut Sourdough bread. Kamut is a grain I have never baked with before and I wasn't sure what to expect.

Current nutritional fads notwithstanding, I've been intrigued with using heirloom grains in my breads, and impulsively bought a bag of Kamut berries a while ago.

Pecan Kringle

This Pecan Kringle is the perfect breakfast treat for Christmas morning.. or any morning! The pecans in the filling are toasty and flavored with buttery cinnamon and brown sugar.

Cheddar Cheese Crackers

I'm pretty excited about these cheddar cheese crackers! They have such a wonderful savory flavor... and they came out crispy!

I've always had good luck making savory shortbread crackers, but have been challenged at times with creating a crispy yeasted cracker. Sometimes they can come out tough or chewy instead of crunchy.

Checkerboard Tangzhong Rolls

These Checkerboard Tangzhong Rolls are so soft and fluffy. When you separate them, the crumb just pulls apart into deliciously thin ethereal sheets of goodness.

Tangzhong you ask? It is a starter made of flour and water, and sometimes milk, that is cooked to exactly 149 degrees F (well maybe not exactly in my case), cooled, and added to the dough. The resulting bread is amazingly soft. It's the kind of bread that is so good with just salted butter.

Demi Baguettes

Baguettes! I have a love/hate relationship with them. When I first attempted them, I got baguette pancakes, squiggly baguettes, pale baguettes, and other various mutations of the elusive perfect product from French boulangeries.

I've got to say, I'm really excited about these. Browned crackly and crispy crust, holey interior, and an amazing flavor from two to three days of fermentation make these my favorite baguettes so far.

Bialys

Bialys are a long forgotten treat from the Jewish quarter of Bialystok, Poland, where they were constant staple.

Food writer Mimi Sheraton wrote about her exploration of the history of these wonderful rolls in her book The Bialy Eaters: The Story of a Bread and a Lost World. "Rich Jews ate kuchen (bialystoker kuchen) with meals, and for poor Jews kuchen were the meal.... we ate them in the morning and in the night, and in between."

Hawaiian Style Sweet Rolls

These Hawaiian Sweet Rolls are the perfect vehicle for pulled barbecue pork sliders. They are also amazing as dinner rolls. We even sliced them and used them for French bread and cinnamon toast.

Olive Campagne Boule

This Olive Campagne Boule is one of my favorite breads for serving as an appetizer. The crust is super crunchy, and the interior is so incredibly moist. I love setting out small slices of the bread along with  a carafe of roasted garlic infused olive oil for dipping.

Stollen

Stollen is the German Christmas bread. According to Peter Reinhart, in the book, Bread Baker's Apprentice, the shape of the stollen symbolizes the blanket of the baby Jesus, and the colored fruits represent the gifts of the Magi. Dresden is considered the home of stollen and even hosts an annual stollen festival where they unveil a giant (huge!) loaf.

Cranberry Pumpkin Rolls

These cranberry pumpkin rolls are so soft and tender. I think they would be perfect for your Thanksgiving bread basket. I also think they would be even more perfect with Thanksgiving leftover dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, and sliced turkey sandwiched in the middle. Seriously.

The dough is incredibly easy to make. Just toss all of the ingredients into a stand mixer and mix until blended. Add the fruit and candied ginger, form the dough into 24 balls, and bake them in a 9 inch by 13 inch cake pan.

The pumpkin puree adds such an amazing softness to the dinner rolls, without any added fat. These will definitely be on my Thanksgiving menu.

Cranberry Pumpkin Rolls

Ingredients

4/3/4 C (20 ounces) unbleached all purpose flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp ground ginger

1/8 tsp ground cloves

1/4 C (1 3/4 ounces brown sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1 T instant yeast

3/4 C (6 ounces) canned pumpkin

2 large eggs

3/4 C (6 ounces) water

1/4 C (2 ounces) softened unsalted butter

3/4 C (4 1/2 ounces) dried cranberries

1/4 C (1 1/2 ounces) diced crystalized ginger
1/4 C butter, melted

Instructions

1. Add all of the ingredients, with the exception of the cranberries and crystalized ginger, into the bowl of a stand mixer, and mix on medium low for about seven minutes. The dough should be smooth and soft. Adjust the the flour and water as necessary. 
2. Add the cranberries and ginger and knead for another minute, until fully incorporated.
3. Place the dough into an oiled bowl or dough rising bucket, cover, and let rise until doubled, about 90 minutes.
4. Oil a 9 inch by 13 inch cake pan. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
5. Divide the dough into 24 equal pieces, about 54 grams each. Form each piece into a ball and place each into the cake pan, seam side down. Cover the cake pan with oiled plastic wrap. Let the pan rest for about an hour, until the rolls are puffy.
6. Bake the rolls for about 25 to 30 minutes. 
7. Remove the rolls from the oven, and brush them with the melted butter.
8. Turn the rolls out onto a cooling rack to cool. 
9. These rolls can be served warm or at room temperature. 

Recipe from King Arthur Flour

More pumpkin themed breads! 

• Cream Cheese Filled Pumpkin Muffins from That Skinny Chick Can Bake
• Crusty Pumpkin Rosemary Bread from Culinary Adventures with Camilla
• Giant Pumpkin Spice Cinnamon Rolls from girlichef
• Pumpkin Chocolate Pocky Muffins from NinjaBaking.com
• Pumpkin Seed Breadsticks from Never Enough Thyme

Apple and Ham Pizza

This apple and ham pizza absolutely made my day.  The combination of the apple, ham, and Havarti cheese is the perfect combination of savory and sweet, and the apples hold up well during the hot bake.

We had this pizza for dinner with a salad, and I had the lone leftover piece for breakfast the next day. I immediately made it again. So good.

The crust for this pizza is really versatile and easy to work with. The dough is mixed a day in advance and magically rises overnight. The dough recipe yields five pizzas. You refrigerate the dough after shaping it into dough balls, and you can make pizza over two to three days. Woo hoo! I used the rest of the dough to work on my pizza skills, including baking pizza on the barbecue. It was awesome. (I'm pretty sure I drove my friends on Instagram crazy with all of the pizza posts).

The outer crust gets all airy and bubbly, and the pizza is crispy throughout.

Will I make this again? Oh yeah.

Apple and Ham Pizza

Overnight Pizza Dough

1000 grams (7 3/4 C) white flour

3 C water at 90 to 95 degrees F

20 g (1 T + 3/4 tsp) fine sea salt

.8 g (scant 1/4 tsp) instant yeast

1. Hydrate the yeast in a small amount of the measured and heated water in a small container. 
2. In a very large bowl or 12 quart dough rising bucket, combine the flour and the rest of the water. Mix by hand until all of the flour is wet, cover, and let rest for 30 minutes. 
3. Scatter the salt over the top of the dough, and add the yeast mixture. Wipe out the container with a piece of the dough to get all of the dissolved yeast. 
4. Mix the dough by hand by pinching it and folding it alternatively, until the salt and yeast is fully incorporated, about 3 to 5 minutes. 
5. Cover and let rest for 30 minutes. Stretch and fold the dough twice during the first hour (once after 30 minutes, and once after 60 minutes). 
6. After the last fold, spray the top of the dough with spray oil, cover the dough, and let it rise for about 12 hours at room temperature. 
7. When the dough is ready, gently ease it onto a floured work surface. Cut it into 5 equal pieces, about 340 grams each. 
8. Shape the pieces into balls and place them onto a floured baking sheet. Spray the tops with spray oil, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least 6 hours and up to 3 days. 

Apple and Ham Pizza

1 T olive oil plus more for the baking sheet

1/2 thinly sliced red onion

1 T fresh thyme

Salt and pepper

1 pizza dough ball

8 ounces grated Havarti cheese

1 thinly sliced crisp apple, peel on (I used Honeycrisp, but Braeburn would be great too)

4 ounces thinly sliced ham

1. Place a pizza stone in the middle of your oven and preheat it to its highest temperature.
2. Rub 1 T olive oil onto a rimmed baking sheet.
3. Toss the red onion with the thyme, 1 T olive oil, and salt and pepper. 
4. Place the pizza dough onto a floured work surface and press it down to form a disk. Flip it over, and continue to press it to stretch the dough. Pick it up, and stretch it with your hands. 
5. Place it over your hands, and work it around with your knuckles to continue to stretch the dough. 
6. Place the dough onto the oiled baking sheet. Press it into the oil to stretch to to about a 10 inch round. Take the cheese, and press it into the dough. As you add the cheese, the dough should eventually stretch into a 12 inch round. 
7. Add the onion mixture, top with the apples and the ham. 
8. Place the baking sheet on top of the baking stone and bake for about 5 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 400 degrees F and continue baking for about 15 to 20 minutes more, until the crust is golden brown. 

The pizza dough recipe was adapted from Ken Forkish's book, Flour, Salt, Water, Yeast. The book is amazing. Trust me. You can also find the recipe here. 

Cherry English Muffins

These cherry English muffins are probably the closest I've gotten to creating the "nook and cranny" English muffins for which we bakers strive. Plus they have cherries!!!

Crusty Cheese and Onion Bread

This Crusty Cheese and Onion Bread, with its crispy and cheesy crust and soft savory interior, is totally captivating.

I took one of the loaves to work, and it disappeared immediately.

One of my favorite "foods" is burnt cheese. If you are with me on this, you will love this bread. It was really hard not to pick off every last bit of it.

Pizza di Pasqua - Easter Pizza

This Pizza di Pasqua is traditionally served only on Easter morning in areas of central Italy (at least according to the interwebs). It is incredibly ethereal and light. In fact, as I researched this bread, I was continuously reminded that "this bread is very delicate." (With all of those warnings, I was a little nervous after my "collapsed savarin incident" that I'm trying to forget).

Swirled Rye Bread (Using Cocoa)

I used to think that marbled rye bread was made by using two different rye flours, one white, and one dark. I've since learned that both doughs are the same, with one having been darkened by an added dark colored ingredient.