Portuguese Sweet Bread

This week I decided to make some Portuguese Sweet Bread.  It is sometimes called Hawaiian bread due to its popularity there.  The recipe for this once again came from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. 

This bread is somewhat rich from the butter and egg.  It is also a little citrusy.  The bread is good on its own, but makes for some outstanding French toast.

This is the mise en place for the sponge for the bread.

First, the dry ingredients go into a bowl and mixed.

The sponge gets water added and mixed together.

The sponge sits for an hour or two until its extremely bubbly and ready to collapse onto itself.

This is the mise en place for the dough, minus salt.

The butter, sugar, and dry milk are measured and ready for mixing.

Then they all get creamed together.

The eggs and extracts get mixed into the butter until smooth.

Then the bread flour gets kneaded in for about 10 minutes.  It should pass the windowpane test, when the dough can be spread out so that you can see through it.

The dough shaped into a ball and set in an oiled bowl.  It then has to ferment for about two hours.

At that point, the dough get “punched down” and reshaped into a ball.  It then gets placed into an oiled pie tin and left on the counter to proof for another two hours.

Here is a shot of the dough, with the skin pulled tight.

After the proofing period, it gets brushed with egg wash and baking in the oven for 50 minutes.

After baking, the crust gets a deep mahogany brown.

And here is a final shot of the bread in slices.

Lemon Buttermilk Cake

In this post, I’ve chosen to make a lemon buttermilk cake. Once again the recipe comes from the Culinary Institute of America’s book Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft. Unlike the biscotti, however, it needs to be at least halved so that it can be made in the home. And even at half the amount, it still made a large Bundt cake as well as two loaf pans worth.

Here is the mise en place for the cake. Only I’ve forgotten to include and ready an important ingredient: the buttermilk.

Getting ready to make the batter, the lemons get zested and the zest gets measured.

The dry ingredients go into their own bowl and get mixed.

The lemons get juiced and the buttermilk measured out.

The wet ingredients, except the lemon juice and buttermilk get mixed.

The dry ingredients go in a third at a time, alternately with thirds of the buttermilk. Once mixed, the lemon juice is mixed in.

The batter then gets measured into the Bundt cake pan. It’s now ready to be baked. The times will of course vary based on the size of pan and the temperature of your oven.

Here is the final product. The shape here is due to the Bundt cake pan that I used: a chrysanthemum.

Here’s a close up of the cake.

And a top down view of the cake.

At this point, it is ready to be eaten, but would be better with a lemon glaze. For that mix lemon juice with powdered sugar until smooth and somewhat thick. Spoon the glaze over the cake and let it seep in and dry.