Tonight I started on my baking for Thanksgiving. I bought a pound of yeast at Hyvee this morning (the bakery manager obliges me, God bless her!), which will probably last only until the end of the month. We had a pan of leftover smashed potatoes, so I ran them through the ricer and made a six-batch of potato roll dough, which yielded 5 dozen rose rolls, six HUGE loaves of bread and a small pan of monkey bread. The potatoes in the dough help yield a softer and lighter loaf with a good crumb. The recipe I used is similar to Hungarian Potato Bread from season three of Breaking Bread with Father Dom, and you can find it here. I omitted the optional seeds for this bake.
I must say I'm mystified by people who bake only during the holiday season. I suppose I can understand (just barely) if you make sugar cookies only at Christmas, but why make cinnamon rolls only once a year? Why can you find time to bake in the season when you have a thousand other things to do, but not in February, or June, or September? And but me no buts about heating up the house in summer---we have a kitchen utterly without A/C, and it has to get above 90 degrees for three days in a row before I give up honey oatmeal bread, and I've managed to turn out a decent Danish pastry dough even in July.
In the end I suppose I do understand why people often bake only between Thanksgiving and New Year's day---they associate it with happy memories of Mom or Grandma or Aunt Belle, or they started baking some family favorite recipe when the kids were little and "It just wouldn't be Christmas" without it. I just happened to grow up in a household with over 5,000 cookie cutters to choose from (no exaggeration) with shapes coresponding to every human activity and holiday---Groundhog Day cookies, anyone? I had a mom who never said, "Get out of my kitchen!" but was more likely to yell into the living room, "Come in here and sift this flour!" I had a family for which it was normal to bake on any day, for no particular
For which all the monks who will be having rose rolls tomorrow cry out, "Deo gratias!"
I must say I'm mystified by people who bake only during the holiday season. I suppose I can understand (just barely) if you make sugar cookies only at Christmas, but why make cinnamon rolls only once a year? Why can you find time to bake in the season when you have a thousand other things to do, but not in February, or June, or September? And but me no buts about heating up the house in summer---we have a kitchen utterly without A/C, and it has to get above 90 degrees for three days in a row before I give up honey oatmeal bread, and I've managed to turn out a decent Danish pastry dough even in July.
In the end I suppose I do understand why people often bake only between Thanksgiving and New Year's day---they associate it with happy memories of Mom or Grandma or Aunt Belle, or they started baking some family favorite recipe when the kids were little and "It just wouldn't be Christmas" without it. I just happened to grow up in a household with over 5,000 cookie cutters to choose from (no exaggeration) with shapes coresponding to every human activity and holiday---Groundhog Day cookies, anyone? I had a mom who never said, "Get out of my kitchen!" but was more likely to yell into the living room, "Come in here and sift this flour!" I had a family for which it was normal to bake on any day, for no particular
For which all the monks who will be having rose rolls tomorrow cry out, "Deo gratias!"
RSS Feed