Tuesdays With Dorie: Baking With Julia-Whole Wheat Bread

It has been awhile since I have posted. I have been very busy with gardening clean up which I will detail in another post.

This post is about my adventures making whole wheat bread. The hosts for this month's recipe are:

Michele of Veggie Num Nums and Teresa of The Family That Bakes Together. So visit their sites if you are interested in the recipe.

This bread was very easy to make. I used molasses instead of malt extract and the bread turned out great. I took some other liberties too. One loaf was made according to the recipe, and  the other loaf chopped walnuts and raisins were added. Both loaves came out nicely and make excellent toast. I also think the recipe could be used to for  whole wheat rolls.

This was a no fuss recipe. See my results below.

Tuesdays With Dorie : Baking With Julia-French Strawberry Cake

Although we are not supposed to post pictures of our French Strawberry Cake creation until June 19, what I can tell you is that I baked the cake layer today and took liberties. Those of you who know me well will say--well we are not surprised. The cake batter is a genoise and it is supposed to be intimidating. Well it really is not as long as your follow the instructions. Where folks often go wrong is not beating the egg and sugar mixture until it triples in volume. With my KitchenAid standing mixer that took about 10 minutes. After that you just fold in the butter and flour. Then get that pan in the oven pronto.

Here is where I took a different path. The recipe calls for an 8 inch cake pan. I wanted to use a 6 inch spring-form that is 3 inches tall. Let me just say that the spring-form is wonderful because this cake has a tendency to not want to come out of the pan even if you butter and flour it and use wax paper on the bottom. The spring-form makes it a breeze to remove the genoise from the pan. However, since I was going down in size I had to calculate the amount of batter to use--which was just under 4 cups. Then I had to play around with how long to  bake it.  This is a cake that you do not want to open the oven until it is somewhat firm or it will deflate. I estimated that 20 minutes would work for the first check on this little beauty.Baking time was almost 30 minutes in our over at 350. It looks fabulous. Next comes the lawyers of strawberries and cream. Stay tuned for that post.

June Recipes For Tuesdays With Dorie: Baking With Julia

As many of you know I am a member of the  Tuesdays With Dorie: Baking With Julia  baking group. The June recipes have been posted at the TWD:BWJ blog and they are the following
June 5 – Oasis Naan on page 149
June 19 – French Strawberry Cake  on p. 273

If you have The Baking With Julia Cookbook the recipes can be found at the above pages.
I plan to make the French Strawberry Cake for a special dinner. The cake is a genoise and only one layer pan is baked. It is then sliced into 3 layers.

A genoise is a whole egg cake and it does not rise because of whipped egg whites or chemical leavening agents, but the air that is retained in the whole egg and sugar mixture that has been beaten until it has tripled in size. Glad that I have a Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. This is a very elegant cake and the layers will be filled have fresh sliced strawberries and a sweetened  cream and sour cream that has been whippped,

Stay tuned for my post in June with pictures of course,.