ABC: Raspberry-Almond Braided Bread

Hello ABC-er! I'm sorry I've been so absent lately. I actually made the Blueberry Hand Pies last month but never got around to processing the photos and posting! I will add the photos to my next ABC post.

For this bread, the recipe yield 2 breads and they looked huge! So I made 1/2. I was so excited about it. It looked and sounded so good and I figured I could use my stash of homemade lemon curd that I made earlier this year. Except, the lemon curd had turned bad. The top part has turned brown and the consistency is more like lemon butter. Also, the lemon smell is totally gone. So I had to throw it away. Sniff sniff....

I didn't feel like going to the store just to get lemon curd, so I improvised. I cooked a couple of handfuls of frozen raspberries with some sugar. I didn't measure any of them, just sort of eye-balled it.

ABC: Boston Cream Pie

For this week's ABC selection, I decided to make 1/3 recipe. The full size of this cake uses a 9 inch pan. I was too lazy to measure by volume. I do have 7 inch, 6 inch, and 4 inch cake pans. So I went with 6 inch. The size turned out to be perfect. The cake rose pretty high. However, if you look at the picture above, the cake sunk in the middle. When I took the cake out of the oven I was so sad. I didn't know why it sunk and it looked terrible. I only baked this for 20 minutes since this is a smaller size. I thought maybe I bake it a few minutes too long, but it should still not sink in the middle. Hubby cheerfully suggested that I should cut a hole in the middle and call it a bundt cake :). If you have seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding this comment should ring a bell.

ABC: Panettone Muffins

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2012 was a good year for you and may 2013 be even better!

For this year, I've decided to join a baking club: ABC. It stands for Avid Baker's Challenge. ABC is ran by my friend Hanaa and it's a group that baked once a month. I knew Hanaa from my time as Heavenly Cake Bakers (HCB), baking through Rose's Heavenly Cakes. After that baking club ended in 2011, Hanaa asked me to join ABC but at that time I wasn't ready. Having baked through a whole book of 95 recipes in 2 years, I wanted a little break from baking and blogging. But I'm ready now and a couple of months ago I asked Hanaa to join ABC for 2013. For 2013, the group voted to bake from the 3 choices that Hanaa presented us: Flour by Joanne Chang, King Arthur Flour website, or Baking Illustrated by America's Test Kitchen. King Arthur Flour won.

For January, we are baking Panettone Muffins. I love pannetone so I was pretty excited about it. However, this recipe does make 12 muffins and having baked a couple other sweet things during this weekend, I thought I would just bake part of the recipe. So I split the recipe by 4. Yes 4! Hanaa and other ex-HCB friends are familiar with my habit with MO, as they've called it. I've had great success in the past making small portions of recipes and with this one as well.

ABC: Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake

Hanaa asked me to participate as a guest blogger for her ABC baking club. It took me about 2 minutes to decide. The menu for this month is Butterscotch Spiral Coffee Cake from Flo Baker's Baking for All Occasions.

The recipe for this cake reminds me so much of cinnamon rolls, which I love. I am not a big fan of cardamon so I opted out of it.

I do not want to make the full portion of the recipe, so I made split the recipe into 5. It is not very challenging because most of the measurement is in grams. The biggest challenge is to figure out where to bake it in as the original recipe calls for a 9 inch pan.

Fortunately I do have a 4 inch pan, that I bought on a whim last year. Going off the appendix section in Rose's Heavenly Cakes, it said that 4 inch pan is 1 3/4 cups  and a 9 inch pan is 8 2/3 cups. Dividing that up 1.75/8.67 = 0.20.

But then looking at the recipe it used 2 eggs. Would be hard to split it into 5 and I don't want to waste eggs. The recipe used some water in the dough, so I decided to replace some of the water with the remainder egg.