quadruple bake

woke up early in the morning for a whole half-day of baking with sonya!

first, we made the pain viennois from bertinet. this was my first time seeing the sweet dough from the book.
a lot of rubbing of ingredients into the flour. this dough comes together faster than the white dough, but it was very hard to work it. nevertheless, we formed it to ball, left it to rise, divided and shaped it. i shaped one of them, and it was quite ugly.
into the oven. the little baguettes were supposed to be scored deeply, but you can see that the one on the right has a barely superficial scoring; it's the one i made - i didn't read the recipe beforehand, and hance scored it like a normal baguette.
one on top of the other for you to see the difference. mine actually looks not bad on the photo. it's like a shiny and fake baguette - those used for displays. anyhow, the bread came out much less sweet than i imagined it to be. this pain viennois should be sliced length-wise in half, served with a thin chocolate bar sandwiched inside.

next, we made a wholemeal almond raisin biscotti. i biscotti is a cookie that is twice-baked. you first bake a log of biscotti dough in a moderate oven to give the dough form. after it's completely cooled, you slice it up and then return it to a low oven for drying out.
the log, and the biscotti slices. this tasted really nice. not sweet like other cookies, but with a nutty and fruity flavour from the almonds and raisins. very healthy. i think it's something 姑姑 will like. if you want to know, the biscotti is adapted from martha's recipe.

then, we made white wheat bread.
yes, my electric mixer is down, but i managed. manually kneaded the dough to get a somewhat acceptable smoothness.
leaving the dough to rise, fold, rise again, fold, divide, preshape, shape, yada yada. i glazed the loaves with the egg wash leftover from the pain viennois, as an experiment. the scoring was very pretty, and it revealed an interior with quite some airiness. maybe it has to do with resting the dough for longer than the recipe instructed.
i've found a new way to slide the loaves onto the 'baking stone' in a much easier way: fold the parchment over and get two layers before placing the dough on it. being able to slide the loaves on in a shorter time prevents excessive heat loss from the oven. with the egg wash, the loaves looked better as they baked.
omg i love the sunny golden of the loaves. for some reason neither of us could think of, the loaves had a buttery smell. again, the bread was as good as a sunday bread could be.

finally we made some bailey's sugar cookies, because sonya had to make cookies with liqour. this one was a cut-out cookie. that is, the dough is made, chilled, rolled and cut out for baking.
spot patrick on the baking sheet haha. i twisted the arms of one of the cookies to make it look like patrick. but in the oven, these spread a little, unlike nigella's butter cut-out biscuits, which don't spread at all.
the recipe for these cookies comes from here. the problem is that the recipe doesn't specify oven temperature. but no matter, the recipe makes up a batch of dough so huge that i still have half of it in my freezer for me to use next week, in testing out the required oven temperature and timing.

and an arrangement of the four things we made today:
after this i'm watching the stepford wives.