Summer baking

Southern cornbread in a cast iron skillet.  The key is really hot grease!

I don't really know all the details of C.Z.'s recent summer baking, and that's the beauty of it.  But I do know that when she was three, she liked nothing better than to be allowed to play in flour and then have me vacuum her feet.  When she was eight, she made up a lot of recipes that began, "3 c. flour, 3. c. sugar, 3. c. butter...." and then she wanted to be allowed to make them.  Sometimes we did!   By ten or so, she had gotten pretty decent at making cornbread after my mom's recipe, banana bread and bran muffins, which don't require yeast, but do require following a recipe.  Then she added scones to the repertoire.  But this summer when C.Z. got out my old Mary Mac's Tea Room cookbook and decided that it was time to learn to make biscuits, she had entered a new level.  She was ready, and she meant business.

The first biscuits turned out, well, a little dense.  She got hints from our neighbor, hints from the terrapin professor, hints from my mom, and kept trying.  She tried lard.  She stopped using the food processor and started cutting in the butter cold.  The biscuits got better.

An early attempt at Southern biscuits

Then she started reading cookbooks for fun.  "Mommy, did you know we could be making tiramisu?!" she'd announce.  Well, yes, but my only proven method of weight control is to have no tempting foods in the house, so I tend to avoid the dessert sections of cookbooks.

Then came challah.  We are big fans of Silver Moon challah, as I've written elsewhere.  And we like challah from the farmers' market, but sometimes we arrive too late to get any.  So C.Z. tackled challah on her own, and did a tolerable job of it.  I don't think challah is an easy bread to make.

Challah dough

Finished challah

Then our neighbor leant her a book on French bread techniques.  She would sit on the sofa reading and calculating the number of hours required for brioche, croissants, and more.  This was not easy fare, but like me, sometimes C.Z. eschews easier fare for more challenging material.  (She didn't really read until she could digest chapters.)  She made cinnamon raisin brioche.  It was quite good!

Brioche, before and after baking

Yesterday she made croissants.  She got up early in the morning and made the dough, let it rise, cut it, folded it into crescent shapes and let it rise again.  By late afternoon, we had croissants! And we ate them again for breakfast this morning.  

The latest project, croissants!

C.Z. would be the first to tell you that this baking is a work in progress.  She's quite self-critical.  Yesterday she said, "Ooh, I'm not sure I want you to post photos on your blog.  They're not that pretty."  But then I uploaded them and accidentally posted them before I meant to!  It took so long to upload them that now I don't want to delete them, so here you go--a post in progress, about a baker in progress.   

 Pizza, with farmers' market vegetables