Baker

Ivy's first fougasse!

This term Ivy has decided to focus some of her energy on baking. She and Ella experimented with making up their own recipes and came up with "Butterfly Biscuits" and "Caramel Whizbangs"! They based their ideas on recipes they were familiar with and baked them independently in the toaster oven. The Caramel Whizbangs were particularly good and got great reviews! Their ability to adapt recipes and achieve not only usable but tasty results was amazing. The ratios they came up with were excellent and they made subtle adjustments in subsequent batches. A third recipe didn't turn out nearly as well but lessons were learned from that too.

The most recent goal has been to bake some good artisan bread. We took a few books out from the library and were most impressed with Richard Bertinet's "Dough". This afternoon we watched the accompanying DVD and made a batch of Fougasse. Ivy was frustrated that her dough was stickier than shown in the video but we talked about the fact that the baker had been doing it for years and this was a first attempt.

These cookies were made to take to a Valentines violin recital. A friend of ours makes the little flowers but the girls baked, iced and decorated the cookies. I help take them out of the oven but that's my main role!