Sunday breakfast

For Sunday morning breakfast I like to eat homemade freshly baked bread, pancakes, crumpets, or anything alike, and fresh fruits in salad or smoothie. It's a good start before spending the day out.

This weekend I prepared sugar bread, the recipe comes from Erik Kayser's book, my reference for bread making (in French). 

It's basically bread base in which a little sugar has been added, and the final shaping is slightly different. After baking it it is also finished with sugar sirup.

Perfect with butter, jam or just nothing.

Bakewell Tart

An English classic dessert, the bakewell tart, with almond, strawberry marmalade inside and a Royal Icing. And of course a cherry on the top! The recipe is simple (100g of soft butter, 170g of ground almond, 3 eggs, 2 spoons of flour, 100g of sugar. In small molds, put the mixture, half the mold, then a small spoon of marmalade and mixture again. In the oven for 10 minutes. Wait for the cakes to be cold. Make the frosting with 200g of icing sugar and the white of one egg. Put on the top of the cake. Add the cherry!)

Perfect for tea time, not too difficult to make and really impressive if you have guests!

Macha Madeleines

It's the week-end, time to make cookies, cakes and today: madeleines. I used a french traditional recipe (just eggs, sugar, flour, milk, honey) but with a touch of Japan: macha.
Just ready to eat!

Whole-wheat baguette viennoise

Still running out of regular white flour, I prepared a whole-wheat baguette viennoise for breakfast (regular recipe from Kayser's book). Despite the granulous texture due to the whole-wheat it was perfectly soft and tender. I replaced the yolk egg batter with a whole egg batter and the color and crisp of the shell was much better too.

Spelt baguette

I wanted to make some baguette but realized I was running out of white flour, so I replaced it by spelt flour. The result was really tasty and I managed, despite the cold temperature in the house in that season, to obtain a very soft crumb in a relatively short time. 

Navettes

We spent part of the holiday season in Aix-en-Provence, France, my home town and we went visiting some places I like and used to often when I was a kid. One of these places is the cathedral Saint Sauveur. Not that I visited this place as part of my religious up-bringing, but I spent a lot of time in the beautiful Roman cloister (freely accessible at that time) with my mother, every Wednesday morning after my dance classes until my sister would finish school and we would go home. Since at that time I couldn't eat a single thing for breakfast, we would often stop by a baker that made some navettes (not the dry one from Marseille). Visiting that place again I wanted some navettes and tried to bake some since no-one seems to make any anymore.

I found some recipes on the net and adjusted them to fit my distant memory. The shape, the color and the smell were perfect, but honestly the taste I couldn't say. It was good, but not to my expectations... I need some more adjustments before releasing any receipe...