MayFlour Baked Goods

Made levains this afternoon, one for an artisan loaf and one for 2 sandwich loaves, with starter still in the fridge for future use. 👌🏻

Today was baking day, and the boys requested rolls instead of the usual loaf bread. 👌🏻 I 1.5x my sandwich loaf recipe for the rolls.

I’ve had a decent chunk of discard in the fridge for most of the last month, taking some out each week to make a levain (an amount of starter fed to create the exact amount needed for a recipe). This system actually worked quite well for me, and I may keep doing similar, but yesterday, I split off 25 grams apiece these jars, and this afternoon, I fed each jar 100 grams each of flour & water. After several hours, both jars were ready for use, but the canning jar seemed to rise higher and have more bubbles. What interesting scientific experiments we sourdough bakers inadvertently perform. 😉

Mondays are typically sourdough baking days, so the process begins on Sunday night. The warm weather of summer tends to yield wonderful loaves - the dough rises well overnight, and I don’t need to use the oven for the final rise in the pans before baking. 👌🏻

I haven’t attempted macarons for a few years, but I pulled out my recipe today and gave it a whirl. They are rather misshapen and not consistent sizes, but they appear to have baked out nicely, and the highly desired, telltale “feet” are there. First time trying them with the convection oven - perhaps it made a difference? 🤷🏼‍♀️

Enjoyed the opportunity to decorate the cupcakes for my niece’s high school graduation party. 🙂

Fed my starter yesterday morning, and it tripled over the course of about 12 hours - I gave a large feeding to about 25 grams. Yesterday evening, I mixed up my dough and let it bulk rise overnight, and it was happy and bubbly this morning. Not pictured are the 3 loaves I baked out. 🙂

A friend of mine, who is an avid viewer of Food Network, asked me a few weeks back if I had ever made anything with pink peppercorns. I have not watched anything from Food Network in a long time, so I had never heard of pink peppercorns. But, I promised to look into it, and I found a recipe for a pink peppercorn-vanilla Bundt cake. From my small tastes of the cake batter and the glaze, I’m expecting something delicious. 🤤 I’m taking this beauty to my end of year Bible study brunch tomorrow, and I’m excited to taste all the flavors together.