holiday

Cranberry Semolina Crown With Pine Nuts and Fennel

I served this semolina crown with cranberries, pine nuts, and fennel for Christmas dinner. It’s a variation on a favorite of mine, Semolina Bread With Fennel, Currants, and Pine Nuts. The crown shape and substitution of dried cranberries for the currants make it a little more festive for a holiday dinner. (OK, so I’m a little late posting this in time for Christmas. But it would be lovely for New Year’s dinner, too.)

With a cross-section similar to that of a baguette, a crown is a delight for crust lovers. To maximize crustiness, make sure you bake the loaf until it is good and dark. Any leftover bread can be sliced thinly and baked in a low oven until crisp for some toasts that are wonderful with your morning coffee or after dinner with a smear of goat cheese.

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Chocolate Panettone Baked in Folded Paper Baskets

I had three goals in making this Chocolate Panettone, a new bread for me:

To make a panettone that my daughter would like. M has an inexplicable dislike of fruit in bread, (indeed, in most baked things; this is inexplicable because she is my flesh and blood). Although fruitless chocolate panettone is not traditional, I have seen it now and then, and I thought M might give it a thumbs-up.
To bake a panettone that, unlike the wild yeast one I usually bake (and love), does not take a good 30 hours to make. While that is a delicious panttone that keeps quite a long time, and the weekend-long process is starting to feel like a necessary holiday ritual for me, sometimes you just can’t invest that kind of time, and why should that have to mean going without home-baked panettone completely?
To try my idea of making folded paper baskets to bake the bread in. You can of course buy paper panettone molds and other decorative, bake-in-to-give-away, paper “pans,” but they’re expensive (and I just like to make things).

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Butternut Brioche

If I’m remembering my childhood correctly, there was a time when I didn’t like winter squash. Hard to believe, because I can’t get enough of it now: roasted or steamed; stand-alone, stuffed, or in risotto or pasta; with sweet spices or savory herbs. On top of all that, I have discovered it makes a pretty darn good brioche.

This bread is only lightly spiced so the squash flavor really shines through. Feel free to increase or tweak the spices to your taste. Also, it has less butter and sugar than a typical brioche; if you leave the pecans off the top, it could pass for dinner rolls, but the nuts push it over into pastry territory in my book. Either way, I think it’s a delicious and festive addition to a holiday table.

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Little Bones

Pan de Muerto, the sweet bread traditionally made for Mexico’s Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), is typically shaped into a round loaf and decorated with huesitos (little bones). In a variation on the theme, I made this “bread of the dead” into individual bone-shaped rolls.

Because the dough is rich and soft, the shaping is a bit tricky. I suggest dividing the chilled dough into the individual roll portions, rounding them into balls, and chilling them again for an hour or so before the final shaping. Periodically cooling your hands on an ice pack while shaping is helpful.

The bones are shaped by rolling a log with knobby ends, then using a sharp knife to make a small cut in each end, forming the condyles (for all you anatomy geeks). I rolled my bones about four inches long; in the future, I would shape them longer and thinner, as they expand outward considerably (but not much lengthwise) during proofing.

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Hot Cross Buns: Not Just for Easter

One of the first nursery rhymes I remember learning was Hot cross buns! Hot cross buns! One-a-penny, Two-a-penny, Hot cross buns!

When my mother was ticked off about something, she always said she was “cross.” So when I sang the rhyme, an image of grouchy buns languishing in summer heat would paint itself across my mind’s little eye. I suppose I imagined they were cross because wasn’t being hot (in those days when that wasn’t a good thing) enough to make anybody cross?

I’ve understood for quite some time that “cross” refers to the buns’ decoration and not their state of mind, but it was only recently that I learned that hot cross buns are a traditional spring celebration bread.

Although hot cross buns have been associated with Easter for several centuries, they probably predated Christianity. Small cakes or loaves adorned with an equilateral cross were offered to deities in ancient cultures such as early Egypt and Greece. The feast of Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring (from whom Easter derived its name), was celebrated at the vernal equinox. The cross on the sacramental cakes eaten during the feast may have symbolized the balance (between light and darkness) of the equinox, the four quarters of the moon, or the symmetry of the seasons.

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Panettone

I’m not sure when it started, but sometime after my husband and I were married, my mother came for Christmas and brought us a panettone for breakfast. Ever since then, this rich, sweet Italian bread has been a part of our Christmas breakfast (along with bagels with cream cheese and smoked salmon). Last year, I decided to try making my own. And now it’s that time of year again!

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