Baking breads and cakes! It smells great in my house

Perhaps it’s the spirit of the season, or maybe it’s all of the emails that I’ve been getting lately with interesting sounding recipes, but I’ve been on a baking spree in the last week and a half.

It started the weekend before last when I had the urge to make french toast. Not just any french toast. No … It had to be the kind of french toast that’s made with cinnamon swirl brioche. I had a craving – obviously.

At first I just tried to go out and buy a cinnamon swirl brioche or some kind of cinnamon swirl bread. I looked in a few grocery stores and some local bakeries without any luck. Would you believe that the best I could find was a commercial brand of Cinnamon raisin bread? Finally I decided to make my own. Of course I didn’t have any luck finding a cinnamon brioche recipe that I liked … somehow I got side tracked and discovered cinnamon babka and cinnamon chocolate babka recipes and oh it was on! Before I knew it my kitchen counter was covered in mixing bowls, flour and the air smelled of yeast and spices.

Grating the chocolate for the cinnamon chocolate babka was uh .. interesting … I tried a hand grater at first and well … that would have taken two hours. So … out came my Braun all in one food processor. You know … the machine I should have been using all all long to mix my double batches of dough? Eventually, with my husbands help, I got enough of the dark chocolate grated for the Cinnamon Chocolate babka.

I think it took about 7 hours to make two Cinnamon babkas and two cinnamon chocolate babkas that evening. Half the time was of course waiting for the bread dough to rise, but the rest was mixing, and figuring out how to grate all the chocolate and so on. I also hadn’t used my food processor for a long time so that took some time between cleaning it for use and figuring out which attachment to use.

You know what the sad part is about the whole experience? I didn’t really like the babkas – not initially at least. The bread was too dense and heavy, for my tastes anyway. I didn’t even end up using any of it to make the french toast that had initiated the whole idea in the first place. I ended up using the commercial cinnamon raisin bread that I bought in the grocery store – which was ok, but not the delicious experience I’d been anticipating. I’ve now found what seems to be the perfect cinnamon Brioche recipe for making a cinnamon swirl bread – perhaps I’ll try making that this coming weekend.

My husband took one of each of the Babkas to work to share with the nurses and his other co-workers in the day surgery recovery room. I hear they enjoyed them. Oh and at least with two less loaves of high calorie desert bread in the house I know I won’t be looking for the best fat burners any time soon!

Then … this past weekend I came across some tasty looking recipes for Zucchini bread. My husband had found a great deal on zucchini in the grocery store – a bag with 12 or so medium zucchini in it for $1.49! Yes they were still fresh! I had been going to grate them and package them up to freeze so that I could eventually add them to pasta sauces and other recipes. Well .. I ended up making four loaves of Zucchini bread and one Chocolate Zucchini cake. Yummy! Plus I still have about five cups of grated Zucchini left so I can either use that in dinner recipes or make more zucchini bread with it next year.

I also made two dozen carrot muffins from a packaged mix the same day that I made all those zucchini loaves. Chris took one Zucchini loaf to work, but we still have three, plus the cake and muffins galore. LOL … what was I thinking? There’s only two of us in the house. I think I’m either going to have to give away most of my baking of put it away in my already very packed freezer.

Gee .. I wonder what I’ll end up making next weekend?

Are you on a baking spree too?