Steamy

The heat and humidity are on! We’ve been having temps hovering around 90 for the past week. The tomatoes and other summer veggies are loving it, but the lettuces, broccoli, and other greens are a some worse for the wear. My raised bed is now full, with petunias, marigolds, peppers, okra, basil, rosemary, cucumbers and tomatoes, all still small plants yet, but with great promise! The bees are going gangbusters after a rough winter, and the rabbits are growing by leaps and bounds.


This time around our HBinFive breads were made with the master recipe. Like the other blogfolk, I’m glad to get back to the basic recipe. However, this assignment’s breads are far from basic. I knew that I would like the cherry black pepper Focaccia, but with ingredients like shallots, dried cherries and red wine, I was a little concerned about MJOL, but he thought it was scrumptious and ate it up. This is definitely a make again recipe.

The cinnamon raisin bagels were a challenge for me. Since I’m a little OCD, I wanted them to be perfectly shaped. I had to let go of that dream! It was the first time I’ve ever made bagels and it was an adventure. I have to say though; once I lowered the perfection threshold it was a lot of fun. They also were very tasty, toasted with cream cheese slathered on them, or toasted with honey…that hint of cinnamon and just sweet enough….delish! MJOL liked these toasted with butter for breakfast with his bacon and eggs.

The moon and stars bread was easy to shape and came out pretty, but really…it’s just a regular bread shaped differently.

Check out what other bakers did with these recipes at Big Black Dogs.



Until our next baking adventure…