Thanksgiving has come and gone, and ofc I had to get my bake on with some Thanksgiving bakes. First up, you always need some bread and butter with turkey day dinner, so I made an overnight white.
I also made both a sandwich loaf (plain white bread) and cornbread to use in stuffing. My wife had seen this recipe in the NY Times and thought it looked good, and it was. I made an extra cornbread while I was at it, and I actually didn’t think it was that great when I tasted it. Ironically, probably because I made it from scratch using cornmeal, and not a box mix that would have lots of extra sugar and stuff. The stuffing itself was great though and will probably be our new go-to in years to come.
And of course, the pièce de résistance, it’s not Thanksgiving bakes without the pies! I made my two favorites, the obligatory pumpkin, and a bourbon pecan.
Pain de Savoie is a delicious bacon and cheese bread. To explain why I made this loaf, I need to work backwards. On a Costco trip for lockdown supplies, my wife and I ended up buying an absurd amount of bacon. Not super absurd, but we only really use bacon as an ingredient and never just fry up some bacon. So 5lbs of bacon for 2 people was a lot.
I’ve been following the quarantine content Alton Brown has been putting out and one day a new video popped up on YouTube of him making Lacquered Bacon (basically candied bacon)…
So I made a batch, managing to use up half the bacon. It was good. So good in fact that my wife didn’t love the idea of having it sitting there begging for us to just snack on candied bacon. So I went looking for a bread recipe that uses bacon. I considered cornbread (which is what 90% of the hits are if you search for bacon and bread), but settled on Pain de Savoie. It checked a lot of boxes – bacon, cheese, Paul Hollywood recipe, chance to use my springform pan which I haven’t used since I made cheesecake.
It’s an interesting bake, it’s built like a layer cake, with cheese filling between the layers. Paul calls for Comté but I used Gruyere. They are practically the same thing, but Comté is French and Gruyere Swiss. I think any semi-hard to hard cheese would work, especially another alpine cheese. He also calls for plain lardons, but given I had the candied bacon, I just diced up candied bacon.
Pain de Savoie
Paul Hollywood's Pain de Savoie, slightly adapted.
400 g Bread Flour
100 g Rye Flour
10 g Salt
8 g Yeast
20 ml Olive Oil
330 ml Cool Water
150 g Laquered Bacon ((or any bacon you have))
200 g Gruyere Cheese ((Paul calls for Comté))
Add flours, salt, and yeast to the bowl of a stand mixer. Be careful not to mix the salt and yeast directly.
Add all the olive oil and 250ml of the water and start mixing. Add the rest of the water little by little, you may not need it all. You want a soft dough to form.
Kneed for a few minutes on low to medium.
Dice and add the bacon, mix until well incorporated.
Transfer the dough to an oiled bowl and let rise for 2 hours.
While the dough is rising cube or shred your cheese. (I used the large holes on my shredder to make decent sized chunks)
Turn out the dough on a floured surface and split it into 3 equal parts. Knock back the pieces and form them into balls.
Oil your springform pan.
Roll out one of the balls into a disk roughly the size of your pan and place it in the bottom. Scatter about half the cheese over this first layer. Roll out another dough and place it on top, scatter the rest of the cheese, then rool out the final dough and place it on top.
Let the formed "layer cake" rise again in a plastif bag, for 1 hour.
Bake at 445F for 30 minutes.
Once removed from the oven let it cool in the pan for about 10 minutes before you take it out of the pan and cool completly on a rack.
Pain de Savoie
It came out tasting delicious, although not really beautiful. For one thing, it sank a bunch in the middle as it cooled, I’m not sure how I could fix that, but I suspect grating the cheese finer, and distributing it more evenly, would help some. I might also be tempted to give it an egg wash for some color next time. All of this is fine though, it’s meant to be a delicious rustic bread, not a showpiece, and it was delicious!
I made a standard FWSY overnight wheat bread last week, and I decided to crust it in some rolled oats to fancy it up a bit. It ended up being one of the visually nicest loaves I’ve ever baked.
Top Down View
I used parchment paper to transfer it into the dutch oven, and the parchment is what ended up giving it a bit of a quilted look around the edges that I quite like.
Side View
I won’t bother giving a recipe. It’s basically the same as the overnight white I’ve posted, but with 40% wheat instead of all white flour. Overall the loaf looked great, tasted great, and had a nice crumb. I was quite proud!
I did a couple of father’s day bakes. My dad is no longer with us, but my father in law had a request – a coconut cake. I also baked a bread because I never go to the inlaws without a bread, they always love it.
First up, the cake.. I wanted to make something a little ‘extra’ than just your generic coconut cake. I’d been experimenting with pandan recently, mostly in cocktails, but it pairs well with coconut, so I figured what the heck?
The Cake
I followed a standard coconut cake with cream cheese frosting recipe that I wont bother to detail. The pandan was incorporated by using pandan simple syrup I made (simply infuse pandan leaves in simple syrup for 12 hours or so). Once I had the two layers of cake baked I sprinkled a generous amount of the simple syrup on top of them. This method is often recommended to keep cake moist anyway, and was the perfect way to also add the pandan.
Looks good to me
Once I had the cake together and frosted I covered generously with shredded coconut and ‘coconut chips’ which I found at Trader Joe’s. They added a nice a crunch. For the decoration on top I used a stencil I had and sprinkled cocoa powder on it. I had bought a ‘happy fathers day’ stencil but it turned out to be much smaller than I realized, so I used the one I already had instead.
A Slice
The bread..
The bread I made was just a standard overnight white from Flour Water Salt Yeast, but it came out looking particularly nice, and everyone loved it.
The LoafSliced
The bread went super fast, I should have brought two, and the cake was also a hit. All in all it made for a great father’s day with family.
