Baking Orgy at Kathy's

I haven't had time to post in a while due to grad school application/decision craziness. Thankfully that's all settled now, and it'll be "Paris Sweets in Boston" come September (note to self, don't include geographical information in the blog title next time).

Last week, I was suddently struck with the desire to make bread. Beautiful, warm, domestic-goddess-style bread, and lots of it. Some people have dreams about wanting lots of babies. I wanted bread. I knew I couldn't possibly handle all this bread-making by myself, so I turned to my friend Kathy.

Kathy's my partner-in-crime when it comes to baking. She's technically my coworker (along with 90,000 other people), but we really bonded over food (I made her wedding cakes last summer). Once in a while, we'd get together and unleash our culinary prowess in furious, multi-hour baking sprees. And Kathy's sugar-loving husband Colin usually ends up with lots of mixing bowls and spatulas to "clean".

Really, we're scary efficient when it comes to churning out baked goods. This time, we whipped up sage garlic bread, blackberry coconut bread, cinnamon bread, and mango tres leches cake in less than three hours.

(At least we had one savory item this time. Last time we made cranberry tart, French apple cake, and Paula Deen's insanely decadent pumpkin pie. My heart still hurts when I think about that one.)

Kathy made no-knead bread with sage, garlic, and black pepper. Look at the gorgeous bread!

We were both highly impressed by how well the bread turned out. To be fair, we didn't have the highest expectations. Something along the lines of "Wow it actually looks/tastes like bread!" was repeated many times that afternoon.

The loaves were crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, and they tasted like garlic! What's not to love? (Kathy posted the recipe on her blog)

 

We also made coconut bread. Kathy had blackberries on hand, though, so the conversation went a little like this.

"Hm, what can we do with blackberries?"

"Add it to the bread?"

"But they'll break down and get watery."

"Puree it and add it to the bread?"

"Then it'll just be kind of blah and pink"

"Cook it down and swirl it?"

"Like a jam? Yeah!"

"Yeah!"

The blackberry swirl was gorgeous.

The bread baked up beautifully, with a tender, moist crumb and nice coconut flavor. The blackberry swirl complemented the bread amazingly. In fact, I think I'll add more fruit next time (and there will definitely be a next time!).

We also made cinnamon bread. We didn't have raisins so we added some toasted pecans instead. There was a slight toasting incident, but I learned that pecans are pretty tolerant when it comes to not tasting like burnt woodchips.

Due to an oversight, we ran out of loaf pans. So we made individual sized buns in muffin tins instead. They made the cutest rolls, but were a little on the dry side.

Last but not least, there was mango tres leches cake. Oh New York Times, why do you have to put such ideas into my head?

Really, with the holy trinity of coconut milk, mango puree, and condensed milk, how can you go wrong?

The extra mango puree went into a blender with ice and greek yogurt. Waste not, want not.

As if the coconut-mango-condensed milk bath wasn't enough, the cake was topped with mango whipped cream and more mango puree.

In case anyone thought baking was all fun and games, you should know that by this point, I was curled up on the sofa with a snuggie and a Cooks Illustrated, trying to nurse my poor stomach and overcome the nauseating effects of sugar overdose. The last thing I wanted was another bite of cake, but I had to suffer, for the sake of knowledge.

Curse you, New York Times.