I took Martha Stewart Baking out of the library. It looked great! Excellent pictures. A wide range of great baking recipes, not all of the whip-up-this-little-wedding-cake-in-your-spare-time variety, but homemade Oreos and cupcakes.

She had a recipe for Pullman bread (also known as pain de mie), and since I am still looking for the sine qua non of pain de mie, I couldn’t wait to try it.

Then I read the instructions and went, “Huh?”

Let me summarize it: make the dough. Let proof. Punch down; let proof again in the proofing bowl. (Most recipes I’ve read do only one proofing in the proofing bowl, but whatever.) Take the dough out, fold up, put in pain de mie pan, let rise.

So far, so good. Then we get to this:

Close the lid completely and bake, rotating pan halfway through, until loaf is light golden brown, about 45 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350F, close the lid, and continue baking another 30 minutes.

I assume that second “close the lid” is there because you opened the lid to check on the loaf’s color. But this baking time — what the hey? 75 minutes total is almost double what any other recipe I’ve read has called for.

I pulled the loaf out after the 45 minutes were up: the loaf was a deep golden brown, and the crust was actually several millimeter thick. To be absolutely sure I used my insta-read thermometer, and the interior temperature was fine.

What’s up with that extra 30 minutes? If this was the first time I’d baked bread, I would have cremated the loaf.

This makes me very nervous about trying other recipes.

I learned something new this week: when you’re violently ill for 24 hours, it’s not a “24 hour thing,” it’s the “stomach flu.” I haven’t gotten the flu very often, okay?

Anyhow. Whatever this thing was, it has completely kicked my ass for the past week. I’ve been lethargic and my stomach has felt queasy for days. I’ve been home a lot.

During this week, I’ve discovered that one way I like to pass the time is by baking. In fact, several times I was itching to get started baking something and felt stymied that I had to do something like, I don’t know, laundry. Or napping.

On Friday I made the Cook’s Illustrated recipe for shortbread. I burned the first batch. So I dumped the entire thing and got to making a second batch. Not that I particularly felt like eating any, and Darin certainly wasn’t in the mood for a cookie. (I’m a little disappointed, because while the CI recipe is good, it’s still not the kind of shortbread I want to make, which is the kind I get at a local coffee house: softish, flaky, very buttery. Maybe I can’t make it at home, but I keep trying.)

I picked up Chocolatier magazine (personally entranced by the “perfect chocolate chip cookie” recipe, just as Ivonne at Paper Palate was, but the deciding factor was the Chocolate Cherry Bread recipe, which I want to make for Darin) and 125 Best Cupcake Recipes by Julie Hasson. Yes, I’m currently into the whole cupcake craze.

I made the honeycomb recipe from Chocolatier, mainly because I had some honey on hand and because I love Violet Crumbles so much. It was fun to make — the part where the sugar-honey goo bubbles up with the baking soda is cool — but the end result screamed, “Extreme dental work will be required if you eat more than one crumb of this!” So I tossed it.

Yesterday, however, was the sine qua non of baking mania: I made a loaf of sandwich bread, I made biscuits for dinner (the best I’ve ever made! and the kids didn’t eat them! what’s up with that?), I made banana chocolate chip cake after dinner.

While I am enjoying some of the fruits of my labors (I am as fond of banana chocolate chip cake as the next person (the next person who likes banana chocolate chip cake, that is)), I’m not especially crazed to eat these things I’m making. I’m just finding that baking is very relaxing for me. The idea of mixing a whole bunch of stuff together and having a new food at the end is just deeply appealing. And very odd. Would never have thought it was possible, but there it is.

If When we remodel the kitchen, I am so asking for a baking area.

Now even chocolate milk is good for you. Hear that, Rob and Nina: chug! chug!

I bought myself a seltzer bottle for Christmas. Isn’t it pretty?

At first, I couldn’t make it work. Then I noticed the cartridges not only said “Cream” but also said NO₂ instead of CO₂. (I had those cartridges because that’s what the chick at Williams-Sonoma sold me, okay?) I took the cartridges back, got the ones labeled “Soda,” and discovered they work much, much better.

Normally I drink carbonated water mixed with a slug or two of Torani syrups, available in nearly every flavor you can think of (and even more, if you buy the full-sugar ones — currently i use the sugar free ones flavored with Splenda). I hope adulterating perfectly good water with syrup removes it from my “glasses of water per day” total, but I can’t say that with certainty.

The best thing about making the bottle of soda is, of course, adding the CO₂ to the water. You add the cartridge to the cartridge holder, carefully screw it in… and when the seal on the cartridge is pierced, WHOOMP! The water bubbles up. Then you shake the bottle a few times (to distributed the CO₂?) and you’re good to go.

Now that I have used the seltzer bottle (successfully), I can give you a side-by-side comparison of how the bottle stacks up against a bottle of carbonated water (say, Crystal Geyser) bought at the store:

Clearly in the short run it’s much more cost-effective to keep buying the carbonated water at the store, but I much, much prefer using the seltzer bottle. It tastes better, there’s no sodium, and best of all, I’m not filling up our recyclables container every week with four or five bottles.

So if you’re like me and a)like carbonated water and b)like to make your own Italian sodas with Torani syrup, I highly recommend picking up a seltzer bottle. There are both cheaper ones and bigger ones out there, depending on your needs.

Via the Accidental Hedonist, there is a settlement to the Hershey’s trademark infraction suit concerning a Hershey’s bar appearing on the cover of a biography of Hershey. The story contains the best quote of the Foodie year:

Author Michael D’Antonio called the settlement “a victory for people who can’t tell the difference between recycled paper and chocolate”

Hahahahahahahaha.

Seriously, I don’t like the mouthfeel of Ghirardelli’s anymore — I can’t imagine trying to stomach a Hershey’s bar.

Despite being fairly sick yesterday — I didn’t get out of bed until 11am, and I don’t know when the last time that happened, other than it was undoubtedly Before Kids — I felt an urge to start baking. Like Christmas didn’t cure me of it. So I made Layered Brownies last night and Cocoa-Chocolate Chip Muffins this morning, both from Lisa Yockelson’s ChocolateChocolate. And it’s not like I have a fleet of people coming in to celebrate the New Year!

(The Cocoa-Chocolate Chip muffins seem to have turned out better than the Chocolate Chocolate Chip muffins I made from Baking By Flavor for my birthday — today’s muffins are a nice deep brown, whereas the ones on my birthday were kind of a light brown and nowhere near chocolatey enough.)

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I am wondering how I’m going to get back into the swing of things next week. We’re all waking up late — even the kids aren’t getting up until 9. Have I really been in the habit of getting up at 6 to meet my friends for early morning runs? This is going to take some doing.

I was reading Barbara’s post at Tigers and Strawberries about shopping for lemons at Whole Foods. One paragraph definitely stood out for me:

However, once I got up to the fish counter, and leaned in to take a look, the heavy smell of fish once again got to me. It was bad enough that I will not buy fish from them, but at least the smell is confined to within a few feet of the fish counter.

I have the same problem at the Whole Foods near me. At both of them, in fact. I do not buy fish from Whole Foods. I have no problem buying beef, chicken, pork… but I skip right past the fish counter because the smell is so overwhelming. I have no such problem at Lunardi’s, which has beautiful fish nicely laid out. What’s Whole Foods doing wrong?