Week 1 -- Biscuits, Muffins, Tea Bread

In my first lab of Baking and Pastry class, I made Lemon Poppyseed Tea Bread, Blueberry Muffins, and Buttermilk Biscuits.


First, we started making our tea breads. When I finished making the batter for my tea bread, I thought I had done something wrong because my batter was quite thicker than the rest of the class. I read through the recipe again and could not really find a place where I did anything wrong. The recipe had us measure 10 ounces of sugar and only add 7 of it to the tea bread. I eyeballed the 7 ounce measurement, so I thought maybe that was where I went wrong. Later, I used the leftover sugar for my muffins and when I weighed it, there was only 2.5 ounces. So I knew I had only added a half ounce more sugar to the tea bread than the recipe called for. When the tea breads were done baking, I took my tea bread out and it looked awesome. It baked up nicely and the coloring was perfect. It also looked pretty on the inside and tasted great! I was really proud of my tea bread, considering that I had convinced myself that I screwed it up!

Next, we went on to make our muffins. My main concern for the muffins was making sure that I didn't over mix them. If you over mix your muffins, there will be tunneling; so I was hoping to avoid that. I made my batter and then greased and filled the muffin tin. I set the muffins aside to wait for them to go in the oven. When I came back to my station, I noticed an egg sitting out. That was the egg that was supposed to go in my muffins! I carefully scooped the batter out of the muffin tin and back into a bowl. I beat the egg and tried to fold it into the muffin batter without mixing it too much. My muffins ended up turning out ok. They were a little dense. I also think they should've risen more. I'm sure that has to do with the fact that I left out the egg until the end! They still tasted pretty good, so I was happy about that.

Last, we made buttermilk biscuits. Chef had us experiment with the buttermilk for our biscuits. Half of the class used real buttermilk for their biscuits. The other half "made" their own buttermilk by combining milk with lemon juice. My biscuits were made with the milk/lemon juice combo. I think that this minorly altered the taste of the biscuits, but not so much that I wouldn't "make" my own buttermilk if I was in a pinch. My biscuits weren't as flaky as they should've been and I'm not quite sure why. I think I did a pretty good job cutting in the shortening (considering I was using a dough scraper), and I didn't mix the dough a whole lot. But overall, they looked nice and tasted good.

For the lab, we only worked on one side of the kitchen. I think this was a good idea, because we didn't have to deal with cleaning the other side of the kitchen. I was sharing a station with Kristine. I knew that if I had to share a station, she would be a good person to share with because she is really neat and organized. I tried to work as neatly as possible so I wouldn't get in her way. It was kind of hard to work this way. Especially since each of us were trying to get our mise en place together. That meant that each of us had numerous bowls around the table and not much space to work. I would prefer not to partner up again because it would be much easier to work at my own station. If we continue to work this way, I think it would be a good idea to trade off each week so the same people aren't always stuck sharing a station.