It hasn't been all cooking successes over here at bahn yaiAnn. Last weekend for Easter I decided I was going to bake a loaf of No Knead Bread for B's family's Easter get-together. Inspired by Veronica's double batch loaf, I decided to make a double batch loaf myself. Be warned, if you're going to attempt a double loaf, make sure you try to fold it up as compact as possible so that it fits when you put it in your dutch oven. Mine didn't fit so well, so some of it ended up on the edge and side of the pot. Anyways, when I took the lid off halfway through, I had a bad feeling about the loaf, but hoped that it would turn out. When I finally took it out, it looked really odd. It was slightly burnt at the top (probably because my rack was a bit high given that I doubled the recipe. What was really odd was that it didn't come out of the pot! It was literally STUCK! I usually stick a knife or fork into the side of the pot and use it as a lever to get the bread out. Except this time, it wasn't budging! I even flipped the pot upside down to dump it out.. no movement. This was definitely not good. As I wacked the bottom of the pot to try to get the darn loaf out, the sound it was making wasn't too promising. It was almost thud-like. So I decided to throw in the towel. No no knead bread for B's family. When it was finally cool for me to handle, I pulled the loaf out and it looked liked this:

It was heavy and there was no crust on the bottom. It almost resembled a cake like texture, as if the bottom was steamed. Even mamaFasu asked me what kind of bread that was. And embarrassingly I said, "That's not how it's supposed to be." She wasn't around for my first no knead attempts, so hopefully this won't traumatize her. And at that point I was scared to even cut it open to see what it looked like on the inside. Because of its weight, I was afraid it was undercooked inside. So it sat in the pot on the counter in the kitchen for a few days until last night when I finally had the courage to slice it open.

And to my surprise, it looked fine. Then I realized what went "wrong." I used up a lot of my all purpose flour for my pizza dough. So when it was time to mix my double batch of no knead, I only had enough AP flour for 4 out of the 6 cups needed. To make up the remainder, I used white whole wheat flour thinking it wouldn't affect it that much. Guess who was wrong. *raises hand* When I was reading up on no knead before I took the dive, I read about people's experiences substituting flours and trying to make it healthier with whole wheat flour. What they discovered was that whole wheat flour created a denser bread since it does not rise as much as white flour. So silly me thought that white whole wheat wouldn't make that much of a difference compared to whole wheat flour. But yes, yes it does. And I forgot about that when I pulled it out of the oven and tried to pry it out of the pot. So how does it taste? I honestly have no idea. I'm a bit scared to taste as it's been sitting on the counter in the pot for 5 days before I sliced it open. I sniffed the crumb and it smells fine, and papaFasu even snuck a taste and said it was good. So I'm sure it's fine and I could probably use it for something else, but I'm not sure what. Any ideas?

Then last night I decided to make my first recipe from one of my favorite foodie blogs.

Gâteau au Citron fresh out of the oven

I wanted to make my parent's a not so sweet dessert so I decided to use Orangette's receipe for Gâteau au Citron. It was a simple recipe using pantry items. The only think I did different was to use soy yogurt instead of regular yogurt. As you can see, the cake looked perfect coming out of the oven and it also smelled great (lemony -- one of my favorite scents). Then when I went to glaze it, something had happpened.

It did the dip!

It sank! I'm not sure if this was supposed to happen, but I glazed it anyways. Food is food, my family will eat it. But I probably should have put the cake bottom side up as the glaze didn't soak into the cake and collected in the dip. I spread it around and let the glaze drip onto the sides and collect on the edge of the plate where I then lifted up the bottom edges to let the glaze soak in at the bottom of the cake. Verdict? Not bad, except that the middle of the cake was mushy (probably due to the glaze collecting in the middle. The cake was light, flavor was okay. I definitely will make this again to see if can right my wrongs.

And lastly, (you can consider this my eye candy Friday submission) I think we can expect a lot of good to come out of this.

Happy Friday!