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Tag: baking

I give you – French Cheesecake

Another memory from my days at Carleton College hits the blog. The campus had (has) several special interest residential houses, including French House. It was a place people wanted to live when they had been on an exchange program to the university in Pau, France. They also had events that anyone was welcome to attend. My fading memory tells me that I tasted this cheesecake there. I was told it came from Pau and it had become a house tradition to make it. After tasting it, I had to have the recipe, which I dutifully copied to keep (in pencil on lined paper – ah, the pre-digital camera, pre-scanning days). It’s such a lovely cake that I thought it was worth sharing here despite being glaringly off-topic, although you could say it communicates community and storytelling. Am I stretching that a bit? I elaborate a bit at the end of…

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A Tale of Bread

Nic Steenhout‘s photo of fresh-baked bread sent me more than 30 years back in time. I’ve always loved baking bread. I know I learned to bake bread when I was a teenager, but I have few recollections of those breads. I know some were sweet and most were incredibly flat and heavy despite being baked in a form and using yeast. I may have been heart-broken, but my dad never complained. The bread disappeared completely when in his care. I wasn’t afraid to experiment, either. An uncle was coming over for dinner in my early bread-baking years, and I thought I’d make some special dinner rolls. I added blue food coloring, blue being my favorite color. To my great disappointment, no one wanted to eat them! Years later, I became more conscious of the beauty of the creation of bread. It wasn’t doing something fancy like adding blue coloring. It…

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