There’s quite a few new things going on:
We’re back a the farmers markets. The first few weeks have been pretty disorganized, but last week, we started getting things a bit more under control and more variety at the markets. For right now, we are focusing on having a subset of the usual bake schedule at the markets. Check our bread schedule, and you will be able to find most of the breads we normally have at the bakery at the market. We have been limiting the pastries to just cookies, but I’ve been getting a lot of requests for scones, so I might bring a few of them to Saturday’s Marquette market.
We added a new cookie to our daily lineup. It’s a Snickerdoodle, and not being able to leave the traditional recipe alone, we added cardamom to the dough. It gives them a bit of a peppery punch. I love them and hope you will too. As always, feel free to give us your opinion.
This Thursday is the last Thursday of the month, so we will be baking Cornish Saffron Buns again. We’ll have them out early — around 7:30am. The quantity will be limited, so call us to reserve some if you have a large order or want to pick them up late in the day.
In other new, we bought our first new piece of baking equipment — a mixer. We’ve been overloading our first mixer — a wonderful circa de 1950 Hobart we got from the Munising Bakery when it closed. The new one uses a completely different mixing technology, and I love the doughs that are coming out of it. It’s much more gentle so we see the biggest difference on the delicate doughs like rye and spelt.
That brings us to our latest project. We are starting to work with whole spelt — an ancestor of wheat that many people who have wheat intolerance find less problematic. We made a test run with it today, and I am not happy with the results — too heavy. Maybe there’s no way around that when working with whole grain spelt. It does have a nice flavor for being whole grain. I will continue to work with it and let you know when I have something I’m ready to sell. In the mean time, if you have any interest, you can try our experiments.
Peter