Tag: Homemade

Vegan Dried Fruit Milk Sweet Bread

writ­ten 2/18/2024, updat­ed 9/25/2024

What

Sweet bread with dried fruit and nuts, made veg­an, with­out eggs or cow’s milk

Ingredients

Main (amounts also in instruc­tions)

½ Cup + ~4 Cups All-Pur­pose or Bread Flour

1½ Cup Plant-based Milk (e.g. Oat milk)

1Tbsp Corn­starch

~½ Cup Water (boiled)

2¼ tsp or 1 enve­lope Active Dry Yeast

2 tsp + ~½ Cup Sug­ar (Depends on how sweet you want it)

1Tbsp Salt

¼ Cup Veg­an But­ter

Sup­plies: Elec­tric Stand Mix­ture, Mea­sur­ing Cups, Spat­u­la, Plas­tic Wrap, Non-Stick Spray, Loaf Pan/Baking Sheet/other Bread Pans, Cool­ing Rack, Bread Bags

Option­al: Hon­ey, Nuts, Seeds, Cin­na­mon, Red Bean Paste, Fruit, Corn Syrup

Time

Prep (1.5 hours total) + Rest­ing (2 hours total) + Bak­ing (40 min­utes) = ~4.1 hours Total

Serving Size

2 bread loaves

Making

  • Remove veg­an but­ter from refrig­er­a­tor to warm to room tem­per­a­ture

Yeast (~15 min­utes)

  • Heat Milk (1½ Cup) to about 105–115F
  • Pour into stand mix­er bowl
  • Dis­solve Sug­ar (2 tsp) and option­al­ly, Hon­ey
  • Add Active Dry Yeast (2¼ tsp or 1 enve­lope)
  • Light­ly stir
  • Cov­er and let bloom for about 5–10 min­utes (until it foams and smells like yeast)

Flour Paste (aka Tangzhong method) — adds a creamy tex­ture

  • In a mix­ing bowl, com­bine Flour (½ Cup) and Corn­starch (1Tbsp) with Boil­ing Water (add ~½ Cup first then more if need­ed. I used between 2⁄3 Cup and 3⁄4)
  • Whip vig­or­ous­ly until smooth. It will be sticky (I tried a whisk first but it was either too small or I did­n’t add enough water and it got all stuck inside. Switched to a spoon for bet­ter results)

Option­al: Fruits and Nuts *see Notes sec­tion

  • Soak dried fruit in warm water
  • Toast wal­nuts

Dough (~15 min­utes)

  • By now the Yeast should have bloomed quite well
  • Add the Flour Paste and dis­solve with a pad­dle attach­ment at Stir speed
  • Dis­solve Sug­ar (½ Cup for sweet bread, less for less sweet)
  • Add Salt (1Tbsp)
  • Incre­men­tal­ly add Flour (~4 Cups total) until it starts turn­ing into dough
  • Switch to the dough hook, increase speed to lev­el 2, and fin­ish adding the flour (scrape down the sides every so often)
  • When it is well com­bined, but still sticky cov­er and let rest for about 10 min­utes (good time to wash dish­es)

Dough Part 2 (5–10 min­utes)

  • Cut Veg­an But­ter (¼ Cup) into lit­tle cubes
  • Add to mix­ing bowl
  • Run at speed lev­el 2 until well-mixed
  • Dough should come nice­ly off the sides of the bowl. Add small amounts of flour as need­ed
  • When it is smooth and tacky, cov­er

Rise #1 (1 hour)

  • Cov­er and place in a warm place for an hour until it has dou­bled or tripled in size
  • If using fruits and/or nuts, drain the fruits and prep nuts/seeds if you haven’t
  • Pre­pare any oth­er fill­ings or addi­tives

Dough Part 3

Real­ly big now!
Prep sur­face
Divide how you’d like
Spread fruit if using
Shape

Toast­ed wal­nuts
Cran­ber­ries and wal­nuts
Fold up
Roll
Flat­ten and fold again until you’re hap­py
Shape

  • Either turn stand mix­er on to speed lev­el 2 (for 2 min­utes) to remove air, or sim­ply punch it down
  • Pre­pare loaf pans by plac­ing parch­ment paper
  • Light­ly flour work­ing sur­face
  • Turn out dough and decide how you want divide
  • If adding fruits/nuts/paste, flat­ten the dough and add, then fold togeth­er, and roll. When sat­is­fied, place seam side down onto pans
  • If no addi­tions, shape and roll into prop­er shape for pans, remem­ber­ing that bread will rise again and expand when bak­ing

Rest #2 (1 hour)

  • Spray the top of the dough with cook­ing spray to pre­vent plas­tic wrap from stick­ing to the dough lat­er
  • Cov­er and place in a warm loca­tion until dou­bled in size

Bake Prep (5 min­utes)

Wow
These are huge
Syrup and Hon­ey Wash

  • Your pref­er­ence of wash (Option­al)
  • Can be Syrup Wash (1:1 Corn Syrup to Water) or any com­bi­na­tion or ratio of the syrup to water. Can add hon­ey to the ratio
  • I used 2:1 Corn Syrup to Hon­ey, and added a dash of water
  • If adding top­pings to bread, add it
  • Cut vent lines in the top of the loaves
  • Here, I messed up because I did­n’t grease the plas­tic or the dough, so I had to re-shape the loaves and let them rise a lit­tle again
Oh noooo
Welp. Miss­ing some dough here… Time to reshape
This one came out fine for some rea­son

Bake (40 min­utes)

  • Pre­heat oven to 350 F
  • Uncov­er dough and brush tops with Wash
  • Bake for about 40 min­utes until gold­en
  • Brush with Wash again after remov­ing from oven
  • Let cool before slic­ing!
  • Impor­tant: Make sure to remove any parch­ment paper from under the bread! Oth­er­wise, the bot­tom will remain wet while the rest cools

Notes

  • Dried fruit: (like raisins, cran­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries, etc.) can be fold­ed into the dough, but can soak up mois­ture. To coun­ter­act that, soak them in hot water
  • Nuts: can be chopped and fold­ed in raw but can also be toast­ed to improve fla­vor. Hard­er nuts should be soaked in warm water oth­er­wise they can be too hard after bak­ing
  • Seeds: If top­ping with seeds, do not toast before­hand as they will burn dur­ing bak­ing
  • Paste: Same game­plan as the oth­er add-ins. Pre­pare to your taste, then spread it like you’re but­ter­ing toast, then roll, spread, roll, etc until you’re hap­py

9/22/24: Made both Sweet Red Bean Paste and Dried Fruit bread. Red bean paste from a can. Did filled buns, 1 twist, and 1 loaf of that. Just 1 loaf of dried fruit bread, using dried apri­cots, cher­ries, and cran­ber­ries. Should have cut the apri­cots even small­er (did quar­ters). For the loaf, added some orange extract to the red bean. Might have added too much, but it does give it an inter­est­ing taste. Did not use a glaze and they’re a tad over­done.

Fruit
Red bean

DIY: Elevated Wood Planter

01/16/2022

What: Mak­ing a wood­en ele­vat­ed planter

When: April 2021

Sup­plies: Wood (lots of it), router, sander, wood screws, rub­ber feet (option­al), wood stain, wood seal­er, wood filler, drill, dri­ver, shop vac­u­um, clamps, cir­cu­lar saw, ruler/square, pen­cil, rub­ber mal­let, wood glue, weed bar­ri­er cloth

Time: a few days’ worth of time for me

The Plan­ning: I spent a LONG time research­ing and plan­ning for this project. It was very excit­ing for some­one who had nev­er done any­thing deal­ing with wood­work before aside from ran­dom­ly putting two pieces of wood togeth­er into a makeshift stool. Hours of image and prod­uct search­ing along with videos. Here are few of the images I found online that I ulti­mate­ly decid­ed on using as ref­er­ence:

The Process (in pic­tures!)

Get­ting Start­ed:

^This was the gath­er­ing and deci­sion stage where I had to decide how I want­ed to ori­ent the wood, made a few test cuts, mea­sured out some things, fig­ured out rough­ly the size I was going for and if it was rea­son­able giv­en the mate­r­i­al. Wood qual­i­ty and that kind of thing are new to me, so I was­n’t sure what to buy, and then just went for it. Ver­ti­cal or hor­i­zon­tal planks? In the end I went for hor­i­zon­tal for less wood cut­ting and less screws required. My sis­ter has a pre-made planter she bought with ver­ti­cal planks, and it was­n’t secured, so some­how squir­rels dug into them and knocked them all out. Not hap­pen­ing with this planter.

Router Work:

^Very fun to use a router and it was very first time, to boot! I found out that router bits are very sharp, that rout­ing makes a MASSIVE mess and should be done out­side, if pos­si­ble (still find­ing saw­dust in every sin­gle nook and cran­ny of the base­ment), and there’s a rea­son why router tables are a thing. I would def­i­nite­ly use a rout­ing table the next time if I could.

Frame Assem­bly:

^As you can see, I don’t have a very large base­ment at all. Nei­ther do I have sawhors­es. I did­n’t even have enough clamps and had to impro­vise a lot of what I was doing. This was prob­a­bly the most frus­trat­ing part of the project, try­ing to weed through all of the wood for straight wood, doing all of the math and mea­sure­ments, only to require revi­sion half-way through, then hav­ing the frame con­tin­u­ous­ly fall apart from lack of appro­pri­ate equip­ment, and deal­ing with the lit­tle imper­fec­tions here and there. It kind of looks like a bed frame, does­n’t it, though? I was so proud when I achieved the last pic­ture in this set.

The Slats

^Dry lay­ing of the wood and then using spare pieces of wood as spac­ers. Turns out that it was­n’t per­fect­ly even, but that’s okay, because who would notice? The spac­ing is for air­flow for the plants and water drainage. I debat­ed whether or not to place cor­ner slats, being afraid that water would just sit with­out being able to be drained, but went for it any­ways, con­sid­er­ing it would be sealed with the rest of the planter. I guess if I want­ed to get fan­cy, I could have grad­ed the wood a bit away from the cor­ners.

Remain­ing Assem­bly

^Lit­tle things like try­ing to fig­ure out how many and where to place screws with­out them over­lap­ping or break­ing the wood. Not too many, but not too few. Where would it be best of lift the hefty thing espe­cial­ly when it’s full of wet soil? It was very dif­fi­cult and painstak­ing to cut the top trim and secure the 4 cor­ners. Then rout­ing those to a smooth edge and sand­ing it all down to smooth­ness but also to rid of the pen­cil marks. My lack of prop­er clamps came back to haunt me with the top trim. Then wood filler to fill in the holes and more sand­ing. This part took a huge chunk of the time and made a mas­sive mess. But it’s most­ly done! And it looks good!

Stain and Seal

^ Yay! Then I decid­ed to put feet on it because I did­n’t want the wood to just sit on the ground soak­ing up water. That’s where one of the leg pieces that was full of knots con­tin­ued to be the bane of the project. Also, I used the wrong screws. Make sure you’re using wood screws. It’s not shown, but I caulked around the rub­ber feet and the wood.

Fin­ished Prod­uct

^ Not shown in pic­tures, but you can see the weed bar­ri­er I line it all with so that the soil won’t fall through the bot­tom of the planter. Grand­moth­er = Very Hap­py. Me = Proud.

In Con­clu­sion: This entire project took me about 3 week­ends to do and hon­est­ly, by the end of it, I just want­ed to be done (espe­cial­ly because I end­ed up crush­ing my foot some­thing awful with some of the equip­ment ear­ly on). It cost me around $300 — 400 in equip­ment and sup­plies (most­ly because wood prices in 2021 were sky high) which puts me over the amount to just sim­ply buy one pre-made. On top of it, the sheer weight of pure wood is sub­stan­tial and some­thing I did­n’t real­ly con­sid­er when plan­ning the project. Nor was I plan­ning on so much left­over wood. One of the biggest prob­lems I ran into with it all was the qual­i­ty of the wood. SO MANY of them were too bowed or warped to work with and now they’re just sit­ting there being a fire haz­ard in my base­ment because it cost me so much mon­ey to begin with. How­ev­er, the process, the plan­ning, the doing, and then the recep­tion by my grand­ma, grand­pa, and oth­er rel­a­tives made it all worth it for me. I was and con­tin­ue to be proud of what I did despite the mis­takes and imper­fec­tions. The best part about it all is that I know that if I ever want­ed to attempt it or some­thing sim­i­lar in the future, then it will take much less time sim­ply because I know more about what I’m doing (and also because I the right tools now). I have oth­er ideas in mind (like a top for the planter and an out­side squir­rel-proof toma­to plant cab­i­net) that hope­ful­ly I can bring to fruition one day.