Ciabatta: Attempt 1

I've been told by a certain someone who shall remain nameless that she's tired of looking at green macarons. So I'm bumping them down with a pic of the first loaf of ciabatta I made--a month late.

The outside is prettier than the inside. Although the flavor was great, there weren't the big holes and texture I associate with ciabatta--it was a dense loaf, with small holes. I'll work on that for next time. I used Peter Reinhart's recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which I got for Christmas.

I am finishing school and working full time again, so I'm not sure when an original (or at least Allie-tested) recipe will go up again. But, money is good. Gotta pay off all those school loans somehow, and baking doesn't even cover interest payments. :-)

Oh, Christmas Tree

I've been a busy girl. A friend of mine with whom I often travel for work called me a couple weeks ago to see if I'd be interested in a baking job. For 15 dozen cookies. Sure, I said. Great. Absolutely.

Now, I've baked a lot of cookies. I've decorated a lot of cookies. However, my royal icing experience has been entirely limited to those breast cancer cookies a couple months ago. I thought it would be quick and easy--outline, flood, decorate, no problem. Ha. I am definitely a buttercream girl through and through. Royal icing in large quantities is a messy slow process for me! I learned a lot, and have been operating on less than five hours of sleep every night this week. Tomorrow, I might just sleep until noon. There was one point this week where I'm pretty sure every flat surface of my dining room was covered with a layer of green trees--like my very own confectionery forest, that smelled almost nauseatingly sweet when one walked in the room.

There are 14 dozen cookies with royal icing, plus a dozen with my usual buttercream. Since I don't have any elves to help me decorate my cookies, in the future, I think the cost of said cookies is going to be a touch higher than I charged this time, purely because the time commitment and frustration/exhaustion factor was significantly higher than anticipated. But they are pretty, aren't they?