rainforest recipes

Bread Baking Day is hosted this week by Hefe und mehr.

It has been an interesting process preparing a post for Bread Baking Day this month. After a busy month getting back into the "flow", I began the process late. Then, as I discovered later, I had been reading outdated information, and thinking that this month was for "small breads", so I went through the recipes I have been saving to find the one for Hot Dog / Hamburger Buns that I had been wanting to try. I laid out all the ingredients that were listed in the recipe, and began the preparation. I mixed together all the wet ingredients and yeast in one bowl, and as I began adding the dry ingredients, I realized that the recipe's ingredients had left out the 3 cups of whole wheat flour that was needed in the recipe. I didn't have any more white flour, and I would normally use a mixture of white flour and bran to make the required amount of whole wheat flour. I could have set everything aside and gone to the local store for a couple of pounds of flour, but then I remembered a bag of special flour that a friend, who owns a cookie baking business, had brought for me. I did note on the label that the floury mixture was made up of several different biodynamic ingredients, but since whole wheat flour seemed to be at the head of the list, I didn't put too much attention to exactly what was in it. As I reached the point where the "dough" should be forming up, it was still a "batter" ... so I tasted it. It was delicious ... and SWEET!! Very sweet! I realized immediately that this mixture was not destined to become sandwich buns


Accidental Mango Coffee Bread

So, I re-read the list of ingredients in the bag of "flour" and sat down to figure out what I could possibly do with a "sweet bread batter" ... and it came to me ... A COFFEE CAKE!! I remembered that I had 4 fresh mangoes in the refrigerator that I wanted to use up ... so I diced them up to use as a filling. I greased the pan well ... spread a layer of the "bread batter" over the bottom of the pan, put a good thick layer of diced mangoes over the batter, sprinkled a mixture of grated panela (real brown sugar in a block) and cinnamon over the diced mangoes, then added spoonfuls of batter over the top of the mixture.


I decided to let it rise for about an hour (it did have yeast in it, after all) and then I baked it at 350' for about 45 minutes ...

WOW ... it was really tasty! Its too bad that I could never duplicate the recipe.


Meanwhile, I didn't realize yet that Bread Baking Day this month calls for "Sweet Breads" and went ahead and blogged the OTHER bread that I made after this one made its unexpected "transition" (I went out to buy more flour) ... then when I went looking for today's Bread Baking Day event, I discovered my error BUT ... I could hardly believe my good luck ... all was not lost .. I still had this incredible Mango Coffee Bread to post.

As I began trying to upload the first picture I noticed that the process wasn't completing and that none of my webpages were loading ... I did a quick check and ... sure enough ... someone in our library in the morning had downloaded over the Hughesnet restrictions and our internet connection is now 90% shut down for 24 hours.
So, after all, I am not going to be able to finish my post before the end of July. However, all of the pictures that you would normally be seeing in this spot will be posted tomorrow after our penalty has been lifted.

(Saturday Note .... our restrictions have been lifted and I am now able to upload the photos for this blog entry).