Weekend of Baking

This past weekend I caught the baking bug. I decided I wanted to try a new recipe, so I went to the Gourmet magazine's website and looked around. There I found a recipe on khachapuri, Georgian cheese bread, that looked scrumptious. Now, I'm not a big fan of working with yeast because I haven't had much experience with it and the experience I have had wasn't positive. Despite classes in food chemistry I have managed to kill yeast with water that was too hot. I should have known better! Well, I do now...

So I ended up making the Georgian cheese bread and it turned out quite well (see photo below). I didn't kill the yeast, so that was good. The only thing that I didn't like so much is that the cheese filling turned out to be a little salty. The recipe calls for a Georgian cheese, sulguni, but says you can substitute with havarti and salted mozzarella. I've never heard of salted mozzarella, so I just bought the regular mozzarella you get here in Germany and salted it a little. Apparently that wasn't necessary.

Because of the saltiness factor I decided to make a sandwich with the cheese bread. I thought if I added some unsalty ingredients it would cut the salitness. And it did! I made a sandwich by slicing a cheese bread wedge in the middle and stuffing it with tomatoes and basil (see photo below). What a delicious lunch!

The baking frenzy didn't stop at the cheese bread, though. It continued with carrot-coconut cupcakes with cream cheese frosting, a recipe from the November 2003 issue of Bon Appétit. I love how epicurious provides us with so many recipes from Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. It's my favorite website for looking up recipes! Anyways, I had made these cupcakes before and knew they were fabulous. Not too long ago I made a carrot cake and I didn't like the recipe very much. Ever since then I was craving to have these cupcakes again. So I finally made them and they turned out wonderfully! They were really moist and aromatic. Although, I think they would have been even better if only I had had the sweetened flaked coconut they have in the US. They only sell unsweetened coconut here. If anyone knows where to get that kind of coconut in Germany, let me know!