Another use for the Chocolate Espresso Bread

The next step in this cooking adventure, was to take the Chocolate Espresso Bread Dough that I made (that turned out too bitter to eat) and convert it into Chocolate Tangerine Bars. It was my hope to fix the lack of sweetness by adding more milk chocolate chips (the recipe called for more bitter sweet) and hoping that the tangerine helped tone down the bitterness. Of course, as is my fashion to do these things, I discovered that the recipe called for dried cranberries, which I did not have. So I embarked, cranberry-less on with the bars.

I took the rather wet dough (this dough is wetter and stickier than most of the bread recipes in the book) and worked in the chocolate chips and tangerine zest. Again, it looked and smelled pretty good, and my hopes were high again. So I cooked the bars and set them out to cool. After cutting them into the bar shapes my family hesitantly took a bar each and ate.


The result of the bar was mixed. It was definitely better with the sweeter milk chocolate chips and tangerine zest, but there was still an underlying bitterness to the bar that couldn't be masked. This bar has great potential, since the fact that it is not a sweet bread makes this bar have a nice amount of sweetness without feeling like you are eating a dessert. With the correct type of chocolate in the dough originally, this could very well become a nice Saturday afternoon treat that I would feel comfortable letting my family have, in lieu of some sweet treat that will hype up the kids for a while. Despite all this, my young son ate a couple of bars, despite everyone else having one, and was even caught trying to sneak one off the counter a couple of hours later. So it was definitely not a total loss as quite a bit was eaten, but I should divulge that my son is a huge bread addict (like his parents) and is not very picky when it comes to his bread.

More woes in the kitchen

So I set out to make another bread, keeping in mind that the Whole Wheat flour I had used previously was not an appropriate whole wheat for bread (too course a texture). So a trip to the local co-op provided me with the needed Whole Wheat Bread Flour to make my next batch of bread. I get home with what I thought was all I needed to make the Chocolate Espresso Bread for Valentine's weekend. Sounds divine, doesn't it? Well, turns out, not so much.

Upon starting my venture into this new bread, I find that I did not have the bitter sweet chocolate required. However, I did have unsweetened chocolate and milk chocolate chips. Mixing these would have to produce the right amount of sweet... right? Turns out, that is wrong. I mixed the bread and it came out the rather wet consistency that the book warned, which was strange, but on track. I refrigerated the dough to make it workable, again as per the instructions. The dough was a beautiful dark chocolate color and I was excited for my newest experiment to be completed, and so was my daughter who had helped me make the dough.

Together we worked the cool dough into a ball and placed it to rest on the pizza paddle that we use to transfer the bread to and from the oven, we preheated the oven, and waited patiently as time rolled by and we were able to put the now formed ball of dough into the oven. With excitement we waited for the dough to cook, but the smell seemed a little "off". It smelled almost burnt, that scent that occurs when you know that something may have sat in the pan just a minute too long. Nothing strong or obvious, just bitter and not quite right. We pulled the cooked bread out of the oven and set it aside to cool, the entire time thinking it looked nice, but it just didn't entice us to start eating it right away.

After a good cool down time, and the man of the house coming in from work, we cut into the bread, put a pat of butter on it and made not so pleased faces while we ate. I quickly realized the error as I ate the, perfectly edible but not fantastic, bread. That unsweetened chocolate was just too bitter for this project and the milk chocolate chips did not help to sweeten the bread in the way I had hoped. Sadly, I had to concede that my second batch of bread was another fail. Granted, it was an edible fail, but a fail none the less. We even had half the loaf leftover the next day (almost unheard of in this house if I have only made a single loaf), so I threatened to force it on the family for breakfast. I did actually follow through with that threat hoping that toasting the bread and putting maple syrup over it would help, which it did... a little.

So without further ado, I'll show you the bread that I made (finally I remembered to take pictures).




As a reminder (did I mention this before, if not here it is), the HBin5 method has you make enough dough to make 3-4 loafs all at once. The dough is then refrigerated for you to take out and use as you need (preferably within 5-10 days of making). My next experiment will be using this dough again to make a bar in hopes of fixing my mistake.