My friend and I decided to do a “bake off” for the month of April.  We picked a couple of things: rustic breads (pictures coming later), brioche, and strawberry tarts (pictures coming later).  Here are some of my brioche adventures.

I started with a simple loaf, it turned out OK but pretty dry.  I used it to make some of the best croutons we’ve ever made.  The problem is that they aren’t really reproducible.  Have you ever had the spiced peanuts from Costco?  We will never buy them again because they are SO GOOD.  You can’t get anything from Costco in small quantities so we ate them way too fast!  Anyway, we finished the peanuts and had some of the yummy spices left at the bottom of the peanut jar.  I didn’t want the rest of the peanut spices to go to waste, so I sliced the bread into one inch cubes and covered them with the peanut spices and some olive oil.  I baked for a while to let them dry out and voila, yummy croutons.  Sorry I don’t have pictures of these…just memories 🙂

As good as the croutons were, I didn’t think croutons would be a very good entry to my bake off.  So I decided to do a Beef en Croute.

The beef and goodies all wrapped up before they bake…

After baking…

Sliced and ready to eat…

You can also do a Salmon en Croute called coulibiac, but it wasn’t salmon season.  This was really good and I think I’ll use the brioche recipe to wrap brie at parties.

Cheers,
K