Tuesdays with Dorie: Kugelhopf

Kugelhopf what?? My Kugelhopflop.

I had never heard of it before, or even seen one. Looking from Dorie's picture in her book, it's like a bread baked in a tall bundt pan. Part bread, part cake, she says, similar to a brioche. Well not mine.

Mine totally flopped! She says to use warm to the touch milk to dissolve the yeast. My milk cooled too fast and the yeast was not dissolving, it sort of gummed up. I let it warm up in the warm oven in hopes of it working and I carried on . It rose beautifully during the first rise but in the end, with almost 8 hrs of rising time plus overnight fridge time, mine was not looking so pretty. I used a regular bundt pan, and at bake time it was only about 1/2 way up the pan. It should've been all the way. I thought maybe some bake time would help it grow some, but it didn't. It darkened a little fast too. I made mine with cranberries which were nice. The final product wasn't terribly bad, we still nibbled at it.
I didn't even want to blog it, I was so discouraged with it. I even cried to my Husband who gasped when he saw it, and asked, "what's going on?" (referring to my pumpkin cheesecake I had baked earlier that week, that also flopped -not sure that will be blogged either). I figured this was a learning experience, and maybe other's can learn from my flops too, so i'm showing everyone how not to make this.

Go have a look at the other TWDers Kugelhopf, lots of others had better luck. If you'd like to try your hand at this, have a look at Yolanda's The All-Purpose Girl blog for the recipe. I wonder if anyone might know what happened? Was it my cooled off milk?

it rose nicely in the beginning...


but after 4 hrs of another rise before baking, it wasn't looking good



I have to add this in...how fitting. My home PC is junk right now, so what did I do today, I had to clean.