SMiLes by Meg

Brioche

I feel like I’ve been holding out on you. The past couple of months, I’ve been making a LOT of sourdough bread, using a recipe I haven’t posted here. It’s perfect and easy and we don’t buy bread anymore (except when I’m too busy to bake bread and we find our bread box empty mid week). But this will not be the week I share that recipe. Instead, I’m sharing a different sourdough recipe from the same book – one for sourdough brioche. This bread doesn’t taste sour or anything. Sourdough starter just serves as the leavening agent. It tastes

Fig and Olive Oil Challah

This was fun to make. I’m home for the long weekend, having a girl’s weekend with my mom, and she agreed to humor me and make a complicated braided bread on Saturday night. I love challah, she’d never had challah, and the idea of somehow getting a flavor woven into the challah made it a recipe I couldn’t skip. Start by making the base dough. In the bowl of a stand mixer, whisk together the yeast, warm water, and teaspoon of honey. Let sit for 10 minutes until it starts to foam up. Add the remaining honey, olive oil, eggs

Chocolate Zucchini Bread

Calling this a “bread” feels kind of like lying. Sure, the base of this is a zucchini bread, and there is definitely a LOT of zucchini. Which makes you feel like it’s healthy. But then it’s moist, full of chocolate chips, and seems like a better pair for ice cream than coffee. Which makes you feel like it can’t possibly be healthy. However, I’m not one to make such decisions for you, so if you want to call it a vegetable bread, and therefore basically a salad, I’m not going to stop you. If you want to call it more

Spice Cake

Now that it’s January, it’s time to turn away from Christmas cookies and move on to bigger and better things – like continuing my quest to be featured on Yotam Ottolenghi’s instagram feed and using all of my Christmas presents. Those two goals come together in this week’s post: Spice Cake out of Ottolenghi’s Sweet cookbook. When I opened Sweet this week to find a recipe, I wanted something that would be baked in a loaf pan, since Sylvia, Erik’s mom, got me a beautiful yellow Emile Henry one this year (thanks!). Also because a loaf pan cake is a

Mini Pumpkin Bread

Last week, I mentioned that I had made some pumpkin bread. Now that I’m back on the East Coast, where people are as obsessed with pumpkin as I am (I currently have a pumpkin spice candle lit next to my computer), it felt like a good time to post it! Pretty early in the SMiLes by Meg catalog I made a chocolate chip pumpkin bread, but I realized I hadn’t posted any just plain, high quality, pumpkin bread. I wanted a recipe that made its own spice mix, actually looked orange, and had some kind of crunchy topping. More importantly,