Wishing all our baking Dads a blessed day on Sunday! I pray you’ll be appreciated for who you are and how you serve your families. May it be a restful, peaceful day!! You deserve it! To all the Fathers who bake for their kids!! 🥳🎉🎊👏

This week's bake-along is brioche, and if there's one thing I want you to take away from the entire process, it's this: Don't rush the butter. Get gluten development first. Before you add a single piece of butter, you should be able to pull a windowpane. The dough should already be smooth, elastic, and showing signs of strength. Why? Because butter makes gluten development harder, not easier. Once that butter starts going in, it's much more difficult for the dough to build the structure it needs to support all that richness. If you start adding butter too early, you can end up with a soupy, greasy mess that seems like it will never come together. Trust the process. Build strength first. Then add softened butter a little at a time, letting each addition fully incorporate before adding the next. The second thing to watch is temperature. Brioche dough should stay cool. If the dough gets too warm, the butter begins to soften and smear into the dough instead of creating the rich, silky structure we're after. But if I had to choose the most important lesson this week? It's gluten development before butter. Get your windowpane first. Everything else gets easier after that. Perfection is not required. Progress is. Henry ⭐🔥

I had a couple of requests on how to shape my broiche loaf. I went to YouTube and the one that spoke to me the most was Bim’s. It was very impressive and not difficult at all to shape. My biggest issue was fighting the heatwave today at 94 F. Tomorrow, it maybe hotter and I decided to rather bake today. The only issue while I rolled it out the butter kept melting and I had to place this in the fridge. I should have had my cooler with ice-packs and worked one piece of dough at a time next to me. Here is the link to Bim’s video. https://youtube.com/shorts/2A22rbRvWCQ?is=GdugOgJXqHqPO1Xf Tip: Tonight place all your baking utensils, bowl, rolling pin and ice-packs in the freezer to combat this awful heat and humidity. You can also transfer everything in your cooler next to you tomorrow while baking to keep everything as cold as possible. Happy Baking!

Tomorrow is card club day so I’m bringing a blueberry Bundt cake for this weeks treat

@Donna Angelo @Henry Hunter @Sandy Chong @Mauvette Bailey @Colleen Vergara @Ann Snow @Patt Stanaway @Deborah Karaban @Judy Lyle @Mauvette Bailey @JoAnn Amato @Joseph Bilodeau @Betsy Carey @Matt Davies @Parrish Patterson Hey Stiff Starter Squad!!!! Check in with me and let me see what your stiff starter & Levito Madre are looking like. Are they healthy or smelling a little funny, not quite doubling, very few bubbles??? Are you having any issues? If you have any questions ask away!!! If you’ve learned a valuable tip in maintaining your starter or for incorporating it into your dough? What are you making with your stiff starter and/or Levito Madre? Whatever you’d like to share or ask, please say it below so that you can either get help or be of help to another squad member. My stiff starter, Jireh and my Levito Madre, The Avenger are pictured below at peak. Let me see yours, please. What do you love most about your stiff starter???