Pain pour le weekend

A book of Swiss Cooking "Suisse Cuisine".

I was a bit sad this weekend, maybe because it is so cold in Japan! The weather forecast says that it is possible to have snow in Nagoya (I haven't seen it yet). So I decided to do an activity which makes me happy. I miss Geneva because I lived there more than four years. I have a book of Swiss cooking which was my supervisor's present when I got a Ph.D. As he knew  I like cooking, he gave it to me. It is also good for not forgetting French as this book is written in French.

I baked special bread for weekend and holidays in Switzerland. This is called "Tresse" in French and "Zopf" in German. Both means "Braid". You see the reason from the shape of this bread.

The dough of bread fills my small oven!

I have baked this bread when I lived in Geneva, and so there was no problem before baking. The dough leavened very well and looked nice. However, when I tried to put it into the oven, it touched the ceiling of the oven. My oven is mainly for the toast and very small. I managed to put my dough into the oven, while the bread was unevenly colored.

Baked Tresse

You see the bread is almost burned at the top center part, but edges are not even tanned. Anyway, the taste was good, as this includes a lot of butter (70g of butter used 500g of flour; two tresse as seen in the picture). I hope I can have a better oven next year and bake big Tress without worrying to be burned.

Actually, I can't eat so much bread only by myself. So I sent one (better colored) to my parents as yesterday was my father's birthday. Though he always says that he doesn't need anything for his birthday, I am sure he likes something we (my sister and I) bake. When we were teenager, my sister often bake a cake. Even though it was not very good, he liked it very much. Sometimes he requested my sister (and me) to bake a cake for special occasions.

Oh! and there is something interesting. I like to cook for the meal, but my sister liked cooking sweets. We don't have same taste nor similar brain...