Bread Machine Brioche

I’ve been making a lot of this, and the hostess of the last party I brought it to asked for the recipe, so since I’m typing it in anyway, here it is for my faithful blog readers:

It’s from the book that came with the Cuisinart bread machine, which died after 5 months, but the book is much better than the one that came with my shiny new cheap one from Amazon.

Makes 2 pounds of dough.

* 1/2 cup milk (I use rice milk)
* 4 eggs, large, at room temperature (I’m not fussy about the temperature)
* 1 stick unsalted butter (there really isn’t any reason to buy salted if you keep what you’re not using in the freezer)
* 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
* 2 tablespoons powdered milk (I actually use soy protein drink mix that I bought a large container of once and then didn’t like drinking it.)
* 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
* 3 3/4 cups bread flour (It really makes a difference using bread flour over all-purpose)
* 3 teaspoons yeast

Run the bread machine on the dough cycle. At this point you have a beautiful hunk of dough that’s elastic, not at all sticky and smells wonderful. The standard brioche where you roll a ball and then put a smaller ball on top of it must have happened because people just wanted to play with this dough. I’ve been using a mini-muffin pan with 24 small cups. Have the larger ball just fill the cup and the smaller ball perch on top of it.

You can also roll it out as thin as practical (less than an inch) and cut 3-4 inch circles and bake it on a cookie sheet for hamburger buns.

In either case, you get a better color on the result if you brush the rolls with an egg wash of one egg beated with one tablespoon of water.

Let rise for about half an hour after you’ve formed the rolls. Bake in a 350 degree (Fahrenheit) oven until the bottoms are browned. For the mini-muffin size this will be less than 20 minutes.

Report on the September 5 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be on Tuesday, September 12, at 7:45 PM at “my place”:http://www.laymusic.org/directions.html.

I believe people decided not to meet on Tuesday, September 19, when I won’t be there for most of the meeting, because I’ll be Clerk at Ward 10 Precinct 3 in Cambridge.

h3. Last meeting

We played:

* Charlton arrangements:
** ??A-Roving??
** ??Pescator dell’Onda??
** ??A Policeman’s Lot?? (both 5 part and 3 part)
* Senfl, ??Wohl kumbt der Mai??
* Gabrielli
** ??Canzon prima?? 1615 for five instruments
** ??Canzon II??
* Dowland ??His golden locks??

Report on the August 29 meeting

There will be normal drop-in meetings for the next several weeks. We may need to skip September 19. So the next meeting will be Tuesday, September 5, at 7:45 at “my house”:http://www.laymusic.org/directions.html

h2. Last meeting

We played:

* Purcell, ??Allemande??
* Byrd, ??Susanna Fair??
* Senfl Tenor Lieder:
** ??Wohl Kumbt der Mai I??
** ??Wohl Kumbt der Mai II??
** ??Gottes Gewalt, Kraft und auch Macht??
** ??Rosina, wo was dein Gestalt??
** ??Sie ist, die sich hält gebührlich??
* Charlton, ??A Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One??
* Gabrielli, ??Canzon II à 6??
* John Wilbye, ??Weep, weep mine eyes??
* Arcadelt, ??Il Bianco e dolce Cigno??
* Dowland, ??All ye whom Love or Fortune hath betraid??

Gabrielli Canzon II à6

“This piece”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/pieces/361.html is one we’ve been enjoying with a few more people than usual showing up at the meetings. We played it out of the London Pro Musica edition [1], before I transcribed it in this edition. We found it a lot easier without the barlines and with the rehearsal letters.

When I first started the Renaissance Band, I advertised that we were going to do “Gabrielli”:http://www.laymusic.org/music/sp/html/bycomposer.html#13 since I knew brass players like him, and then realized that I didn’t have any. I’ve since added a couple and we’ve always enjoyed playing them when we have the right people at the rehearsal. So there will be more coming.

[1] LPM GAB20

More site fiddling

Bad Behavior seems to be successfully blocking the comment spam, so I have removed the requirement that I moderate all comments.

I was really enjoying the WIKI stuff I was doing, so I have activated the Textile2 plugin, to see if it makes posting a blog entry more fun. I like writing html with psgml in emacs, but getting there from wordpress is several steps:

* click on the html box
* right click on that and invoke mosex
* move to the emacs window
* get into html mode (for some reason, wordpress gives the file a .txt extension — if it were .html, we would be in html mode by default)
* remove the page template that psgml generates for you
* start typing html.

I still think Ctrl-C Ctrl-E tag name is a lot easier of a way to enter a tag than remembering a lot of different punctuation marks, but for a normal post with only a couple of links and lists, I think the textile markup may well be easier.

t turns out to be easier to deal with textile 2 list formatting if you turn off the rich visual editor.

Anyway, I’ll leave it for a while, but I may go back to emacs.

Some tweaks to the blog

After I posted the report on this week’s meeting of the Cantabile Band, I got irritated enough at the bullet style to do some work to fix it. I had to do some googling to figure out how to do that, and so I did some more reading of one of the helpful sites, Lorelle on WordPress.

She has a list of WordPress plugins she finds useful, and I got inspired to install Bad Behavior and Random Quotes.

Bad Behavior shouldn’t affect you as a reader; just the amount of spam comments I have to deal with as an administrator.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the sidebar, you can see a random quote from my quote database.  Feel free to suggest other quotes to be added.  In the course of looking up some quotes I couldn’t remember exactly, I found quotationspage.com.

Report on the August 22 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will take place on Tuesday, August 29, at 7:45 PM at my place.

I don’t know of any reason why we won’t be having our regular drop-in meetings for the next few weeks. The two election days (September 19 and November 7) are the only times in the next few months when I expect anything different.

We may continue to have 6-8 people for a while, so suggestions for five or six part music are welcome. I think there’s enough interest in the Gabrielli we’ve done at the last two meetings that we’ll continue that.

Last meeting

We played:

  • Byrd Susanna fair
  • 2 settings of Ein Feste Burg
  • Gabrielli, Canzon II a 6
  • Dowland group:
    • O sweet wood
    • Fine knacks for ladies
    • A shepherd in a shade
    • Clear or Cloudy
  • Ravenscroft, He that will an alehouse keep

Meeting announcement/report August 15/22

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be on Tuesday, August 22, at 7:45 PM at my place.

We may continue to have a larger number of players than usual, so if there are 6-8 part pieces you’d like to play, let me know.

Last Meeting

We played:

  • Andrew Charlton Krummhorn arrangements:
    • Almaine by Thomas Strangthfield
    • My Thing is my Own, from Pills to Purge Melancholy
    • Triste España
    • Bon Jour Mon CÅ“ur
    • A Policeman’s Lot is not a Happy One
  • Giovanni Gabrieli:
    • Exaudi Deus for 7 voices or instruments
    • Canzon II a 6 from Canzoni e Sonata (1615)
  • Susato group

Plans for the August 15 meeting

The next meeting of the Cantabile Renaissance Band will be on Tuesday, August 15, at my place.

We will again be doing our usual drop-in stuff, possibly with an unusual cast of characters, since it’s August and some regulars can’t make it and some non-regulars can.

We will have an unusually large amount of sight-reading material, because Hope brought over five large boxes of music that she is no longer using for her CCAE coaching. So if there’s something you want to do that you think we haven’t been doing because we didn’t have the music, let me know, and I’ll pull it out if I run into it going through the boxes

Last Meeting

We played:

  • Glogauer Liederbuch: Es solt ein man
  • Gervaise, Dix Bransles Gays
  • Guidiccioni, Il Bianco e Dolce Cigno
  • Tye, two In nomine‘s
  • Holborne group
    • 64. Galliard: As it fell on a Holy Eve
    • 53. [Pavan:] Last Will and Testament
    • 40. Galliard
    • 63. Galliard: The Fairie-round
    • 34. Muy linda
  • Dowland, A shepherd in a shade
  • Dowland, Come, ye heavy states of Night
  • Let us drink and be merry