Election night baking

I had to do something to ease my nerves. And so, bread:

Even though the results were coming in and not looking too good, when I pulled this beautiful loaf out of the oven, I cheered up for a bit. (Basic boule from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with a bit of sourdough starter added, baked in a Dutch oven.)

Hummus pizza

Without tomato sauce or cheese, it feels a bit weird to call this a pizza. Whatever you want to call it, it was good: hummus, topped with lemon slices, olives, pomegranate and sun-dried tomatoes. I wasn't sure that this combination would work, but it really did -- sweet, salty and tangy, with a nice hit of garlic from the hummus.

The tomatoes got a bit burnt, but still tasted pretty good. (The pomegranate bits had been frozen, which changed their colour but they held up pretty well.)

When I did some googling about hummus as a pizza topping, it seemed like quite a few people thought it better to reduce the amount of time the hummus is in the oven, by putting it on after par-baking the crust, or even putting it on after the pizza is done. However, I thought this worked out well, and don't think the long cooking time (12 min) hurt the hummus at all.

(Pizza specs: as usual, I used my favourite dough recipe from Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day. This time I used 2/3 wholemeal and 1/3 white flour and it was very nice. I got some nice bubbles in the crust, maybe because the toppings were lighter and drier than usual.)

World peace cookies

You might think that the name of these cookies is a bit effusive. I did, until I made them. They're very good. The recipe (you can find it here) is by Dorie Greenspan.

 A couple of notes:

• There is a very troubling sequence of instructions in the recipe. First you are told that the dough may be crumbly, and not to worry about it. Then you are told to form said dough into logs. The recipe does not seem concerned that crumbly dough may not want to be formed into logs. (I found that swearing at the dough helped a lot with this step.)
• While the recipe instructs you to refrigerate the dough for at least 3 hours, if you are like me and don't read all the way through and have plans to bring these cookies to a dinner party in about an hour and a half, don't worry. Just stick the dough logs in the freezer for as long as you can (about 40 minutes worked fine for me).

Lemon pizza

Well, technically it was a lemon, thyme and olive pizza. The lemon was kind of overpowering, in a good way.

(The other pizza specs: olive oil pizza dough from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (2/3 all purpose flour, 1/3 whole wheat, plus some vital wheat gluten) and mozzarella style Cheezly.)