📚📚 Read Japanese Every Day Challenge - Spring 2026 🏫 🧑‍🏫

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April 7

Book Content Pages
葬送のフリーレン7 Chapters 62, 63 36
ルリドラゴン 1 Chapters 1, 2 87
薬屋のひとりごと 1 Chapter 11 8

I’ve started Ruri Dragon which has been pretty fun so far :eyes: It all starts when Ruri, a regular high school girl, wakes up one day with horns on her head. As she then finds out during breakfast, her mother, well, kinda had a thing with a dragon in a world that’s otherwise void of any fantasy elements :laughing:


Posted about it in the POLL thread yesterday and heard some good opinions on the series, as well as in the WK book club that I was made aware of. The first two chapters have been fun already!

OH and I totally forgot to fulfill my promise to @pocketcalamity in one of my previous posts. I had promised to deliver some photos of my Easter baking where I made panettone :face_savoring_food:

For anyone who wants to see more of the process (it's extremely detailed lol)

It’s my own vegan recipe for panettone that, while not using eggs or dairy products, still follows traditional ways of building the dough. Most notably, this means we don’t use commercial yeast but a lievito madre which is a very mild sourdough that has a lot less water in it than the sourdough starters you may have seen online in the covid days. Building it from the ground up using only flour and water takes a week or two
This is my lievito madre directly after refreshing it with new flour + water and then after it had some time to grow


Panettone is a very enriched dough, meaning the dough has to take in a lot of butter, sugar (and eggs in the regular version). This only works when you have the right flour! Luckily, my flour came in just in time on Saturday. Of course, I could have just ordered it a bit sooner and not at the last possible moment, but where would be the fun in that


Manitoba flour is the name for the strongest wheat flours, i.e. they can bind the most moisture.
On Saturday, my lievito madre was refreshed three times before making the primo impasto / first dough of the panettone


At this point, it was a barely enriched dough. It was just the lievito madre, flour and soy milk—so no butter and no sugar yet. Those would only get added during the secondo impasto on Sunday morning


The secondo impasto is where making a traditional panettone dough becomes practically impossible without the right machine and right ingredients. It takes a lot of kneading to make the dough come together because of the high fat and sugar content. For the longest time, you have a dough that just seems to melt in all directions when you stop the kneading. My machine here kneaded for a total duration of around 40 minutes this time with much of the time spent at the highest speed. The dough temperature also becomes a concern as kneading it so intensely will increase the temperature over time and might damage the structure of the dough if it gets too hot; some people will even freeze the mixing bowl or some ingredients beforehand to keep the temperature lower
Eventually though, a nice dough forms


Still pretty tricky to work with for someone who is inexperienced with high hydration doughs, but if you know how to handle it, it feels so nice, very wobbly and pillowy :pleading_face: Handling the dough and taking a photo of it at the same time would have been a bit difficult though :laughing:
This was enough dough for five 500g panettoni. I’ve made four with candied citron and orange peels and one panettone with a chocolate filling

Ready for the oven:

I probably should have left them uncovered for a bit so I could better score them (that’s what you call cutting into the dough right before baking so the dough springs up around these cuts), but it is what it is

After baking they have to hang upside down while completely cooling down, otherwise they may collapse. Here’s my patented professional patate panettone cooling station


And yeah, here are the final panettoni :slight_smile:


It was delicious, let me tell you :flushed: