Sunday 28 October 2012

White Bread

I haven't made bread since I was 5 years old, but the smell of freshly baked bread is delicious and just perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Especially when Andy dragged me out for a 7 mile run this morning and I ache all over now. It took me a week to recover from last week's run! Following the trusty TGBBO book again, we headed to Asda to pick up the ingredients. Asda was, predictably, hell on earth, but we survived and only broke 2 self check outs in the process.


So the dough first stuck to my hands and made me look like I had leprosy, but after 10 minutes of kneading it started to look like proper dough. After it had proved, and grown to the size of a small monster, I divided it into 2, to make 1 loaf and 6 rolls.


As you can see the 6 rolls are not particularly even in size... They expanded so quickly and probably 'over-prooved', which I'm sure is mentioned a lot when talking about bread. But it looks good and Andy says they taste ok too, which is a ringing endorsement!


Need to work on my 'light dusting' of flour.

Tuesday 23 October 2012

Coffee Kisses

It's all well and good watching the Great British Bake Off (hereby referred to as TGBBO), and criticising their choice of flavour combination, but it is another thing entirely trying to make something of that standard.


Ever the optimist, Andy bought me the book from the first series for my birthday, and after flicking through for a recipe that didn't contain anything too weird and wonderful, I settled on coffee kisses. I don't have a food processor so everything I make is done by hand. Turns out Zumba is no match for beating eggs and making butter cream - baking is the better work out by far!


The recipe says it makes 16 halves, but I halved each half to make 32 bits in the end.



I went for the chocolate butter cream, because I was worried the coffee flavour might be overpowering so hoped the chocolate would offset it a little. Turns out you can't really taste the coffee at all in the end.  I think they look like mini hamburgers rather than biscuits, but happy for a first attempt.