Yeasty goodness

Bread. How I love thee. Let me compare thee to a summers day.....

Seriously though it's the food of gods. I love the stuff but haven't been able to find bread I'd like to eat at a price I'm willing to pay. I enjoy baking my own but have never found the time to commit to a regular baking schedule. Let's face it. If you let me go, I'll eat bread and butter for most meals.

This is where present me thanks past me quite a bit. When I moved to the UK, my sister bought me an Amazon voucher so that I could stock up on ebooks for the plane. What we didn't realise is that .com vouchers cannot be used with .com.au or with .co.uk. Which meant that I had all this credit and nothing to spend it on... Needless to say I bought a few cookbooks. One of which was The Bread Bible.

Last week I tried the Sandwich Loaf recipe. Half was baked on the day and the other half stashed in the fridge for a few days. One of the comments in the book says that this loaf is everything that Wonder Bread tries to be and doesn't achieve. I thought the recipe was a little odd as it required both milk and butter as well as three rising sessions. Once as starter, another as dough and the third as a shaped loaf.

Over all I thought it was a very easy if not time consuming recipe. It could definitely be done over a few days if you were time poor but able to find 30 min for mixing, kneading and cleaning up the bench afterwards (this is a very wet dough). Last week I stuck to the recipe and this week I changed up half the flour to whole meal spelt. It's been sitting in the fridge for a while. To compensate for the wholemeal flour I added extra yeast.


Edit - a week later - the bread that sat in the fridge for a week was very tasty. M wasn't a fan of the texture. He found it oily, mostly likely due to the butter and milk.

There are no pictures because my iPad is being a poo and not accessing the images properly. Will update when I can.

Blueberry Muffins

One of my favourite muffins is blueberry. A crunchy top and filled with messy blueberries is all I need to be happy. Well it's all I thought I needed. For those who follow other food blogs you have probably already made your way over to Smitten Kitchen. Deb's food is delicious.

 

I'm in back to school mode. September 1st means the start of the school year and a new school for me. I'll be teaching at a school about an hours commute away which means leaving the house at 630am and not getting home until 6/630pm. My solution to this is to be uber organise and have enough food with me to cover all meals and snacks except dinner. If I'm even more organised then I'll be able to have breakfast at home before I leave work.

Deb posted these muffins as the perfect blueberry muffin a few days ago. As someone who adores blueberry muffins, I decided to try them out. For once I stuck to the recipe!! The only difference is that I got 10 muffins instead of 9. I could probably have gotten 9 if I bad filled the cups even higher. 

As you can see I got quite sizeable muffins. Getting 9 would have meant slightly higher tops but I am happy with what I got. The recipe is here

Powder Puffs

The Chocolate Balls were a hit, though a few people were disappointed that there was no rum in them. You can add grog to them quite nicely, I just didn't have anything suitable at the time.

Monday involved one of the best massages in the world. As a result of this $30 massage I have slept right through the last two nights, only stirring in the early hours to roll over when my body thinks its time to get up when really it just needs a few more hours. To celebrate the joyous massage and to kill sometime before hopping in the car, I went shopping. One of the stores was having a special, spend over $60 on shoes and get a free $60 handbag. So I bought these


My house mate finds the image of me in a bathrobe and these heels whilst cooking breakfast absolutely hilarious. My comment was 'Well, I have to break them in somehow..'

The next challenge is to do something with all the lemons I have lying around the house. I think its time to break out the lemon curd as well as finally learning how to make lemon butter. A few months ago I found a recipe for these things called powder puffs. Little sponge kisses with whipped cream and lemon curd sandwiched between them. That then leaves me with egg whites to use or freeze so maybe some meringues as well. I found the recipe in the Epicure (the F&B guide in The Age on Tuesdays)

You can find the article here

So, rehearsals officially start on Sunday for the orchestra. Whilst I'm excited about rehearsing at last there is also some worry. I've worked with most of them before so I'm not worried about that. Just the usual, 'This is going to be a disaster' feeling I get before every show.

I think this time I'm going to stick to my usual method of dealing by baking for rehearsal. Currently of the opinion that Chocolate Balls is the best option.

1 cup desiccated coconut
2 -3tbs cocoa powder
1 pack Marie Biscuits
375mls condensed milk (about a can)
Extra coconut for dusting

Essentially combine everything except the extra coconut in a bowl and combine. Then roll into balls, dust with coconut and stick in the fridge until set. I recommend using wet hands to do teh rolling otherwise you will end up covered in the mix.


A variation on this is Apricot balls
replace the cocoa powder with chopped dried apricots.