Soda Bread

I decided to do some savoury baking as well this week. Mum has recently given me a new book, Paul Hollywood's How to Bake, so by looking through this I found Soda Bread. It told me that it was easy to make and very quick, it looked straightforward enough so I gave it a shot. 

Place the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda together in a bowl. 

Dry ingredients in a bowl with buttermilk on top. 

Add the buttermilk and mix it all together to form a dough. I found this bit quite challenging as it didn't really want to combine, so there was a lot of mixing going on. Eventually I got a ball. This was flattened and then placed on a baking tray and cooked for 30 minutes. 

Bread in the oven

After 30 minutes I lifted it off the tray and checked it, it sounded hollow so I thought it was cooked. However when it came to cutting it up I found the centre wasn't cooked so it could have done with longer. 

Final product

The verdict: Whilst this bread was very quick to make, it didn't use standard ingredients in my cupboard, I don't have buttermilk to hand, so it was a hassle buying the ingredients. It also didn't taste like "normal" bread and I couldn't decide whether I liked it or not. It's not something I would try again, it was ok but just not quite right. I give it 6/10.  

Summer Pudding

For Gary's work BBQ yesterday I decided to also make a summer pudding. I have never made a summer pudding before and decided that it would perfect for the current weather. I used a combination of recipes and therefore this is my own creation. 

Ingredients:

800g Frozen Blackforest Fruits (summer fruits would be better but Tesco had run out!) 

100g Caster Sugar

1 Loaf of bread

227g Tub Clotted Cream

Method:

Place the fruit and the sugar in a saucepan and heat until boiling. Simmer for 2-3 minutes so the fruit is starting to soften. 

Fruit simmering

Remove 1/4 of the mixture and place it in a blender so that it produces a puree. 

Fruit separated off to be pureed

Line a bowl with cling film, this will be the bowl you make the pudding in. 

Cling filmed bowl

Cut the crusts off the bread, dip a piece in the puree and place, puree side up, in the base of the bowl. 

Do the same with the bread to line the sides of the bowl and reserve some bread to place on the top. 

Puree in the bowl

Place the remainder of the puree in the bowl lining the sides and then half fill with the cooked fruit. Place the clotted cream in the centre of the bowl and then fill the bowl with the remaining fruit. Put the final pieces of bread on top. Put a little weight on the top and leave in the fridge overnight for the juices to soak through. 

Half filled with clotted cream

When ready to serve carefully turn the bowl upside down and the pudding should tip out. Finally remove the clingfilm. 

Ready to serve, a little squashed. 

 And then slice it up!!Today we have Gary's photography skills, you're not allowed to say they're better than mine!! 

Summer pudding inside

The verdict: Having never made it before I thought it turned out quite well and tasted good. My pudding collapsed a little so it didn't form a nice bowl shape and this also mean the clotted cream crept to the outside rather than being a nice surprise in the middle. The pudding tasted really good, the fruit was cooked enough to be sweet but not so much that it lost all texture. The bread wasn't as soggy as I would like and next time I will add more of the juice so this can seep through. Gary's collegues seem to like it, that's a relief and now we have some left overs to demolish!! 

Paul Hollywood's Bloomer

This week for my bread recipe I wanted to make something from the master of bread himself, Paul Hollywood of course. I found this recipe on the BBC food website, as usual, and it was featured in his recent series "bread". Found here. 

As usual the first step is to mix the dry ingredients together in a bowl. Paul is unusual in that he says to keep the salt and the yeast separate, instead of butter he uses oil and instead of warm water he says cold is fine. Mix everything together to form a dough and then knead it for 5-10 minutes until the dough is smooth and elastic. 

Smooth, elastic dough ready to prove.

Leave it to prove for around an hour until the dough has tripled in size. 

After proving, tripled in size. 

Knock the air out of the dough and then shape it into a "bloomer shape" and place it on a baking tray. 

Shaped loaf

 Leave it to prove for around an hour, until it's doubled in size. 

Proved loaf.

Sprinkle with water and flour and then cut some slashes in the top. It is now ready to go in the oven. 

Ready to be baked. 

Cook it in the oven, this recipe states you should start at a higher temperature and then lower it for the final 10 minutes. It also says to place a tray full of water in the bottom of the oven so that it produces steam. I'm not sure what this is supposed to do but I didn't notice any difference. Once it's cooked leave it on the rack to cool. 

Cooled and sliced

The outside

The verdict: whilst the loaf tasted nice it wasn't anything special. The loaf required slightly different ingredients, which is fine, but it didn't add anything to the flavour. It was very easy to follow this recipe, I knew exactly what I needed to do and it produced a good loaf. This is a good recipe for us as it doesn't contain any dairy products, which is good for M&M. However, the loaf isn't a very practical shape for us so I would like to try this in a loaf tin. Next week I'll find a new recipe to find.. any others people know of? 

Basic White Loaf - Jo Wheatley P. 163

I've decided to do a little side series working through different recipes for white bread and see which is our favourite. I've already made one from Mary Berry's book, blog here, so I decided that this week I'd try one from Jo Wheatley's Book. I try and make all of our bread now so this gives me plenty of opportunity to try out the differing recipes. 

This recipe makes a loaf using 500g of bread flour, which for me seems like a small loaf but I think that's probably a standard size. It has the usual convential ingredients.. flour, salt, sugar, yeast, butter and water. This recipe has an extra ingredient that I've never seen in bread before (except bread machine mixes).. milk. The recipe states to use whole milk but in this flat we only have semi skimmed so I used that instead. 

Like most recipes it involves mixing all the dry ingredients together in a bowl. 

Dry ingredients mixed together

I then had to add the milk and water together and heat them up. The butter was added to this and melted and then this mixture was added to the dry ingredients. Usually I don't measure out the water and just add as much as I think is needed, however, this recipe had the butter and milk included so I thought I'd better add them. It turn out to be exactly the right amount. The mixture was slightly dry but once it was turned out onto the side and kneaded this made it perfect and I didn't even need any extra flour on the surface during kneading. The dough was rolled into a ball and placed in a lightly oiled bowl for 1 hour.

Dough is rolled into a ball and ready to prove

Once the dough has doubled in size it's knocked back and kneaded for 1 minute. It is then placed in an oiled loaf tin and left to rise for 1 hour before baking. The recipe stated that it should be cooked for 30mins but I did it for 38mins like I usually do. As soon as the bread was cooked I got it out of the tin and left it to cool. 

Loaf out the tin and cooling

 Once cooled I sliced some for my lunch and gave it the taste test. I was impressed at the texture inside the loaf, perfect. 

Sliced bread, great texture inside

Verdict: I really enjoyed this bread and thought it had a lovely taste and texture to it. It tasted lighter than the Mary Berry loaf and is a more useful size. However, I'm aware that the loaf has milk in it and it looks likely that little M&M has a milk allergy/intolerance, therefore I won't be able to make this loaf once she is old enough to eat it. It may be worth investigating in future using alternative cows milk free milk, but that's for another time. 

Farmhouse Loaf

My husband and I have recently started making bread in an attempt to save money. We have a bread machine so this isn't much effort and my husband is very good at setting it up to get a reasonable loaf. However, we've had a few problems with the loaf sinking so we achieve a flat top, in the instructions there is a trouble shooting page and we do need to go through that, but I decided it was time I made some by hand and see how that turns out. 

I looked in a couple of books and decided to go with Mary Berry's recipe from her complete cookbook. It looked like a basic loaf that just contained a few simple ingredients. It was for a 2lb loaf, which I believe is bigger than we normally make, so I'm hoping it'll also go a bit further. 

The recipe starts off with combining the butter and the flour to create breadcrumbs, very easy, and then add the salt and yeast. This is all stirred together and then lukewarm water is added to bring it together as a dough. Knead this on a little floured surface until it is a smooth dough, place in an oiled bowl and leave to rise for an hour or so. For convenience I left mine for 2 hours and it nicely rose to double the size. 

This rose very nicely to fill the bowl

I then turned the bread out onto a floured surface and punched out all the air, kneaded it for a few minutes and then placed in an oiled loaf tin. 

Just put in the tin for it's final rise

I left this to rise for the allocated 30 minutes and then it went in the oven. 

Ready to go in the oven

The bread itself is very easy to make and didn't require very much effort, the hardest part for me was the energy required to knead the dough. I enjoy making bread, it's quite therapeutic!! The recipe uses much more flour than our bread machine, 750g, this seems like a large amount and I need to look up whether this is usual. However, it doesn't use milk powder or sugar like the machine does. 

I cooked the bread for 30mins and it came out slightly brown, I took it out of the tin and tapped the bottom. I think it sounded hollow but when I sliced it I noticed that some areas of the bread weren't quite cooked yet so decided to cook it for a little longer. It certainly rose out of the tin though and produced a large loaf of bread!! 

After 10 more minutes I got the bread out for another look, once opened up it still didn't look fully cooked but I decided to leave it to cool this time. But first I cut myself a slice, fresh homemade bread is delicious!

Inside the loaf

Out of the tin and looking good

My verdict is that this bread is really tasty, if slightly under cooked. Next time I'll leave it in the oven a little longer and turn the heat down as the recipe required a quite high temperature of 230oC. The bread definately has a lovely crust to it, something we don't get in our bread machine, and I think it also tastes much nicer. Something I would definitely consider doing again as it's not much effort and produces such a lovely loaf which rose beautifully.

I would like to add a few additional notes to this blog. My husband really liked the bread and said if we were marking it would get a 8 or 9/10. After a night on the side cooling down the loaf is much better. This morning the bread looks fully cooked through and is very tasty. Lost its crunchy top but really tasty. 

Amelia Buns

For Christmas this year my husband and I decided that we need to start our own traditions ready for our first Christmas with our child next year. Last year my mum made some lovely cinnamon buns, however, hubby doesn't like cinnamon, so I set about thinking of alternatives. In the end I decided to adapt a Chelsea bun recipe and name it after our child. I had to wait until we knew whether she was a girl or boy for this so on Monday the buns officially became Amelia Buns. 

I will put the whole recipe on here this time, as it's an adapted recipe, so there are no copyright issues, however I should say that the recipe originally came from the BBC Good Food website and can be found here. 

The recipe basically asks for a sweet bread dough mix to be made, filling to be added and then baked but here are the details. 

Ingredients:

500g Strong White Bread Flour

7g Fast acting dried yeast

1 Egg

300ml Skimmed Milk

40g Sunflower Spread

Filling:

Whatever takes your fancy we used,

Chocolate Spread

Juice of 1 Orange

Dried Mixed Fruit

1. Place the bread in a large mixing bowl and add the dried yeast to the centre of it. 

2. Warm the milk and the spread until the spread has melted and the milk is lukewarm. We did this in a jug in the microwave but it can be done in a small saucepan too. You need to make sure the milk isn't too warm that it kills the yeast but warm enough. I did it so it was warm to touch from the outside of the jug.

3. Tip the milk mix into the flour mix and stir to combine, add the egg. Once it is fairly well combined turn out onto a well floured surface and knead the dough for around 5 minutes, until it becomes stretchy and smooth. We found that quite a bit of flour was needed to achieve this as the dough was very moist. 

4. Place the dough in a well oiled bowl and leave to rise for 1 hour at room temperature, covered with a tea towel, if like us your cat would investigate it!! The dough should double in size. 

5. Tip the dough onto a well floured surface and roll into a  rectangle shape, it should be around 30cm x 20cm but you don't have to be exact. 

Rectangle dough with chocolate spread, this is TOO much!!

6. This is the fun bit, add what ever fillings you want on the dough. We mixed around 1/3 jar of chocolate spread with orange juice and then spread this on and then sprinkled the dried fruits onto until it was well covered. Be careful not to use too much chocolate spread as first time I made these I used 1 whole jar, when cooked it made them very difficult to eat!! 

7. Roll the dough up, like a swiss roll, as tightly as you can holding everything together. Then slice it into 10 even pieces. 

8. Place these, cut side down, onto a baking tin leaving room between each for further expansion. You should be able to see the nice swirl on every bun here. 

Due to excessive filling these are a bit squashed, leave more room between them if you can!!

9. If you wish to make these ahead then place them in the fridge at this point until you're ready for them. First time we made these the night before and left in the fridge overnight, then get them out to reach room temperature before the next step. Otherwise leave them at room temperature to rise for 30 minutes. 

10. Place the buns in the oven at 190oC for around 25mins, until golden brown. 

11. Allow them to cool slightly and then extract them from the tin and enjoy!!  

Bulging out of the tin, the buns hot out the oven

Removed and ready to enjoy!!

 We really enjoyed these buns and they were popular with our family on New Years Day also. They can be adapted to include anything and I'm sure in future years, if Amelia is anything like her father, ours will get stranger and stranger. For now though, we enjoyed these rather tasty chocolatey and messy buns!!