Bread, Bread, and More Bread

Completely unexpectedly, I found myself at a bread-making class this week, thanks to my lovely friend, Lynne, who is quite the expert cake-baker, and one of her friends. I jumped at the chance to join them at the last minute, when another friend was no longer able to make it - and I'm so glad I did, as the class was absolutely excellent.

Run by The Cookery School, which is hidden away down Virginia Street in Glasgow city centre, this was an evening class that taught the basics of making your own bread by hand. No fancy gadgets or bread machines here! We were shown how to mix and knead our dough (thinking of the gluten as the 'scaffolding' which would stop our beautifully risen loaves from collapsing), and advised that kneading is not so much about the pummeling and punching of the dough that I somehow always thought it was, but more about stretching it out (building that scaffolding a bit taller!). We then got to work at our stations, and all produced a wholemeal loaf and four white rolls with various delicious toppings by the end of the night. It was brilliantly done - taught in a fun but informative way, and with expert bakers there to help out as you test out your new skills (we had a lot of questions and moments of minor panic - 'is my dough too dry?; 'is this kneaded enough?'; is my water the right temperature?'!).

The Cookery School offers a variety of different courses and cookery demonstrations, ranging from evening cocktail-making classes (might be the next one to try, I think!), to five-day cookery courses, and even classes for children. There are also specialist courses in knife skills, working with herbs, and the like. Prices vary depending on the course you choose, but the bread making one I attended would usually cost £50 (we got vouchers from one of the daily deal sites - though I'm not sure which one - so these are worth looking out for in case they run a similar deal in the future). I would highly recommend this class and The Cookery School (although they don't appear to do any specifically vegetarian cookery courses, which is perhaps something they could consider for the future).

As a result of my dalliance with bread-making, I decided that I had to practise my new-found skills this weekend, and so made a batch of 6 bread rolls last night. These are so easy to make once you are familiar with the basic techniques, and there's something so satisfying about baking your own bread, not to mention the delicious aromas that waft through your home as it's in the oven!

The finished product!

Simple White Bread Rolls

(makes 6)

Ingredients:

350g strong white flour
1/2 tsp sugar
a 7g sachet quick-acting yeast
two pinches of salt
250g tepid water (don't worry if you have to use a little more or a little less)
extra flour to prep surface and your hands with
1 egg yolk
a little water
toppings of your choice to sprinkle on top - I personally LOVE pumpkin seeds, or you could try some mixed spices, sesame seeds, or sunflower seeds (optional)

Method:

Sift your flour into a mixing bowl. Add sugar and yeast, and mix well. Add the salt and mix again. Add the water, a little at a time, stirring as you go, until the mixture comes away from the sides of the bowl in one ball of dough. It should be a little tacky to the touch without actually sticking to your hands.

Lightly sprinkle some flour onto a clean work surface and put the dough onto it. Lightly flour your hands. Now comes the fun part! To knead your dough, use the very back of your palm to stretch the dough out - first one way, then bring it together in a ball again, then stretch a different side of the dough, then bring it back. Like I say, it is more about stretching every part of the dough to make it really supple than it is about beating and pressing it, which is what I'd always thought you were supposed to do! Knead it this way for approximately 10 minutes, or until your dough is lovely and soft and supple. Place it back in the mixing bowl and cover with cling film. Leave in a warm area to prove for about half an hour or until doubled in size.

Proving for the first time

Once it has doubled in size, gently punch (see, I knew there was punching involved somewhere!) the ball so it collapses. Take it out of the bowl and knead for a further 10 minutes. Roll it out into a long sausage shape and divide into 6 even pieces. Form each piece into a little ball, and place on a lightly floured baking tray. Mix your egg yolk with a little water and, using a pastry brush, brush this glaze over each of the balls. Make sure you don't use too much, or the yolk will run onto the baking tray and you will end up with baked egg attached to your rolls - not so appetising. Once you have glazed the rolls, you can add toppings if you wish, or just leave plain. Leave to prove a second time, for about half an hour. Towards the end of that half hour, switch on your oven at 200ºC to pre-heat.

Proving for the second time

Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, or until the rolls sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Leave to cool on a wire rack.

Ta-dah! You have just baked your own rolls! These are delicious fresh out of the oven, or can be kept tightly wrapped in tin foil for a day or two - or frozen, if you want to keep them for longer.

Do you bake your own bread - and if you do, do you have any delicious toppings or flavours you'd recommend I try? Or have you been tempted by this post to try your hand at this for the first time? Let me know how you get on!

Homemade pumpkin seed roll with brie

Brilliant Banana Bread

a.k.a. "When Kitchen Experimentation Goes Right"

Today, I decided to try and bake a banana loaf for the first time ever. I have tried a few different people's banana bread recently - with chocolate chips and without - and every single bite I have taken of every single different type of banana loaf, I have thought to myself 'I must try to make this one day'. So today was that day.

Having heard that banana bread is quite a forgiving type of cake, in that you can't really mess it up by putting in too much or too little of a certain ingredient, I decided to do without a recipe (I didn't see any that I liked 100%) and just have a go myself. And the results were completely delicious! So sweet, and moist, and banana-y, with a crisp sugar topping - everything I wanted my banana bread to be (and everything David wanted it to be too!).

I had always thought that the bananas used for a banana loaf had to be old, with blackened skin, but as you can see from this picture, I only had one old banana - the others were pretty normal bananas that I would usually eat as they are. And the loaf tasted great. So I think that really, while you can use older bananas for this recipe, it's not actually necessary. 

Also, I used a bar of chocolate and chopped it into chunks rather than buying a packet of chocolate chips - it's cheaper and also lets you dictate the size of the chunks (I think randomly-sized chocolate chips are the true sign of a home-baked cake!).

So I'm going to share my recipe with you. The only thing I would maybe do differently next time is add some bicarbonate of soda to make it rise more. I used self-raising flour (one of the things I didn't like about some of the recipes I saw was the amount of different raising agents in them - surely it shouldn't be that difficult?) and it was fine, but if you wanted your loaf to rise a bit more, then it seems that added raising agents might just be necessary.

This is how I did it:

Ingredients:
125g caster sugar (actually I used granulated, but I know you're supposed to use caster sugar in baking, so....)
125g butter, melted (plus extra to grease tin)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 medium egg, beaten
3 medium bananas, roughly mashed
100g milk chocolate (chopped roughly into chunks)
190g self-raising flour
1 tbsp light brown soft sugar

Method:
Pre-heat oven to 170ºC. Grease and line a 10x20cm loaf tin.
Mix the caster sugar, melted butter and vanilla extract together. Add the beaten egg , banana and chocolate chunks and mix well. Sieve in the flour, mixing well as you go.
Pour the mixture into the loaf tin and sprinkle the brown sugar evenly over the top. Bake in the pre-heated oven for one hour, or until a skewer comes out almost clean. Leave to cool, then cool further on a wire rack.

This recipe has gone down so well, we can hardly stop ourselves from going back for "just one more slice". I want to make this loaf every day now, it's that good (and easy!), but something tells me we'd both end up the size of houses if we were to have daily access to banana bread that good! If you're looking for a winner to take into a bake sale at work, or simply to impress your friends when they pop in for a coffee, this one will fit the bill, no doubt about it.

The Best Chocolate Fudge Cake!

Surely, when baking a cake, it's mandatory to lick the bowl clean once you're finished? It's the law, isn't it? I remember this being a great treat when I was a child. My mum always baked us delicious cakes for our birthdays, and always made an effort to be as creative as possible, fashioning us caterpillars, Noah's Arks, dogs, and guitars out of sponge and icing. And when her creation was finished, we would always be invited to take a spoon and scrape the remaining cake mix and icing out of the bowls to be enjoyed there and then. Sometimes, I actually think that the raw cake mix is even better than the cake itself. (But it wouldn't look as impressive to be presented with, and I suppose the candles wouldn't really stay in place so well - could be a bit dangerous.)

I always took these cakes for granted (and I think I once even complained that I hadn't got the cake I wanted - what a brat!) - but now I see how lucky we were to always have a delicious, homemade cake to celebrate our special days. One lesson learned though, was never to bake a cake at the same time as you are decorating the kitchen....let's just say that Dulux and Crown don't make cake flavourings for a very good reason. We learned this the year that my mum baked a caterpillar cake for one of my sisters. To this day, my mum can't bring herself to eat cake that's shaped like a caterpillar (and she has as sweet a tooth as me, so that's saying something!).

So, all these years, and all these cakes.... Yesterday was my mum's birthday, and when one of my sisters said she was going to buy a cake to present to my mum at her birthday meal, I immediately said I'd bake one instead. After all, she who bakes all of our cakes surely deserves a home-baked caked too? Now, I do not consider myself a baker, but I have some recipes that will always turn out a good cake. This chocolate fudge cake is one of those.

I have never tweaked this recipe, other than to use vegetable oil in place of sunflower oil, which works just as well (oh, and I may have slightly increased the amount of cocoa in the icing this time!), so I will just direct to you to the BBC Good Food site, where I got this recipe originally. The only other thing I would say is that ovens can vary, so in my oven, I find 20 minutes is enough (the recipe says 25 - 30), so I would suggest checking it after 20 to see how it's doing. You wouldn't want to burn it! The best way to check is with a metal skewer. Insert it into the centre of the cake - if it comes out clean, the cake is done. If there is still some cake mix stuck to it, pop the cake back in the oven.

This cake has always been a huge hit with whomever I've baked it for - my boyfriend, my family, workmates...and it always, always turns out right. I also have no problem making this without an electric mixer. I use an electric whisk, as per the instructions, and other than that, just a mixing bowl and wooden spoon does the job fine*.

This recipe gives you a really light, moist, delicious cake, that is equally delicious cold or, if you want the full chocolate fudge experience, heated up in the microwave and served with a little cream poured over. Actually, I lied when I said I'd never really tweaked this recipe - I did make it once with chocolate ganache instead of butter icing, for a friend who finds the buttercream too sweet. That works well too, if you prefer the richer taste of ganache. But if you are going to heat it up, I'd recommend sticking with the icing as per the recipe, as it would just be too easy to slightly burn the ganache on reheating.

If you are looking for an easy, delicious cake to wow your friends with, you just can't go wrong with this one. (And yes, I scraped the bowl clean after making this.....it is the law, after all!)

* I should mention that you will also need other basic equipment, like a sieve, wooden spoon, cooling rack, etc.