Nigella's Buttermilk Birthday Cake - A Sunrise

I've seen quite a few brightly coloured cakes around recently, on the Pink Whisk and then BBC Good Food published their recipe for a Rainbow Cake too. Dan Lepard has been in on the act with his Rainbow Cupcakes too. I decided that I didn't want to go the whole hog and do a six or seven layered cake and decided instead to stick to three layers. I decided to go for red, orange and yellow - a sunrise. I know this isn't the best set of photos ever but I really had to mess around with the white balance to even get this far!

I wanted a reliable cake recipe and I've made Nigella's buttermilk birthday cake recipe quite a few times (the original recipe has three eggs and I can see from the scribbles in my book that I've scaled it to two and four egg versions) and it's a good recipe for adapting to different tin sizes.

Batter divided with food colouring added

I made the recipe just as stated (there's a copy from the Guardian as a PDF here, which I assume is reproduced with permission so I will link to it) and then divided the mixture into three (I handily remembered to weigh my mixing bowl before adding the ingredients so it was easy to divide the mixture exactly). I added the food colouring and mixed well before dividing between tins and baking for around 20-25 minutes (although I can't remember exactly how long). Although I have far too many 8"(20cm) round tins, I have two sets of two which are the same within the set but annoyingly don't match each other. So I baked two whilst one set of batter waited and then baked the final cake.

The cakes were quite thin, but this was perfect because three full thickness cakes wouldn't have given a very good cake: buttercream ratio. 

After letting them cool I made a white chocolate buttercream, sandwiched the cakes together with some of it and then spread the rest over the top and sides of the cake so as to hide the interior colour. A scattering of pearlescent hundreds and thousands (very pretty, stocked by Waitrose) finished the cake in style.

Pearlescent hundreds and thousands

All round very successful - it was very well received at work and this is a great cake mixture to work with. I was pleased with how it turned out but next time will be braver with the food colouring because my colours were a little on the subtle side.

I'm entering this into the Forever Nigella challenge, founded by Maison Cupcake. The theme this month is 'Colourful' and is being hosted by Elizabeth of A Girl in her Kitchen. I think this fulfils the brief!

Christmas Chai Inspired Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream

One of the best things about festive baking is using all of the warming spices that just seem to fit in so beautifully at this time of the year. I love using mixed spice, ginger, cinnamon and allspice to create that heady Christmassy aroma but this time I wanted to combine them in a light cupcake recipe with chocolate .

I had seen a recipe for chai cupcakes in the BBC Good Food magazine (October 2011) by Edd Kimber that used chai teabags to give the flavour but as I didn't want to use teabags I decided to adapt the recipe. I think I've not really used chai spices at all, simply my own mix using what I know I enjoy (and what was available in my baking stores!) but I'm going to stick with the name anyway. I think you'd need to use cardamom and perhaps a pinch of cloves to make them more authentically chai.

If you look really hard you can just about make out my Christmas tree cupcake cases....

Chai Inspired Spiced Cupcakes with Chocolate Buttercream
Ingredients
225g butter
225g light muscovado sugar
4 eggs
225g self raising flour
110g buttermilk
1 1/2tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice

Chocolate Buttercream ***makes tonnes, far more than you need - see below***
200g butter
200g icing sugar
150g milk chocolate
50g dark chocolate
1/2tsp vanilla extract

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Line at least 18 muffin holes with paper cases - see comment below.

- Melt the chocolate (either in the microwave or over a bowl of hot water) and set aside to cool to room temperature.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Add the eggs, flour and spices and beat until well combined.

- Add the buttermilk and beat again until the mixture is uniform.

- Divide between the cases. Bake for 20-25 minutes until well risen and golden.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack. 

- Cream the butter until very soft and fluffy. Add the (cooled) chocolate and half of the icing sugar and keep creaming. Add the remaining icing sugar and vanilla extract and continue to beat until well combined and fluffy. Add a little milk or (boiled) water if necessary to make the frosting softer.

- Pipe or spread onto your cupcakes. Decorate as desired.

Notes:

- There was too much mixture for 18 cases (I was using cupcake rather than muffin size cases - i.e. bigger than fairy cases but smaller than muffin cases - if you used muffin cases I guess it would have been ok). I ended up using three silicon cases too to take the excess. Which worked fine.

- There was far, far too much buttercream. If I'd been piping it there probably wouldn't have been quite such an excess - making swirls always takes more buttercream than you think - but if you're just spreading them like in my photos I think half the amount of buttercream would be ample.

Rudolph makes a festive appearance...

These were lovely - the spicing was quite delicate and the chocolate buttercream worked well with the cakes. The original recipe specified soured cream but I didn't have that - the buttermilk substitute worked very well in my opinion and gave lovely, soft, moist cakes. A winner, just that the quantities were a little off!

Since this recipe contains both chocolate and cinnamon, I am going to submit it to We Should Cocoa, founded by Choclette of Choc Log Blog (this month's host) and Chele of Chocolate Teapot. The theme for December is, of course, cinnamon. Yum.

As a Christmas-scented recipe I'm also submitting this to Calendar Cakes hosted by Rachel at Dolly Bakes and Laura at Laura Loves Cakes. The theme this month is (unsurprisingly!) Christmas!

Pam's Chocolate Cake

I'm looking for a fudgy chocolate cake recipe that I can fall back on for special occasions. There are already lots and lots of chocolate cake recipes on this blog (see the index at the side - not yet completed for chocolate but getting there), but thankfully, this doesn't stop me wanting to try new ones! There are just so many delicious looking recipes out there for me to try and this is just one of them.

The recipe is published in Pam Corbin's book 'Cakes'. This is one of the River Cottage series of cookery handbooks, and is full of seriously enticing recipes. It has also got some lovely tips in the getting started chapter on ingredients and then a chapter on filling, topping and decorating too, and is generally a good book to read. Well, if you like reading about cake as much as I do that is.

This cake is entitled simply 'Chocolate Cake' but the delicious looking photo makes the cake rather more enticing that the title would have you believe. I made a couple of small changes and a couple of minor errors in the method too, so this is an adapted version of the cake in the book. I decided to make a half recipe as suggested in the variations at the end of the recipe and bake in the suggested 7"/18cm deep tin (this is another lovely feature of the book - there are often ways you can change the recipe slightly to give a recipe another flavour combo, or serve it in a different way - can you tell I'm a fan?!)

Chocolate Cake (my ingredients)
Ingredients
25g cocoa powder
150g plain flour
1/2tsp baking powder
1/2tsp bicarbonate of soda
90g butter (mine was salted)
50g light brown sugar
50g caster sugar
2 eggs
75g half fat creme fraiche
few tbsp milk (probably about 3)

The original recipe calls for a proportion of ground almonds in the cake, along with either buttermilk or a mixture of milk and yogurt instead of the half fat creme fraiche - guess what I had in the fridge! I made a slight mistake with the method too. I started by creaming the butter and sugar, all well and good, and then added the other ingredients as instructed. When I was pretty much finished I looked at the batter, which was a lovely golden colour and remembered I was supposed to be making chocolate cake. Hmmm! The cocoa powder is mixed with boiling water to a paste and then set aside to cool. Guess who forgot to add it until the last minute? It was supposed to go in after the butter and sugar. Ooops, but no harm done. My cake, in an 18cm tin (I used my new pushpan) was baked in around 40-45 minutes.

I sort of wish I hadn't added the milk, as it curdled the mixture slightly, with being so cold from the fridge and being added at the last minute. Thankfully this didn't seem to matter when it came to eating the cake.

There is a suggested chocolate fudge icing for the cake, but as I ran out of time to make this, I decided to go the simple route and simply split and fill my cake with black cherry jam. As a slight aside, I'm glad it's not just me that has problems with fruity jams with bits in them. Many recipes tell you to allow the jam to cool for a period of time before jarring, to allow the fruit to remain evenly distributed through the whole jar. The makers of Waitrose's Black Cherry conserve hadn't heard this trick and pretty much all of the cherry pieces were in the top third, used for these jammy muffins. So it was effectively cherry jelly that I spread in the middle of my cake. No less delicious for that though!

It was a lovely, soft moist cake. Nice and chocolate-y but not overwhelmingly so. I wonder if adding melted chocolate to the recipe would improve the depth of chocolate flavour. I think I would describe this as an excellent afternoon tea chocolate cake - not too rich and not particularly fudgy or gooey but a good light, moist cake. It was lovely with jam, but would be equally delicious with a more decadent gooey icing.

Jam Buttermilk Muffins

Brief note to self - don't bother making these again, there are better ways of using up a tub of buttermilk. I seem to be having a run of making things that just aren't quite to my taste at the moment. Hope I snap out of it soon, very frustrating!

The recipe came from 'Muffins - Fast and Fantastic'. It's the basic buttermilk muffin recipe with a tsp of morello cherry jam added before baking. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the recipe, it just isn't to my taste. Not quite sweet enough I think, and when the muffins were baked there was a slightly odd (and offputting) appearance to the tops of them.

Eaten up happily at work, which goes to show that everyone's tastes differ.

Lemon Buttermilk Cake

There seems to be an abundance of beautiful, perky fresh lemons at the moment, just bursting with zingy flavour and juice and asking to be made into something delicious. I couldn't resist picking some up and then wondered how to make the most of their fresh flavour.

Inspired by a tub of buttermilk in the fridge I decided to visit my bookshelf and pull out one of my purchased-long-ago much-neglected books as I recalled seeing a recipe for a buttermilk cake in it. The book in question is Bill Granger's 'bill's food' and is such a beautiful book. The layout is clean and simple and the photography is gorgeous, making you want to eat all of the dishes in the book, even the ones containing ingredients you detest! I think the only other recipe I've made from the book is the buttermilk pancakes (buttermilk obviously being a theme here!) many years ago, for breakfast once. I seem to remember they went down well!

The picture for this particular recipe is lovely - a gorgeous wedge of pale cake with raspberry syrup running over it, served with extra raspberries and a blob of whipped cream - divine!

Because I wanted to use lemons rather than the specified vanilla and raspberry combo, I have adapted the recipe slightly and give it here:

Lemon Buttermilk Cake
Ingredients
125g butter, softened
250g caster sugar
2 eggs
250g buttermilk
250g plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
grated zest 2 large, juicy lemons

Method
- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square shallow tin.
- Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. It will seem that the mixture is not changing, but it does after a while.
- Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition.
- Add the buttermilk, continuing to beat slowly. Here my mixture curdled in a most disgusting way, I think probably because my buttermilk was fridge cold.
- Add the lemon zest and stir to distribute it.
- Sift in the flour and baking powder, and fold in. At this point my mixture didn't look too bad again!
- Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and bake for around 50 minutes until risen and golden. I think I may have left mine a few minutes longer.
- Allow to cool for a while in the tin, and then transfer to a wire rack to cool.

When cool ice with a simple lemon glace icing. I used about 250g icing sugar and the juice of one large, juicy lemon to do this. Simply spread over the cake, trying not to allow too much to run off the edges!

This was a gorgeous cake. The crumb was so soft and tender and gently flavoured with lemon, which was accentuated beautifully by the sharp sweet lemon icing. I was very pleased that the curdling that happened when I mixed the cake didn't seem to affect it adversely after baking. It certainly satisfied my lemon craving in the most satisfying way, and my colleagues seemed equally taken with it as a rapid disappearance will testify!

I will definitely bear this cake in mind again when I next have buttermilk to use, and think it would make a beautiful birthday cake if decorated with fondant etc. But on the other hand, the recipe is too good to save for special occasions - it deserves to be enjoyed everyday.

I am sending this Lemon buttermilk cake to Ros at The More Than Occasional Baker. She is co-hosting a new event - 'Alphabakes' with Caroline of Caroline Makes. The idea is that a random letter will be generated each month and we must bake something involving that letter. The first letter to be generated is 'L' hence my submission!

I am also submitting this recipe to Jac's (from Tinned Tomatoes) Bookmarked recipes linky. This month's linky can be found here. This recipe is one of those that has languished in a cookery book that has been on my shelf and at the back of my mind for years and years now!

Spelt honey cake

This is another of the type of cakes I regard as everyday 'snacking' type cakes. The ones that you keep in the cake tin to grab a piece of as you pass by. Not a posh dessert, but something simpler, just to keep you going. But this cake was no less delicious for that.

I would almost call it frugal - it felt that way to me because I was using up lots of bits of ingredients that I had lying around the place, as you will be able to tell from the ingredients list! However, I don't think it was a particularly cheap cake to make - it still contains butter and eggs and the spelt flour isn't exactly a routine ingredient for many people. Frugal in spirit I think (and the pictures are certainly frugal - please excuse them!).

The spelt flour was a new product that I had seen in the supermarket and wanted to try. I have enjoyed cakes and breads made with spelt flour in the past and wondered what the Dove's Farm flour would be like. Although I have only used it for this cake, I'm pleased with it. One of the brands I have bought in the past is full of bits of husk, which pretty much necessitates sieving it, and then picking through the bran to get the husks out and then adding the bran back in so as not to lose the weight of flour, or the nutritional benefits of that part of the flour. It's a pain! But the Dove's Farm flour doesn't seem to have husks in as far as I can tell.

Spelt honey cake
Ingredients
175g butter, softenend
80g caster sugar
90g honey, melted *
100g plain flour
100g wholemeal spelt flour
scant 2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
60g buttermilk (the end of a pot used for a different cake)

* I used a runny honey, but it had crystallised and wouldn't squeeze out of the squeezy nozzle (I'm going to stop buying squeezy honey - I never get it all out before it crystallises), so I chopped the top off the bottle, spooned it into a pan and melted it very gently over a low heat, just to get rid of the crystals.

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square tin. Mine was a shallow rather than deep tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until slightly lighter in colour.

- Add the flours, baking powder, honey (which was warmish), eggs and buttermilk and continue to beat until well combined.

- Spoon into the prepared tin and level. Bake for 40-50 minutes (ish, I can't quite remember!) until well risen and golden and springy to the touch.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

As I said above, I hadn't intended this to be a decorated cake, and was more interested in the flavour that the honey and spelt flour gave the cake. To this end I should really have used a more interestingly flavoured honey! It was  a lovely, moist tasty cake. There was a slightly wholemeal flavour, which was good, and the honey was discernable but subtle. I  think I'd definitely make this again, but would use a better honey to get a more obvious flavour. I think mine was just a fairly generic runny honey.

Nice cake, went down well at work!

Buttermilk loaf - Breakfast Club #17

I love it when unplanned baking works out for the best! As I'm sure regular readers will have gathered by now, I have a very bad habit of buying ingredients with no plans for them. They sit in the fridge, all the while I'm wondering what to make and the expiry date is advancing upon me. Finally I have to either use the item or shamefully dispose of it.

This bread is the result of one such occasion when my conscience got the better of me and a tub of buttermilk was the item in question. I recalled making buttermilk baps ages ago, to a Dan Lepard recipe published in the Guardian in August 2009 and although I didn't want rolls, I wanted a loaf I thought I'd use the same recipe as I recalled that it seemed to be a good one.

As I followed the recipe as given (albeit with slightly less kneading at slightly longer intervals!) I won't reproduce the recipe here. I was doing other things whilst making this bread and forgot to check on it while it was prooving. When I did remember it looked over-prooved, and was slumping onto the edges of the tin. I had mentally written it off as being a flat topped disaster, but thankfully the dough was very resilient and still had some life left in it, giving a pretty excellent oven spring that lifted the dough off the edges of the tin and into a proud dome. I was really pleased as I seem to time baking my loaves wrongly quite often and rarely get such good oven-spring! This was a truly enormous loaf, and I haven't really managed to capture that with my photos.

It has a beautifully even texture and has a moist and light crumb with a delicious chewy crust - just perfect for a few slices of hot buttered toast or a fabulous lunchtime sandwich. Just looking at the pictures now is making me hungry!

I'm sending this to Krithika for Breakfast Club - the theme this month, hosted by Krithi's Kitchen is Bread! Although this might look like quite a boring bread it tastes anything but boring, and given that half of the UK population will probably be eating cereal (yuk!) for breakfast, surely the other half will be eating toast (yum!) and this loaf is the ideal one for toasting.

Buttermilk Oatcakes - Short and Tweet

Again, I'm only just going to get my post up before the Sunday 6pm deadline!

These are the second item I've made from Dan Lepard's new book, Short and Sweet, for the challenge set up by Evidence Matters on twitter and the Short and Tweet blog. Check it out for more information.

This week there was a choice of recipes, we could make either the cheese and black pepper buttons (p258) or the buttermilk oatcakes (p259). Or both of course! I chose to go with the buttermilk oatcakes, I can't find a recipe for them online, but if you fancy making the cheese and black pepper buttons, you can find the recipe here. This was a good challenge because I'd never have made these otherwise, and would have missed out on a good recipe, very quickly made yet pleasing and impressive.

The method involves grinding oats to oat flour/powder in a blender (I love this step, it's so satisfying!) and then mixing the flour with bicarbonate of soda, a little sugar and salt, a little butter and buttermilk or low fat yogurt to mix to a paste. I used low fat yogurt because that's what was in the fridge! These were really quick to pull together, and would be very impressive to serve guests with a cheese board - they need never know that you hardly had to put any effort in at all!

My oatcake dough was really quite soft and sticky, I'll be interested to find out how other people found it. I baked for the specified 25-30 minutes until they were starting to go slightly brown round the edges. The finished oatcakes were still quite soft in the middle, rather like a soda bread type texture rather than the crisp oatcakes you can buy from the shops. Not unpleasant at all, just not quite what I was expecting, although given the combination of yogurt and bicarb, plus the softness of the uncooked dough, I'm not sure why I was expecting them to be crisp!

They are actually quite sweet on their own, which surprised me, because for the half batch of dough I made, I only added 10g of sugar (recommended amount 15-23g). I'm quite pleased with them, because although they will go well with cheese and chutney, they will also be tasty on their own, and I do rather love the taste of oats. I think if you're a fan of porridge you'll like these, because the flavour is the same, but don't be put off if you don't like porridge - these are obviously biscuit texture, not soft and sloppy!!! I made 19 small oatcakes from half a batch.

I hope I manage to make next week's top teacakes, but I may well run out of time!

Pear and ginger buttermilk muffins

These came about because I had a surfeit of various ingredients that I wanted to get rid of make into something delicious. First on the agenda - half a carton of buttermilk. Next up, a half used tub of half fat creme fraiche. Thirdly, some rather ripe pears that I am singularly failing to eat in raw-fruit-good-for-you form. Finally, crystallised stem ginger. I suppose the last one didn't really need using up as such, but with it being autumn now, spice seems right and the pear/ginger combo appealed.

I based my muffins on a buttermilk muffin recipe in a little book I have had for years, Susan Reimer's 'Muffins - fast and fantastic'. But I've adapted the recipe so much I very much doubt the author would recognise it.

Pear and ginger buttermilk muffins
Ingredients
300g plain flour
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
90g white caster sugar
2 tsp ground ginger
1 egg
130ml buttermilk
90g half fat creme fraiche
80ml water
85g unsalted butter, melted
90g crystallised stem ginger, chopped

2 small ripe pears (I used conference, and they weighed 180g before peeling) peeled, cored and chopped

demerara sugar for sprinkling

Method
- Preheat the oven to 200C/Gas 6. Line a 12 hole muffin tin with papers.
- Sift together the flour, salt and bicarbonate of soda. Stir in the ground ginger and sugar.
- Mix together the wet ingredients, beating the egg into them.
- Melt the butter.
- Pour the wet ingredients into the dry and mix to almost combine.
- Add the chopped pear and ginger and continue until just mixed.

- Divide between the cases, scatter with demerara sugar and bake for 25 minutes until well risen and golden brown.

These were lovely - full of juicy chunks of ripe pear and little nubbles of crystallised stem ginger. Yum! I have to admit that they weren't quite gingery enough for me, in spite of having used 2tsp ground ginger in them. Perhaps a tbsp would have been better. They were nice and gingery when you encountered one of the (frequent) chunks of stem ginger though - yum! The pear is very subtle - I wonder if using tinned pear would up the pear flavour a little as it was more of a texture (a good one though!) in these muffins.

Tasty and warming for a cold autumn day.

Bread - less successful

Maize bread

One of the points of keeping this blog is to record the things I make and bake - wonderful, and not so wonderful. Periodically I have a complete fail and occasionally just can't bring myself to blog about it, but mostly you get the good, the bad and the indifferent (in my opinion - you might try these and love them). Blogging the indifferent reminds me that I've made it, why I wasn't that keen and reminds me not to bother trying again! Not everything can be fantastic and, in my opinion, the two breads that follow fall in the indifferent, not really worth trying again category.

Both are from Dan Lepard's book The Handmade Loaf. I feel bad saying that I didn't like these, but it's true. There are lots of recipes in there and it's down to personal taste that I don't like these rather than bad recipes so don't let this put you off the book.

Lemon Barley Loaf

Up first: Lemon Barley Cob. This is a hybrid sourdough/yeasted loaf and for some reason the flavour combination just didn't do it for me. I don't know whether I let the bread overproof (I seem to remember that I did) but the texture was quite odd too - sort of crumbly, so I'm not quite sure where/if I went wrong here. In any event I wasn't all that keen on the lemon. Dan says this is a savoury bread, and I would totally agree that it wasn't sweet at all, but I couldn't find a good partner for it, so I'm unlikely to make it again with lemon. I might try the base recipe with the barley flour and sourdough/yeast hybrid again at some point, but I might not.

Lemon Barley loaf

Secondly: Maize Bread. This is a straight yeasted dough using white bread flour and maize flour plus buttermilk as part of the wet ingredients, and has cooked polenta broken up into it. The recipe worked fine, I didn't allow it to overproof and it was straightforward to make. My antipathy towards this one is based mostly on texture - again it seems slightly crumbly to me, which I'm putting down to lack of gluten in the maize flour (which is 30% of the flour in the recipe) and my taste buds can't really detect any specific flavour in there, it seems insipid which I wasn't expecting. I wonder if I forgot the salt? Anyway, I probably won't make this one again. The day I made it, J dropped in on her way home from holiday. I was planning to give her half of this so she probably feels glad that it wasn't made in time!!! I'm eating it, I'm just not over the moon about it.

Maize bread

So there you go, two that I just didn't enjoy that much. Live and learn!

Buttermilk Oaten Bread

Is it a house brick, or maybe solid porridge? Was it all just a big mistake, or is it actually a loaf of bread? Well, it's defnitely bread, but it also comes under the heading of a big mistake too. Let me elaborate.... the recipe/inspiration for this bread comes from The National Trust Teatime Baking Book, yes, that one again (apparently my new favourite book). However, I had a bit of a mix-up with this one and have 'adapted' (i.e. made a hash of) it so much that I feel I can post the recipe as my own!

This bread is a non-yeasted soda-type bread, with the slightly unusual step of soaking the oatmeal of the title overnight in the buttermilk of the title. I didn't have the required fine oatmeal, but made do with medium oatmeal, and also didn't have buttermilk, instead substituting a mixture of fat-free Greek style yogurt and milk to make the mixture slacker.

Unfortunately the time between mixing the oatmeal and dairy to soak overnight and finishing the bread the following day was sufficient for me to forget that I'd halved the recipe. So I just stuck in the whole amount of flour as specified in the recipe for two loaves, rather than the one I planned on making. Well, I did wonder why the mixture was so dry - no way could I knead a bowl of crumbs! So I added more milk and eventually it came together. So try it if you want, but heed my warning about recipes with two stages separated by a period of sleep. This is why I don't try any of the more adventurous challenges out there in the blog world, I can't manage simple bread recipes, let alone anything actually complicated!!!

Buttermilk Oaten Bread aka Solid Porridge
Ingredients (as I made it)
100g medium oatmeal
130g fat free greek yogurt
80ml semi-skimmed (2% fat) milk
125g plain white flour (soft, not bread)
125g plain wholemeal flour (soft, not bread)
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Method

- Mix the yogurt, milk and oatmeal together. Refrigerate overnight. In the morning, the mixture will be pretty stiff.

- Preheat the oven to Gas 4/180C. Grease and line a baking tray.

- Add the flours, baking powder and salt to the soaked oatmeal, plus extra milk to combine (I didn't measure this, but at a very rough guess 50ml?)

- Knead until smooth.

- Pat out until about 1 1/2 - 2" thick. Place on the baking tray and dust with flour, or sprinkle with oats. To be honest, I mean to sprinkle with oats, but forgot that too. I'd also suggest cutting some slashes in the bread but forgot that. Can you see a theme developing here?

- Bake for 40-50 minutes (I think, the recipe says 35-40 but I definitely left mine longer than that!) until it is golden and sounds hollow when tapped.

- Remove from the oven and allow to cool, or serve warm with butter melting onto it... mmmm, butter!

You can see from the picture that this is a really dense bread. I'm sure that a lot of people really wouldn't like it! I, on the other hand, am quite enjoying it! It has a distinctive (pleasant!!!) oaty taste and because it's so dense it really does remind me of solid porridge. I quite like porridge, so this is no bad thing in my books. And because it's bread you can spread it with butter, it's difficult to spread porridge with butter (and no, I haven't tried that!) I think it would make really good toast, or croutons for a salad. It hasn't really turned out the way I expected, but I quite like the finished result as it is, although I may try repeating the recipe more as it was intended at some point!

EDIT: 15th May

This is the bread made as it was supposed to be - with 125g flour in total rather than 250g. I still felt it needed a little extra milk to bring it together. The texture was pretty much identical to the first time I made it, so I didn't go too far wrong there. Nice bread though - to have made it twice so quickly!