Bread rolls and playing with your food

Inspired (and aided!) by Celia, Brydie and Joanna, these are my bread rolls made with my new bread presses a spiral, a kaiser/vienna and a rosette/rosetta (I bought two of them from Bakery Bits, here you need to scroll down) but I need to play around some more with the recipe that I'm using. When I press the rolls they flatten a lot, and my dough doesn't seem to have much oven spring, resulting in rather flat rolls. It's just a straight yeasted dough, a little lower in hydration than my usual, and with a little olive oil added.

I suspect that this is partly to do with the fact that as they proove they seem to develop a bit of a skin, I ought to try prooving them in a moister environment to prevent this and try and get them to spring a bit more. I also think that the white rolls weren't aided by a further experiment in using some quite elderly '00' pasta flour I had hanging around. I don't think it was designed for bread really - not only did they not spring very well, they staled quite quickly too. I ought to try either Joanna's recipe or Celia's sourdough rather than just freestyling.

I also found that if I pressed them immediately before baking I got the patterns you see above

whereas if I pressed them and allowed them to proove a little further, the pattern all but disappeared on baking seen here at the front - I pressed the back one just before baking. All good fun but I do need some more practice before I can emulate the three bakers I linked to at the beginning of this post. If you want stunning pictures, hop through to their blogs!

This one is my best one!

Typically though, the bread rolls I made the morning I was expecting the presses to arrive in the post (and they didn't arrive until after the bread needed baking.... one of those days) sprang much better and were reasonably tasty if nothing special. Just goes to show though, that even if you don't have fancy presses, you can still make pretty bread rolls. I just used my small dough scraper, but any reasonably firm piece of plastic would probably do.

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!

We should cocoa - chocolate rose rice pudding

Well, it's the end of the month, and this month Choclette set us the challenge of using rose with chocolate. I have seen lots of  lovely looking cakes popping up all over the place, but lots of people saying they weren't sure what to make. I have to admit that I am definitely in the 'don't know how to pair rose and chocolate' camp on this one! Definitely a challenge.

I was going to make a dark chocolate rose cake, and in fact I did indeed do this, but unfortunately it was such a disaster that I can't bring myself to even show you a photo of my failure. Shall we just say that me, yogurt and cakes don't always mix. Sometimes they turn out really well, and occasionally they are an utter disaster. So it was back to the drawing board on this challenge.

I decided that instead of doing a cake, I would do a quick mid-week dessert. This definitely still needs some work on it, but has the potential to be repeated, so I am going to enter it for the challenge.

I used to love rice pudding as a child, and especially when it was thick and gungy, baked for ages in the oven and coming out with a golden nutmeggy skin. Yum. However, not right for this challenge, and not achievable for dinner on a week night when you're home late from work in need of comfort food. I decided to take the quick route. Flaked rice is something I've often seen in the supermarkets but have never bought or cooked with, but since it promised to be ready after only 12 minutes cooking it seemed the perfect contender!

The amount I made was rather less than I expected. From memory, 2oz of rice swelled magically in the milk to give enough rice pudding for 4 people, so I used 1/2 oz, or 12g for my rice dessert. There really wasn't very much of it!

Chocolate rose rice pudding
Ingredients
12g flaked rice
150ml rice milk
1/2 tsp rosewater
1 tsp caster sugar
chocolate to taste

Method

Place rice, milk, sugar and rosewater in a small pan. Bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer and continue to cook, stirring for around 12-15 minutes until the rice is thick and gelatinous and the milk has been absorbed. Stir in the chocolate to turn your pudding a lovely chocolate shade!

Eat!

Pretty simple, and pretty tasty. The pudding was quite soft when warm but quickly became very thick when it cooled, so I think I should have added more liquid. I have to say that I couldn't really taste the rose, but I could definitely smell it whilst this was cooking. Perhaps my taste buds don't work?!! This reminded me of the chocolate semolina pudding I used to have as a child, which always set solid, yum! It made a nice change from making something cake related too!

And the winners are...

Congratulations to Choclette and I'll be Sally for now, you are the winners of a copy of the Great British Bake Off second series cook book. Apologies to all those who didn't win!

Choclette, I've emailed you details, I'll be Sally for now, please get in touch with me at cakecrumbsandcooking@googlemail.com - I tried your email but it failed to deliver.

In my kitchen - August 2011

In my kitchen (inspired by Celia).... some goodies from Bakery Bits - pure lemon oil, I can't wait to use this. It smells sweeter than lemons, lemony but without the acidic backnote of either zest or juice. I'm sure this will enhance anything lemon I make. And because I'm a chocoholic, chocolate essence. I just couldn't resist. Smells pretty good, but not as bitter as my preferred dark chocolate. I shall just have to wait and see. They have lots more too, here.

Obscure Objects of Desire. Thank you Joanna. My shiny new danish dough whisk, already used for mixing up bread doughs. It seems like the perfect object to mix the sticky sourdough starter into the water before proceeding with the rest of the flour. And easy to clean too, only one tiny bit where dough gets a little stuck. Fab, looking forward to using it more....

To make more bread like this. Once I'd succeeded with the rye and barley sourdough from Dan Lepard, I decided to make it with wholemeal flour rather than rye and barley. So not totally wholemeal (there is white flour in the recipe too, and my starter is white flour based) but I think that actually I prefer the flavour of this one to the rye and barley incarnation.

And a couple of pictures for Celia - I haven't opened either of these yet, wondering how to showcase them to best effect. I bought the mezzi rigatoni because they reminded me of a shape Nigella had used in a recipe containing squid rings. I don't like squid though....

And finally, I adore cut flowers and gladioli in particular, so when I saw these deep, velvety red gladioli I just couldn't resist!

What's in your kitchen this August? Head over to Celia's blog to see her round up of what's in everyone elses kitchens now!