Cottage loaves

I was quite pleased with the detail on these loaves

My derelict gingerbread cake village has long since vanished into the mouths of the Mudlets but the urge to try and produce something using the mould, that captured all the fine detail of the windows, roofs and chimneys led me to try a completely different approach. The absence of baking beans or spare rice meant that I was still unable to try baking an actual gingerbread village just yet but what I did have in abundance, was the ingredients needed to bake bread and specifically bread buns and so I though it would be fun to try and make some cottage shaped bread buns – some cottage loaves if you like.

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Hot Crossed Buns.

Hot Crossed Buns fresh from my oven.

In my humble opinion, Easter Sunday without Hot Crossed Buns is a lot like Christmas dinner without parsnips and Brussel sprouts, so faced with the realisation that I had forgotten to pick some up whilst we were out yesterday and so this was indeed the very scenario that we were facing, I decided to see if I had the ingredients in to try and bake some myself.

Pork and chorizo stew with homemade bread

Light and airy: who needs a hot oven?

Valentines Day morning and Mud had bought me 3 DVDs and a new recipe book. The book was “One Pot Wonders, by Lindsey Bareham” and it was filled with tasty soups, stews, curries and even the occasional dessert.

Today I decided to try another of the recipes, having already tried out a very tasty salmon and tomato curry earlier in the week.

Back to baking

Light and fluffy

One of the disadvantages of having to cook on a gas barbeque during the summer months is that baking nice treats for the family becomes a bit of an issue. Don’t get me wrong, I can and have baked buns, bread, cakes, puddings and even Yorkshire puddings on the gas barbeque. No, the issue is that baking on a heat source which isn’t sealed and is, therefore, unregulated to a large degree, requires a whole new set of skills and takes longer, using a significant amount of gas.

Shifting, lifting and sifting

With the sun shining and temperatures reaching a heady 8 degrees, yesterday had been a perfect day for gardening and there is nothing more frustrating to a gardener, in my opinion, than having a perfect day and either not having the time to spend on jobs that need doing, or having  nothing that actually needs doing at that time.

To views of the same broad bean seedling

Luckily for me I have two gardens to manage and although my own requires little doing to it at the moment, the same could not be said of the school patch and so, I gleefully grabbed my trowel and favourite gardening gloves and headed round to the school for some much needed garden therapy.

Baking up an appetite ….

There is something really calming about baking and I find that this is especially true of bread making, not the mechanised version, you understand, but the good old fashioned, arm achingly, satisfying hand made version.

Several years ago, when she found out that I made bread by hand, my well meaning but misguided mother-in-law bought me a lovely bread making machine, thinking that I would appreciate the labour saving properties it had to offer. Unfortunately, I found that, as well as making bread, it created a whole new raft of jobs for me, like cleaning it and the various measuring utensils it seemed to require me to use or lifting half the cupboard contents in and out each time I needed to get it out or put it away.