The Bake-off

Although I love to cook, I have long claimed that I cannot bake to save my life. I rarely make successful cakes and had never tried baking bread...until... Last weekend Tim and I decided to have a bit of a baking day and cooked up a storm.

Not as difficult as I had expected, the main problem with me and baking is just a lack of patience. It takes so frigging long; I always want to rush the process and poke at it and look at it while it cooks etc. Not great. I was pretty pleased with the end results though. We used Paul Hollywood's recipes from the BBC website for 'easy white bread' and foccacia. I would definitely recommend both recipes they were clear and easy to follow.

The easy white bread was really easy, and I made it even more so by using my ancient stand mixer and dough hooks. It rose to the challenge gloriously and I'm convinced I wouldn't have been able to stand hand kneading the bread enough I have no upper body strength whatsoever. The bread was very soft and springy and it seemed to stay fresh for about 3 days+ which surprised me.

The focaccia was much trickier because the dough was really wet and difficult to handle. It stuck to everything! It's supposed to be like that though apparently, don't ask me why! and the end result had big air bubbles and was nicely salty and oily. Very nice eaten hot or warm rather than cold.

Observe...!