Busy Bee!

I've been a busy crafting and baking bee, just not been too good at documenting it! This post is a case in point, as I started writing it in April, and it's nearly June!
I had a particularly successful weekend of crafting and baking point of view (back in April), and I actually managed to take some pictures. First up, i'll show you the baking side of things...

CRUMPETS!
So recently I was given a copy of the new Paul Hollywood's Bread, that accompanies his TV series of the same name. Of course I was a very happy recipient :-) I decided this weekend to take a crack at crumpets, having never made them before, and overall am very happy with the results.

Step 1 - Make the batter.

Hubble bubble toil and trouble...

The batter has both yeast and baking powder in so it's really really bubbly, but then it's for making crumpets so it'd have to be bubbly. This is a much wetter dough than any bread, so you have to beat it with a spoon. I kept taking rests as my arms are not so strong as Paul Hollywood's


Step 2 - Cooking.

So I don't have boring round crumpet rings, and had to improvise, which I did with a heart-shaped egg ring, that performed the job admirably. The chick and sheep cookie cutters, while super-cute, did not perform admirably... the batter stuck very firmly, so I was then stuck making crumpets on a one-by-one basis with the silicone heart.

Step 3 - Eating

The crumpets were really delicious, and well worth a try. Next time i'll make sure I have more rings to cook in, as it was a very slow process. 

BREAD!

Recipe from the wonderful book "Brot Genießen" by Oliver Brachat and Tobias Rauschenberger. It's all in German, so it's good for improving my language skills, as well as my baking ones!

So I decided to make a bread I have tried before and loved - the San Francisco sourdough. This bread takes about 7 hours to make, but it's so delicious that it's definitely worth it. Plus it makes two big loaves and freezes really well.

Step 1 - Ingredients

Step 2 - The initial knead

The speckling you can see in the dough is because it's a mixture of 200 g wholemeal spelt flour with 1.5 kg of white bread flour.

Once the dough has been kneaded for about 10 min by hand, you pop it in an oiled bowl, cover it with clingfilm and leave it to rise for 2 1/2 hours.

Step 2 - Proving

One of the key things that I have learnt from this book, is that you don't just leave the bread to prove, at least not all the time. The gluten needs stretching out occasionally, and so every 50 minutes (for this recipe) you take the dough out of the bowl, stretch it out a bit to make a big flat round of dough, and then fold one third over the middle third, and then the other side over the top of that (kind of like a leaflet). This helps to prevent your bread from collapsing later.

Step 3 - Shaping

After the 2 1/2 hours rise comes the shaping.. I decided that I didn't just want an oval, I wanted one of my loaves to be a plait. So I split my dough in two, then split one half again into thirds. These three balls were rolled into long ropes and then plaited together. I tucked the ends under, and hey presto, a plait.

The other half of the dough I decided could stay as an oval. This involves first working the dough into a round (by using your hands on the side of the dough to spin it on the spot on the bench, until it's a nice round shape), then to make it oval. To make an oval you need to flatten your round into a big flat circle, then fold the edges into the middle and pinch them together like a giant cornish pasty. You then flip this so the pasty edge is underneath, and you have your oval.

Step 4 - Second Proving

The bread proves again (covered in a tea towel or cling film), and then it's ready to go in the oven.

 Step 5 - Baking

For most of the bread in this book, you put a tray of water in the oven while preheating, and then for the first ten minutes or so of cooking you have the water in there and the oven temperature high. This helps to make a crisp crust. You then remove the water from the oven, and turn down the temperature for the remainder of the cooking time. Bread comes out of the oven smelling delicious and with that "hollow sound" that you desire.

Yum. 

Pasteis de nata (yum) and dress progress

Last night I decided it was time to try making Pasteis de Nata again (traditional Portuguese custard tarts). Last time they were nice, but I'd used too much pastry and in my old oven the filling didn't cook how I wanted it to.

This time, they were a success!!
I followed the recipe here - except I made a few tweaks of my own.

Here is the recipe as I followed it:-

Ingredients 
3 egg yolks
100 g ground xylitol (instead of caster sugar, I ground the xylitol in my herb chopper to make "caster xylitol")
2 tbsp cornflour
230 ml single cream
170 ml milk
2 tsp vanilla extract
250 g puff pastry (I bought a block of pastry, chopped it in half and rolled one half out and froze the other for later)

Method
Over a medium heat I mixed and stirred the egg yolks, xylitol, cream, milk and vanilla extract. With a little bit of the cold milk I mixed up the cornflour into a smooth paste and then added this to the cooking custard. I mixed the custard until it thickened, then took it off the heat and left it to cool.


For the pastry I rolled out 250g then sprinkled it with cinnamon and icing sugar. I then cut the pastry in two rolled up the pastry pieces into a long thin sausage like snail, and cut 1.5-2 cm pieces of pastry. With each of these, I turned them on their side, so you could see the spiral shape, and then rolled it into a flat circle of around 10 cm diameter. This was then pressed into a greased fairy cake tin and filled with about a dessertspoonful of custard. The tarts were then baked at 200 C (in a fan oven) for 20-25 minutes, and this is what they looked like..

Unlike in my old oven, where they wouldn't brown on top (as the bottom had already burnt) here the pastry is nicely cooked and the filling nicely browned on top. YUM!

Chris approved...
In the lab today, the two Portuguese thoroughly approved, so success all round i'd say :)


I've also been working on the real bridesmaids dress.. the mock-up is still somewhere in the post on its way back from America, so I'm having to remember where I put all of the seamlines last time, but it's coming together..

Hen-day!!!

On Saturday I had my very exciting surprising hen-day, as organised by the lovely Amy.
All I knew when I turned up at Amy's house on Saturday morning was who would be attending, I didn't know where we were going or what we were doing.. and Amy wouldn't tell me :)

I arrived at Amy's at 9 am, we wandered out to the bus-stop and only when we got on the bus (though there aren't that many destinations..) did I find out we were off to the train station. When we arrived there Amy was very sneaky and sent me off while she got our tickets from the machine, so I couldn't see where we were going! I went to fetch some coffees while she did this, and we then sat and waited for the rest of the Oxford contingent to arrive.

At about 10.30 am it was revealed that our destination on the train was London (which they had to tell me really, as we were getting on the train..). I still had no idea what our destination within London was though..

Our first stop once we got to Paddington turned out to be The Cumberland Hotel by Marble Arch, where we were due to meet Zoe, who'd travelled down from the north-west in order to be there! This would be our home for the night, and a very swanky home it was too!

 

This was the bathroom in the hotel room, shiny ne?

Once we'd collected Zoe we hot-footed it across town to Islington, where it turned out we were going for lunch (which was just as well, as we'd been racing round on foot due to a lack of central line and had all worked up an appetite). Our lunch venue was the lovely Candid Arts café, where half of the options on the menu were veggie (always a welcome sight for me).

Here we are, sat around the enormous table that Amy had booked for us.

Once we had ordered, and were waiting for our food, there was some muttering between Amy and Liz and then everyone began pulling gifts from their bags! It turned out that we were to have a Yankee Swap. As the hen I was allowed to choose a gift from the pile to unwrap. The next person around the table (and it follows on like this) can either choose to steal an item that has already been unwrapped, or to unwrap a new item. If someone is stolen from then they get to either steal a different item from someone else (not what was stolen from them) or unwrap a new gift. This can go on for a little while, and in our swap there was a very popular little monkey tea strainer, who moved about a bit. As the hen I was given the option at the end of stealing any gift I liked, and so ended up with a monkey tea strainer of my very own :)

We then ate our lunch, which was quite tasty, and headed on to our next mystery (for me, not anyone else) destination..
As mentioned in Liz's blog our next destination was the MakeLounge, where we were to enjoy an afternoon of crafty goodness making our own bath and body products..

Here's the fabulous spread of food and drink that everyone brought to share while we made our beauty products

Firstly we had introductions to essential oils, leading to a spirited discussion of whether essential oils are of use to the plant or not, I'm on the side of them being extremely useful to the plant as a defence mechanism (against pests and germs) and for attracting pollinators.

Then we began making our massage bars:-

 Heating the mix of beeswax, shea butter, and cocoa butter...

Pouring the melted mixture over the essential oil mixes we'd picked out.

Next we made bath bombs! There were dried petals available for us to use to decorate our bombs, and colouring to make them pretty.

Not sure why Cat is looking so angry and possessive of her bath bomb mix.. maybe we mocked her weighing skills?

The first of my garish blue bath bombs.. as demonstrated by Jennifer, our instructor for the day.

Next we made lip balms (which are really quite nice to use). Here's Claudia stirring away over the hotplate:-

And here are Janina and Anna showing off their finished lipbalms!

Lastly we made body scrub, which also works quite well! It was simple to make, and the only small flaw in it is quite how water repellent you are after using it in the shower! (it's a little oily).

After we had completed our crafty tasks we headed back to the hotel to change and headed out to dinner. I was also presented with another lovely surprise! everyone had contributed towards a recipe book for me, and the entries were beautifully decorated. A few entries are shown below.

Amy had found a really nice South Indian restaurant called Woodlands for dinner, and all the food was vegetarian! as always happens in this sort of situation, I took forever to choose my food. I had puri with my meal, a puffy fried bread that you don't often see, they were delicious.. Several of us had paneer with date chutney as a starter which was excellent! and quite filling.. my main course was vegetable kofta in a tomato-based sauce, which was delicious but a little too spicy for my palate, so by the end of my meal I couldn't taste the flavours anymore!

After the meal several of us went for drinks, and then out clubbing, we ended up in one place which was largely populated with superheroes! but sadly I didn't get any pictures of this part of the hen-day so you'll just have to imagine a whole dance-floor of superheroes boogieing away...

Here's a picture of all of my homemade goodies, once i'd extracted the bath bombs from their heart-shaped container - I recommend you try making your own, it's good fun and would make a great present!

Many thanks to everyone who contributed toward, came along to and organised such a lovely day!