Saturday, November 28, 2009

My First Loaf




My friends know that I am into cakes and cookies. The bread baker at home is really Moobe. This is my virgin attempt, using a recipe found in a blog called A Year in Bread. All in all, it took 4.5 hours (from the word go to the finished product) but it's well worth it. I could have left it for a little longer on the final proofing as it's not as light as I wished but nonetheless, it's nice. I halved the recipe, and used 5g of dry yeast with a couple spoons of warm water to get the yeast going. I'd use a little less yeast next time. Oh a little less salt will be good too.

I think I will mix in herbs the next time. Here's the ingredients that I used (approximately half of what the original recipe called for):

283g plain flour
14g sugar
5g dry yeast (mixed with 2 tbl sp warm water)
15g butter (melted)
454g milk (room temperature, though it called for warm milk in the recipe)
412g bread flour

for the method, do refer to the original blog post. The writer had step-by-step instructions, right down to the nitty gritty. Very useful indeed!

Monday, November 2, 2009

Eyeballs anyone?

Halloween potluck at Ayako's called for a 'scary but edible' dish. What's scarier than bloody eyeballs?


It's simply red jelly (we've put in cut-up strawberries) wrapped in a snowskin (see recipe from my mooncake) and then streaked with food colouring for effect. The 'pupil' is the snowskin mixed with a bit of cocoa powder. I'll probably make it in other shapes for other occassions haha!