A baking day

With the weather having turned decidedly autumnal I decided to spend yesterday in the (comparative) warmth of the kitchen.

I wanted to make bread. I wasn’t feeling too adventurous. I wanted white bread and I wanted it to work. So I turned to Dan Lepard, to the first recipe in Short and Sweet: Easy White Bread. It really is easy. Mix your ingredients, leave for 10 minutes, knead a little, leave for 10 minutes, knead a bit more, leave for 10 minutes, knead again, then leave for 45 minutes. Knock back the dough, shape it into a loaf, put it on a baking tray, leave it to prove for another 45 minutes. Stick it in the oven for 40 minutes. Voila! Bread! It really does work. By yesterday tea time I had something that looked, felt and tasted like pretty good white bread. Definitely not up to the standard of all the wonderful bakeries we’re lucky enough to have on our doorstep, but significantly better than the stuff you get in the supermarket.

One of the things I love about the Dan Lepard bread baking method (obviously apart from the fact that it is easy and results in really tasty bread), is that it gives you lots of time to potter about in the kitchen doing other things. So, during the in between kneading times I made an apple cake. I don’t have any apple trees, but my neighbours do, and I am making good use of the windfalls that land on my side of the fence. This particular apple cake was a Rye Apple Cake, from (where else?) Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet. We had a house full of visitors yesterday afternoon, all looking for somewhere to escape the rain and I was very happy to be able to offer them a cup of tea and a slice of tasty cake. Although this did mean that by the end of the afternoon this was all that was left:

Which, of course, I promptly ate after taking the photograph.

Now, whilst entertaining my visitors (OK, so I mainly left Bobby and James to do the entertaining – visitors only really come to see them, right?) I made rough puff pastry. And the recipe? Light Spelt Rough Puff from Dan Lepard’s Short and Sweet, of course! (I admit – I might have a slightly unhealthy obsession with Mr Lepard and his lovely book. Although only unhealthy in that it makes me want to bake a lot.) Ed bought some beef fillet on Saturday with the aim of making a beef wellington. And we did. And it tasted good. Our wellington did have a rather soggy bottom though. Mary Berry would not have been impressed. I think turning on the radiator in the kitchen, although good for getting the bread to rise, did not have a beneficial effect on the pastry. Also, being a little bit tipsy when I rolled it was, in hindsight, not such a good idea. Sadly I have no pictures of our wellington (although it did look rather like the one in the recipe we followed here, although somewhat less rare in the middle). Happily I do have a significant amount of leftover rough puff, with which to make something tasty for tea tonight.