Bread Therapy

Bread therapy works wonders after a tough week! Tomorrow's lunch is going to be homemade multigrain sarnies ;)

Cooking with Japanese Students

I was invited by a teacher friend to join her high school students for a cooking session, and what they made was okonomiyaki, a type of savoury pancake filled with lots of goodies, such as cabbage, pork/seafood, cheese, rice cake and noodles. It was very tasty. And for dessert, I taught the students how to make Honey and Orange Flapjacks, and these were served top with vanilla ice-cream, delish!

The next day, I joined my junior high school's SEN class, and had a pizza party using homemade pizza dough and veggies picked from the school farm! My students got very creative. I came away with a bag of freshly picked school-grown veggies and basil, because my students picked way too much!

Simple Pleasures

I did some baking with a friend and made Masala Chai Pound Cake and Olive Bread.
Afterwards, we laid out a tarp in a nearby park and had a picnic.

At work for lunch, I had a homemade sandwich of pesto, cheddar, and salad between two slices of olive bread. Absolutely delicious. It's very satisfying emotionally (and of course physically) to eat something that I put time and effort into making with my two hands. I feel a sense of achievement... I made this, it tastes great. During this lunch hour, both my belly and mind were happy and satisfied ;)

Purpley-Pink Bread

[Fruit and Nut Bread]

I did a Baking Spree and made enough bread and cake to last me for a month (if eaten sparingly...). Other than the ones mentioned below, I also made pita bread, maple, yogurt and lemon pound cake, and black sugar, date and rum cake.

Sitting down this morning, with a cup of tea and two slices of the fruit and nut bread toasted and spread with jam was a sweet moment. My first taste of this gave me a pang of nostalgia, they taste so similar to the teacakes that my Dad buys back at home.

[Purple Sweet Potato Sandwich Bread]

Nope, no artificial food colourings were added during the entire process. I'd bought a packet of purple sweet potato flakes aka. dehydrated potato on my Kagoshima trip, and thought I'd try and use them in my bread making. And lo and behold, I made a purpley-pink bread. The novelty of it when I sliced into the loaf made me giggle away like a ninny.

Except for the colour, it tastes like how a sandwich bread should, light, soft crust, and just the right crumb for sandwiches. For lunch today, I made a sandwich of avocado, sundried tomatoes, cheese and a smear of mayo sandwiched between two slices of this pink bread which I accompanied with homemade vegetable soup... bliss.

[Dark Beer and Rosemary Ciabatta]

I got to work on the holes on this one, I would like larger holes in my ciabatta, and it needs to be holeyer. I love the flavours in this though, and the sturdier structure makes it really easy to slice. Toasted cheese sandwiches just leveled up ;)

MY Pizza

Last week, the ALTs and I had a Christmas potluck meal before we went our separate ways for the winter hols. My contribution was homemade pizza topped with cheese, mochi, onions, green peppers, Japanese salami and homemade tomato sauce. It was so good.

Corn Cheese Blueberry Cheese

I made corn & cheese and blueberry & cream cheese buns with a high school cooking club, of which a friend of mine is supervisor. The aesthetic appearance isn't quite up to scratch, but don't be taken in by how they look, they taste really good.

Bread n' Loaf

I was invited by a jam-making colleague to make bread and jam in the school kitchen. It was his first time making bread, and the first bread recipe - country bread - that he decided to tackle wasn't the clearest bit of instructive text ever, but saying that, his first bread turned out surprisingly well, and he was right chuffed ;)

As well as the country bread, I also made a pair of date and banana loaves that received positive responses from colleagues ;)

Pizza and Tiramisu

Before catching the night train to Niigata, I went to ABC Cooking Studios in Shibuya to make next day's brekky!

[Pizza bread topped with tomato, ham, aubergines, cheese, and finished with parsley.]

Rustic shaping, but the teacher was a young thing who was managing two groups simultaneously and was pushed for time, and well, gave instructions in such an unclear, patchy way that even my gentle Japanese friend was becoming frustrated, so I did some things my way.

Added to my repertoire are pizza bread, and tiramisu buns that just give me this finger-twitching urge to give 'em faces (using chocolate... oooh...)

[Tiramisu buns filled with custard cream and coffee cream, and a coffee cookie top. They don't look much, but they are surprising yummy. Next time I make these, I will definitely give them faces, chocolate-drawn faces. ]

Ham And Mushroom Pizza

I didn't quite manage to do a hike, had to cancel because I felt that I was coming down with something. You know that feeling when you have a slight itchiness in the throat which eventually leads to a cold or cough? So I thought I'd better not exert myself too much, and instead took it easy.

I didn't quite manage to stick to congee and salads, because I went to a pizza party! Everything except the cheese was homemade. Oh my gosh, crispy base, flavoursome sauce, loadsa cheese, and the ultimate topping of ham and button mushrooms, it was better than Pizza Hut, better than Dominoes, it was great, and I was literally in Pizza Heaven.

Date Crumb Bake

Thought I'd take a break from bread, so I made a Date Crumb Bake. It was seriously yummy, just right with a cuppa tea.


Ingredients (makes roughly 16 squares):
100g butter
250g dried ready-to-eat dates, pitted and chopped
250g self-raising flour
100g brown sugar
2 tbsp oats
1/2 tsp cinnamon powder
1 egg, beaten

Method:
Preheat the oven to 180°C/fan160°C/gas 4. Grease a baking tin (about 17.5 x 27 x 4cm deep, wider if you want thinner slices of bake).

Pour 6 tablespoons boiling water over the dates. Leave for 5 minutes to soften, then whizz in a food processor to a rough paste.

Place the flour and sugar into a large bowl, add the butter, and rub in until just crumb-like. Tip half the mixture into another bowl and stir in the oats. Rub the remaining mixture until the crumbs are very fine, then stir in the cinnamon and egg to get a moist dough. Press this evenly into the base of the tin.

Place in the oven for 10-15 minutes until the base is no longer moist on top. Take out of the oven.

Spread the date mixture over the base, then sprinkle over the oaty crumb mixture. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until the topping is golden. Cool in the tin and cut into small squares to serve.


Adapted from delicious. magazine @channel4

Mini Red Bean Buns; 迷你紅豆包; ミニあんパン

The Science:
Instead of the usual "incorporate-all-at-once" method, I tried a different technique called 'tangzhong starter' 湯種製作 or water roux. Water and bread flour are combined and heated, before cooling and incorporating with the other dough ingredients. In the presence of water and heat, the flour grains absorb the liquid which causes them to burst, resulting in the release of starch. The intermolecular bonds of starch (C6H10O5)n are broken down which allows the hydrogen bonding sites to engage with more water. This is called 'starch gelatinization', and occurs in, for example, the making of custard and roux sauces e.g. the cheese sauce in lasagne. Basically it's a thickening agent that traps moisture.

This process causes bread to become softer and more elastic, keeps bread moist for longer, and so prolongs freshness. Though I suppose 'prolonging freshness', especially when concerning bread, is pretty alien to the people of HK. When my Dad was there, he bought egg tarts from a bakery in the evening. This is quite unusual by HK-standards, people commented by saying,"邊好食ga?!" Translation: "How can you eat that?!" Meaning that egg tarts are usually baked in the morning, so they aren't fresh to eat later in the day. They weren't warm, but they still tasted good. Funny thing, culture.

[Mini Red Bean Buns, perhaps using black sesame seeds would have looked nicer.]