More Jubiliee Baking - White Farmhouse Tin loaf

Another recipe from Dan Lepard's 'Short & Sweet' book. This loaf uses what he calls the 'half sponge' method. You can start off the yeasty bit hours before you need to do the rest so it's a good one to do if you have to go out or you could do it the night before.

There's definitely more work in this one than the Easy White Loaf I did here but it's still not hard. I did mix up the dough when it came to it in my Magimix to save a bit of time because I'm not keen on the whole rubbing in method. That phrase just always takes me back to school Home Economics lessons!

Having said that, it still wasn't difficult, just a bit more fiddly than the other one. Taste wise, we weren't able to tell the difference between the two. Just because the Farmhouse loaf has fat in it, I imagine that one would keep a little longer - but that doesn't seem to be a problem we are having! The loaves are only small anyway so never really get a chance to go stale, as you can see from the fact I had to photograph the last few slices before they too disappeared!

All in all, another good recipe from this book. I'm eager to try the Cheese and Chive version of this one soon.

More baking!

I was having a bit of a Domestic Goddess moment yesterday (well, in actions if nothing else!) and as a result, have made another addition to the Jubilee Baking Project.

Yum!

As you can see, a little bit has already disappeared so I thought I'd better photograph it before the rest went. Well, you have to test these things, don't you?

In the previous post, I mentioned that an earlier attempt at bread making many years ago resulted in cannonballs, rather than bread rolls and it rather put me off trying again. We don't eat a tonne of bread but we do need it for sandwiches, etc, and it's a little worrying when you read about all the extra ingredients that go into a simple loaf of bread like preservatives and so on. Not having much success with my bread making attempt before, I'd been pondering on investing in a bread maker.

In the meantime, I saw the new(ish) book by Dan Lepard, called 'Short and Sweet'. I have to say I've no previous experience with his recipes and this was the first I'd heard of him. Looking up the reviews though, I found out that he writes a baking column for the Guardian newspaper, and that people were pretty thrilled with his recipes. One of the recipes was for Easy White Bread.

Thanks to some vouchers, I was soon the owner of a copy. This is something in itself. I have plenty of cookbooks and stopped buying them some time ago because there are so many recipes online, and you often only end up making a few out of the book. But this one had such good reviews, I decided to go for it, with the bread recipes a major factor in that decision.

Easy White Bread is the first recipe in the book, and also the first one I've tried out of it. And it worked! Yippee! I made bread! I made edible bread! Thank you, Dan!

I was also playing with the sewing machine yesterday, so I'll update you on that shortly.

Anyone else got this book, and if so, do you have any favourite recipes from it yet?