Nicholas Clee has contributed an interesting post on The Guardian‘s Word of Mouth blog, about recipes and the danger of viewing them as guarantors of success. I’m sure we’ve all endured culinary disasters despite following this-or-that recipe to the letter. In the throes of disappointment it’s easy to blame the author, and sometimes that’s justified. read more…
Dan Lepard’s column in Saturday’s Guardian featured banana cake, one of my favourites. Lepard advocates using very ripe bananas, with which I agree, but also mentions something interesting that I’d not known before. Apparently, bananas become more alkaline as they ripen, which interferes with the ability of the baking powder to do its job. As read more…
A good milk loaf is perfect breakfast fare, and over the years I’ve experimented with various recipes. One that I hadn’t got round to trying until this weekend was Dan Lepard’s version, from his book The Handmade Loaf. His recipe uses milk, melted butter and golden syrup to enrich the dough. As it happened, my read more…
My mother-in-law is a keen forager and gave me a present of some wild mushrooms yesterday: Calocybe gambosa, known in this country as St George’s mushroom because it normally matures on or about this date (St Georges Day, that is). To appreciate their fine flavour, fry in just a smear of butter and serve on read more…
A wide-ranging bout of family illness has enforced a bit of a break from the blog, so I’ll ease myself back into it with some ephemera. This beautiful wood-engraving was made by the English artist and typographer Eric Gill (1882-1940). It was made in 1915 and was originally a piece of advertising art, intended for read more…
Whenever I get into conversation about baking with someone, I very often hear them say something along the lines of ‘I once tried making bread, but it came out rock hard.’ I haven’t subjected this observation to statistical analysis, but I’ve heard it so many times that it seems to me that inedibly tough crusts read more…
I’ve been struggling to set WordPress up as a CMS to power the rest of the site – with some difficulty. The site should be back online shortly. Sorry about this intermission!
Further to the affair of the sliced-bread, the company have very nicely sent me some vouchers, even though I couldn’t send them a sample on account of the bread going mouldy. I don’t personally think much of mass-produced bread, but I can’t fault this particular outfit’s customer service.
Although the large industrial baking companies have almost eliminated unpredictability from baking bread, sometimes things still go wrong. I still have to buy mass-produced bread from time-to-time, and last week I picked up a loaf that illustrated this fact perfectly. At first I thought it had been crushed in my shopping bag but, upon closer read more…
Whatever your political views, it is incontestable that a humanitarian crisis is unfolding in Syria, with the Red Cross now struggling to get aid into the country. My Lebanese sister-in-law just drew my attention to a project called Taste of Freedom, which has been set up to raise funds for the British Red Cross Syria read more…
