Tag Archives: baking

Back to school

With the festive train fast approaching and looking for some foodie inspiration, I jumped at the chance to trot off back to school, dear Reader. Cookery school to be exact – following a wonderful invitation from Season Cookery School at Lainston House, part of the Exclusive Hotels group. Considering that this was the first time in goodness knows how long that I have been allowed out without my 7 and 3 year old chaperones, you can imagine I was more than a bit excited.

Lesson of the day – bread making.

Season Cookery School runs a variety of cookery courses to suit all skills, levels and interests. From courses to help you impress your dinner guests to knife skills and something perfect for this time of year – Christmas cooking for the day itself or festive feasts over the course of the week of Christmas. Bread making was a perfect choice for me though, dear Reader as I have been keen to brush up on my dough skills for some time. A great opportunity to learn some more tips and tricks to have me baking with success every time at home.

The school kitchen has a wonderful layout and setup and all in the grounds of the stunning Lainston House Hotel – ooh it was like walking into Masterchef kitchen itself, dear Reader!

Harriet Mitchell, our chef and teacher for the morning (much less scary than Monica Galetti), made sure that we got cracking with our prep and was exceptionally good at taking the recipes step by step, demonstrating each process and explaining the theory behind using particular techniques. Fresh yeast was a new one for me but the results were far better than my attempts with dried yeast at home – definitely a top tip and much easier to find in the shops than you think! Simply ask your local bakery or supermarket instore bakers.

From focaccia

to bloomers

scones

to pizza

A wonderful selection of recipes to work on, plenty of time to ask questions and for good measure, a bit of time sitting by the oven door with everything crossed GBBO style! Amazing how competitive all of us on the course became with each other!

Afterwards, lunch and a chance to taste our efforts. A fabulous morning with plenty of laughs that has left me armed with ‘cheffy’ knowledge to go home and experiment with in my own kitchen. Thanks so much to Sylvain Gachot, Cookery school manager and Harriet Mitchell, Chef de Partie at Pennyhill Park. I shall certainly be popping in a request to Father Christmas for another day at Season Cookery School. I do hope I have been good enough, dear Reader!

The Perfect Sunday

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Simply heavenly!

One of the most sacred of pastimes in life has to be the perfect Sunday morning. Perfection begins with deliciously hot coffee (a rarity with two small children clamouring for breakfast and a piddling puppy who constantly needs to be let out into the garden) and has to include The Archers on in the background. Jerry mocks me every week for listening to The Archers omnibus with the quip of “It’s no different from watching Eastenders.” Just to make it VERY clear, dear Reader…the Archers is not a soap as far as I am concerned, it is a serial on the radio. I can claim to have been educated in the ways of farming and the countryside simply through catching up with my weekly Archers catch up! Where else could I learn about the perils associated with farriery courtesy of Christopher’s horseshoeing accident, Ruth and David’s TB herd worries and Linda Snell’s opinions on the badger cull debate? There does seem to be an awful lot going on in that sleepy village of Ambridge!

Anyhoo, it seemed fitting that my perfect Sunday morning ritual should also coincide with acquiring the perfect breakfast treat: a warm croissant straight from my favourite baker’s oven. On Croissant Sunday, a monthly institution these days and only a stone’s throw from Twickenham stadium, I finally MET Mr Blackbird of Blackbird Bread. For those of you who haven’t already been introduced to the lovely Mr B (do read about him here), he is the baker extraordinaire whose patience and good advice finally got this calamitous townie into some hearty baking. I still can’t claim to be a good baker but I am learning all the time (trial and error mostly) and practice makes perfect as they say. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be an awful disappointment in the flesh and as Croissant Sunday approached, I became increasingly more anxious about meeting Mr Blackbird in person. A bit like Batman and the big reveal that he was actually Bruce Wayne! Would Mr B prefer the tweeting Margot to the real life version? When mentioning my nervousness, Mr B did remind me that underpants over trousers was not the most fashionable look……a fair point. Secretly, I have always thought that Wonder Woman managed to pull off the whole underwear on the outside look quite well but given that Wonder Woman and Margot are poles apart, I decided to opt for my standard uniform. Barbour, jeans and my new (now half chewed, courtesy of Monty) floral pumps. For the first time in the week, my coat was minus the hidden cocker spaniel! After a disastrous trip in the boot where we had to make an emergency stop (Monty had jumped through onto the back seats), we decided he was best left at home on this occasion! A dog guard for the boot has now been ordered!

I am happy to report that our ‘blind date’ was a success and Mr Blackbird, Mrs Blackbird and the delightful baby birds were a joy to meet. The croissants were seriously delicious too! Inhaled within seconds as soon as we returned home to the cottage! I shall most certainly be back for Croissant Sunday next month and I will also be trying to get a sneaky baking lesson from Mr B before I leave for the countryside. Twickenham and SW London lovelies: DON’T GO ANYWHERE ELSE, get your fresh bread here – Mr B’s baking (as well as Mrs B’s cakery) can only be described as heavenly and I can assure you a loaf won’t last the journey home! Blackbird Bread can be found here. I only hope that Mr Blackbird wasn’t too disappointed in meeting Bruce Wayne!

Yes, dear Reader, we have SOLD the cottage!

To add to the perfect Sunday, dear Reader, Jerry and I were delighted to see this new little number outside the cottage! It was a beautifully sunny day and I thought I would feel really sad about the finality of the ‘sold’ board but….I felt completely elated surprisingly. Moving to the countryside has been all Jerry and I have talked about for at least a year and now, the reality is in sight. Less than 3 months left until we leave the Big Smoke for a hamlet in the North Hampshire countryside. I wonder if they are ready for Margot, dear Reader?!

For the love of….bread

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At the very beginning of my journey to country bumpkindom, I ‘met’ a gentleman. This gentleman followed dear old Margot’s chronicles (or mad woman’s rantings as Jerry affectionately refers to the blog) on Twitter from first chirp and has tweeted and retweeted my posts countless times. He has encouraged others to follow, saved me from kitchen disasters, provided invaluable advice and yet we have never been in the same room as each other. You may be wondering why I am telling you all this, dear Reader. Who is this gentleman? He is known as Mr Blackbird. Other than being a thoroughly nice chap who has taken pity on a muddled Margot, the fact of the matter is that Mr Blackbird has a specialist skill. A skill which I am keen to master. A skill which will help to transform Margot from townie to home grown bumpkin. He is a……..baker!

“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.” - Robert Browning(photo: BLlackbird Bread)

“If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars and all the heavens.” – Robert Browning
(photo: Blackbird Bread)

To give Mr Blackbird a proper introduction, he and Mrs Blackbird started Blackbird Bread, a micro-bakery in Twickenham, in 2012. They bake bread (quite obviously) and cakes all from home, selling to friends and neighbours, the surrounding community and local markets. 11 types of bread and 3 different cakes can be ordered by text, phone or email and are delivered on foot (if within walking distance) or picked up by their loyal followers 3 times a week. Quite frankly, when the bread looks this good, why wouldn’t you buy it?

Blackbird Bread - don't mind if I do! (c) Blackbird Bread

Certainly NOT half-baked! The delicious loaves made by Mr and Mrs Blackbird.
(photo: Blackbird Bread)

Well dear Reader, on Margot’s New Year’s list of to-dos was: No.17 Bake a decent loaf of bread. This has been somewhat of a holy grail quest for me for some years now. I simply cannot bake ordinary bread. Variations on a theme of soda bread, including one with cheese and bacon – done. A real loaf – absolutely not. That was UNTIL I met Mr Blackbird. Armed with Mr Blackbird’s Basic White recipe (which can be found here on Mr B’s blog http://blackbirdbread.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-loaf-for-heather-or-bread-basics-101.html), I gingerly tested my baking skills. Jerry was quite bemused at my ‘Mr B says that you have to….and Mr B said that you should do that…’ but the pep talk and recipe prevailed and I baked my SECOND ever proper loaf with resounding success. (First loaf lost its bottom crust as I wasn’t liberal enough with the flour on the tray). However, with some practice loaves under my belt, I think that I may have finally passed the test!

Margot’s humble cottage loaf

Anyway, I thought if Mr Blackbird could teach a ridiculously hopeless case like me how to bake, then I must encourage him to give up his baking secrets to you, dear Reader. He very kindly said he would oblige so for the first Margot guest post ever………OVER TO YOU, Mr B!

“Blackbird Bread’s Top 5 tips”

Hi! The brilliant Margot has kindly invited me to do a guest post on her lovely blog. An honour!

I work for Blackbird Bread, a micro-bakery in Twickenham, providing homemade bread and cake for the local community. We bake from home, using a domestic oven, nothing fancy, just real honest food! Please visit our blog for more information – http://blackbirdbread.blogspot.co.uk/

Margot asked if I would provide my top 5 tips for baking a loaf of bread, but instead I’ve compiled a list of baking bits and pieces that are invaluable when making a loaf! Really the list could go on and on, so I’ve had to be quite strict!

Digital scales Essential. You can get away with normal kitchen scales when weighing out large quantities of flour, but 7g of yeast is almost impossible to see without digital scales. (You can use measuring spoons, or a teaspoon, to weigh out measurements, but they’re never 100% accurate). They’re not too dear (ours cost £10).
Clingfilm/black bin bags Yes, you heard right! The oft thought misconception about baking, and proving, is that you need to put things on top of a radiator, or in a warm place. Whilst that is useful, it isn’t vital. By using clingfilm or a black bin bag, you ensure the heat and moisture from the dough remains in the bowl as the gluten stretches and the dough proves.
Water spray Cheap as chips, usually costs £1 and is necessary to keep the dough hydrated when it goes into the oven. Bakers’ ovens have built in steamers and sprays so this simply replicates that.
Roasting tray When you switch the oven on (at least 45 minutes before you put the dough into it), put a roasting tray at the bottom of your oven. Leave it and let it get good and thirsty! Pop the kettle on and, just after you spray your loaf and put that in the oven, pour the boiling water from the kettle into the roasting tray and close the oven door as quickly as you can! The steam will fill your oven and maintain hydration for your loaf throughout the bake.
Baking stone/pizza stone By all means use a roasting tray to bake bread in, but you can’t beat a stone that sits in the oven and gets incredibly hot. Your bread will start to cook the second it hits the stone if it’s in the oven for long enough (same time as the roasting tray for steaming – at least 45 mins before baking). The pizza stone is much thinner and usually round, so is brilliant for single loaves. The baking stone is thicker and is, basically, a paving stone, so is quite heavy, but can take two loaves at a time.
(I know I said five tips!) Breadknife A sharp breadknife will be needed to score/slash your loaf just before it goes into the oven. A simple horizontal mark, approximately 1 cm deep, will allow you to control how the loaf will rise and will help to avoid any unsightly bulges in the wrong places!

Okay, that’s enough from me! Thanks to Margot for letting me loose on her blog! Please follow our baking adventures on Twitter – @blackbirdbread

To Mr B – I salute you and your fabulous baking skills. I am delighted that you agreed to share your tips! To you dear Reader, DO follow Blackbird on Twitter or check out his blog and if you live in Twickenham, what are you waiting for…place your order! I am completely indebted to Mr Blackbird and am thrilled to have made his acquaintance. I never truly believed that I would ever be able to pull off No.17 Bake a decent loaf. However, following these fundamentals, armed with a baking stone and trying not to become too complacement, this townie is turning country baker, producing her own daily bread with a little help from Poppy and Primrose of course! Hoorah!

‘Proving’ to be a hit…. Sorry, couldn’t resist the baking pun!

A bag of Allsorts….

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My baking walk of shame……

Dear Reader, I can only applaud you for sticking with me after last week’s empty blog post calamities! Lately, I seem to have acquired a cottage full of gremlins which has reduced me to some very unladylike language. I wondered if Debretts have a section on appropriate words to use in such circumstances. Note to self: must refer to their Guide to Etiquette and Modern Manners when dealing with broadband customer service call centres, children who won’t do as they are told and the bl***y old biddies and Chelsea tractor owners who keep pinching all the parking spaces in our road…. Anyway to add more insult to injury, a crockpot of kitchen disasters also fell upon the cottage last week. Poppy’s pre-birthday birthday party meant that I had to resort to my dreadful baking skills. Dear Reader, you may well be asking yourself why I did not buy the birthday cake. Yes…..that would be a good question. It is true that scones, biscuits, even the odd macaroon I can rustle up. Birthday cakes, I definitely cannot. Remarkably depressing when you try all sorts of recipes and even attempt to channel some Hummingbird Bakery magic (dearest Barbara bought me a HB book for my birthday and I haven’t managed a single recipe without a culinary cock up). Since I endeavour each year to make Primrose’s birthday cake, I thought that it just wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t provide Poppy with the same opportunity to ‘enjoy’ a lead-like taste experience and overambitious cake design! Primrose’s toadstool cake this year looked amazing (I had a lot of help from dear Mamma with that one) but tasted hideous. Luckily I didn’t serve it to any parents and the 4 year olds at the party were too full up with jelly boats and fairy cakes to eat any of it. Undeterred, I decided to climb Mount Everest once more and upscaled a HFW recipe for Poppy’s ‘cat’ bitrthday cake. That may have been my first mistake. I set about creating a chocolate cat and was not successful at all. My cat looked more like it had feline palsy and the head was too small for the body. Apparently, you need to measure cake tins rather more accurately than I did. With no option but to serve it, as my guests were due to arrive imminently, I simply poured yet more melted chocolate onto the top and then added a pink bow in a nod to ‘Hello Kitty’. I hid it at the back of the kitchen and told Jerry (on pain of death) that we would not be letting anyone consume any. A quick rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’, a candle blown out and then cake quickly squirreled away. Mission completed and no class action for food poisoning. All in a day’s work for Margot. I must be about the only person not to like cake which doesn’t help either as I have neither patience for the process or a desire to eat the fruits of my labour. Only last week, my dear friend Edie, had the cheek to suggest that I was a baking fraudster and that she was not entirely convinced of my inability to make cakes. I can (hand on heart) promise that if she had tried Poppy’s birthday ‘cat’ cake, she would have acquiesced and issued a damning judgement on my baking talent.

Oooh look at Margot’s Christmas Allsorts on the back row!

On a cheerier note, Edie did make a special trip to follow my Christmas chutney on its journey to stardom and dragged her hubby all the way to the WI’s Real Jam Festival 2012 at Denman College. Margot’s Christmas Allsorts (had no idea what else to call it) sat remarkably plain (less is more…) amongst some serious contenders. Well it was a WI comp after all. Jam and chutney entries were judged by the likes of Pam ‘The Jam’ Corbin, whose preserving prowess knows no bounds. She has even taught the dear HFW at River Cottage a few tricks or two. Primrose had been asking me for weeks if my chutney had cut the mustard and I am proud to announce, dear Reader, that it most certainly had! No awards this time but a none too shabby 15.5 out of 20. For a preserving and pickling virgin, I was thrilled with the score. I lost marks on the jam jar but was tickled pink that I had made it to the judging table at all. Margot’s Christmas Allsorts was commended as a ‘well cooked chutney’ with a ‘strong spicy flavour.’ Who knows what Margot’s Christmas Allsorts might have achieved if I hadn’t taken the instructions on labelling the entry etc so literally!

15.5 OUT OF 2O!!!!!!!

The success has left me wondering if I should ditch all further baking attempts in favour of churning out chutney from now on! I have certainly been bitten by the preserving bug and intend to try my hand at some more chutney challenges. (Edie, you have created a monster and you only have yourself to blame)! Tempted by a few of the courses they run, I might drop Jerry a hint or two. The purveyors of Tracklements condiments are safe for the time being but perhaps not for long. Wait until I get an industrial sized chutney pan! Now onwards to the next country challenge…..

Goats cheese anyone?!
(photo: Mr Edie)

Baking, shaking and no stirring in sight

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Apparently, it is National Baking Week. How do they dream these things up? Tuning in to the Great British Bake Off this week, I found myself riveted. Not for tips from Mary Berry on good baking as you might think…… Now that Jerry is out of earshot, I will admit that I was glued to the screen, unable to concentrate on the recipe for a Paris Brest due to a rather dishy young baker named James. Once I dragged myself away from watching him making fondant fancies, I got to thinking about my own baking skills which, it has to be said, are rather hopeless. I have all the relevant kit as you can imagine. Bread scraper, cake and loaf tins, silicone moulds, palette knives, spatulas and EVEN a flour shaker! I know I know, with all this kit, you would think that I would be able to produce something edible. I try very hard but the cakes, bread, scones etc I have made in the past have always had the qualities revered in London brick. I can’t help myself. Even though I know that baking is a science and instructions must be adhered to strictly, somehow, I can never help trying to cut a corner here or adding something to the recipe there. Dare I say it, on one occasion, I even thought that I knew better than the housewives’ staple and goddess of plain cookery, Delia.

In desperation, I turned my hand to some baking research. Reading some serious tomes on the matter, namely Bread Matters by Andrew Whitley, it seems that soda bread is the place to start as it requires very little skill on the baker’s part! No problems there then! Past that, it was all sourdough starter this and proving baskets that. Not for the serial baking criminal…..

Well in the end, after some serious deliberating over recipes, I used a classic soda bread recipe (thank you Mr Whittingstall!) and tried as best I could to follow the baking rules! Preheat oven, weigh out ingredients, mix then knead. I did take a turn towards inventiveness and added a few crumbled handfuls of a lump of cheese I found in the fridge, fried off some smoked bacon and put those in too. Mixed altogether, it looked a bit like a small brain on the baking tray. Unappealing I know. Not even Primrose could give a vote of confidence on this one!

Not very appetising…..

Whilst it had its twelve minutes in a hot oven, I remembered a nifty bit of magic which might just steer Primrose and Poppy away from the inevitable baking failure. Making your own butter! About the only truly memorable thing from my prep school days other than girls having embroidery lessons on Wednesday afternoons whilst the boys went out to play sport. Before you ask, no I did not to go to school in the 1950s but might as well have. Just in case you want to have a go at this, here is how I did it:

At the beginning….

Get a jam jar and fill a third full with room temperature double cream. (I used it straight from the fridge….and it took ages to get through the next bit so follow this even if you don’t follow any of the other instructions)!
Put the lid on tight and then start shaking. If the cream is the right temperature, then you may only need to shake for 10mins. I attempted to banish the bingo wings for roughly 20mins. You must shake vigorously and continually.
The jam jar will go silent…..don’t PANIC. In the words of the WWII propaganda poster, “Keep Calm and Carry on”.
Shake until the sound changes to a slosh and you have a creamy mass and some watery milky liquid in the jar.
Pour off the liquid (this is buttermilk and you can use it in your next batch of soda bread).
‘Rinse’ the butter in the jam jar with cold water. Keep doing this until the water runs clear.
…and here’s one I made earlier!
When it does, then your butter is almost ready. Just press out the rest of the liquid. You can use a delightfully vintage set of butter paddles for this. Failing your ability to procure these, your hands will do just as well.
Wrap in greaseproof and put in the fridge.

I mixed in a little ground sea salt into mine before putting in the fridge but I shall leave the flavourings up to you. Anything goes really. You won’t make enough to rival Anchor but you will have made enough to smother on a slice of soda bread. It would seem that butter requires little culinary know-how. Bread on the other hand….well it looks like I may be going back to the bread board again. Sadly you could have used my efforts for shot putting. Shame I am a few months too late for the Olympics! Still, three loaves later and apparently if one follows the recipe and uses buttermilk instead of fat free yoghurt, a bacon and cheese soda loaf with a fluffy inside can be made. A tiny taste of heaven with our homemade butter. Dare we say that Margot has had success in the baking department at last?! Dear Reader, I’ll let you decide….

A small kitchen miracle at last!

Margot Tries the Good Life

A chronicle of the transformation from self-confessed townie to country bumpkin