First Recipe: Bread Rolls

So as some of you may know, I've applied for the Great British Bake Off for the last few years and have applied again this year. As preparation, I've been trying to get my skills up on a few things that I don't bake often, namely bread and pastry.

Now previously, I've tried making bread in a bread maker at my mum and dad's. And for the most part it came out so dense and chewy it was barely edible. So I decided that I'd go back to basics and make it by hand. After a few goes I'd gone as far as I could with the basic flour and water white loaf. Here's the recipe for the bread rolls I made for the Thanksgiving dinner (see last post).

BREAD ROLLS 

500g strong bread flour
30g butter, in small cubes
1 sachet dried yeast
150ml milk
150ml hand hot water
2 tsp salt
3 tsp sugar
1 egg

Warm the flour in the microwave for 1 minute on high. This will encourage the gluten to stretch further.

Make a well in the centre and pour in the yeast.

Mix together the milk, water,sugar, salt and butter and microwave for 30-40 seconds until the butter has melted. Stir together with a spoon. The mixture should still be "hand hot", any hotter and it can kill the yeast. If it's too hot, let it cool for a few minutes.

Pour the milk mixture over the flour and yeast and mix together with a wooden spoon. It will seem very liquid at first but will come together to form a ball.

Take the dough out and knead it on a warm surface (I use a large wooden chopping board). This should take somewhere between 5-10 minutes. You'll know when it's done as the dough will take on a shiny, blistered appearance.

Put the dough back in the bowl and cover with cling film, place in the fridge. Usually doughs are proven at room temperature or above which makes the yeast work very quickly. Proving at the much lower fridge temperature slows the yeast down and keeps the bubbles very small and develops the flavour. The dough needs a minimum of 8 hours at this temperature to rise to double the size. It works quite well as a last minute before bed or first thing before heading out to work thing.

Once the dough has risen, take it out of the fridge and knock it back down so that the air is squeezed out. Don't overknead it, it will be more than elastic. Shape it into rolls (it will make 8 regular sized round rolls) and using a sharp knife, cut a slit across the top of the dough. Brush with the egg and leave to rise again for another hour at room temperature.

When they've risen again, bake them in a preheated oven at 230C for 30 mins. You may need to cover the rolls with foil after 15 mins to prevent them getting too dark on the top.

Thanksgiving in London

So obviously there's no tradition of Thanksgiving in London. A few years ago my family had the traditional American dinner as it coincided with a day in November when we could all get together. It was good fun, and a bit of a change from the usual roast that we normally have as a family meal.

This year, a friend of mine was visiting London from Chicago and although he loves the UK (check out his blog The Curious American) he was sad that he would miss Thanksgiving in the States. So I thought it would be fun to do a dinner here with him and some other friends and see how it goes.

When I started researching this I realised there's no set standard meal really, it varies from family to family and region to region. A lot of the sites I found with menus had ideas to do different and exciting things for Thanksgiving, finding instructions for a traditional dinner were tricky as in America, everyone already knows it! I eventually settled on the below menu from a selection of sources and a few ideas of my own that seemed vaguely 'murican'. I decided to cut out some things like the sweet potato casserole as I didn't want to eat marshmallow with turkey!

Starter:

Sweetcorn and bacon chowder with cheddar and paprika straws

Main:

Roast turkey with cider gravy

Pork, maple and pecan stuffing

Mashed potatoes

White dinner rolls

Green bean casserole

Honey roasted squash and carrots

Dessert:

Apple and pecan pie with maple cream

Here's the pie before it went into the oven. First time doing lattice work as I don't do a lot of pastry as a rule but it was a lot easier than I thought. The case was first blind baked then the spiced apple and nuts put in afterwards. Hopefully this will avoid the dreaded GBBO 'soggy bottom'. 

Apple and Pecan Lattice Pie

This is the stuffing mix before it's cooked, it's sausagemeat, polenta, milk, red onion, pecan nuts and maple syrup. 

The leftover stuffing (when cooked) was rather nice for breakfast!

I thought these little turkey napkins would be fun, they took longer to make than I thought!

Here's the table layout, my housemates brought back the placemats from Japan, they were kind of Thanksgiving sort of colours so I decided to use them. 

After all my concerns that the turkey wouldn't be ready in time or would be frozen in the middle, it was absolutely fine. We had a fair bit of it but I still have a huge box of cooked turkey meat left, think I might make a curry later :)

Here are the honey roasted carrots and squash, the mash and the stuffing balls. 

Here's the pie cooked, I drizzed maple syrup over the top to give it sweetness and shine to the pastry.

Yay First Post!!

Ok I guess the whole "first post" thing doesn't count when it's your own blog. Especially as no one is actually reading it. Yet.
So this is something I've been meaning to do for for a while. I cook and bake a lot, and read a lot about it too. I guess the trigger for me was finding out that the wedding cake I made for my friends in September has been featured on a wedding website as part of a profile on their wedding. You can read about it here and there's some photos of the cake and other things in my gallery.
So this will be a mixture of things really, some photos and posts of my baking and cooking projects, some restaurant reviews and some of my musings on techniques, ingredients and the food industry in general.