No bread is an island

...entire of itself. (With apologies to John Donne!)
I live and breathe breadmaking. I’m an evangelist who would like everyone to make his or her own bread. I want to demystify breadmaking and show it as the easy everyday craft that it is. To this end I endeavour to make my recipes as simple and as foolproof as I possibly can.

I call my blog 'No bread is an island' because every bread is connected to another bread. So a spicy fruit bun with a cross on top is a hot cross bun. This fruit dough will also make a fruit loaf - or Chelsea buns or a Swedish tea ring...
I'm also a vegan, so I have lots of vegan recipes on here - and I'm adding more all the time.

Wednesday 20 May 2015

MATT'S MARZIPAN, APRICOT AND SULTANA SNAKE BREAD and other things

It's always an adventure, making bread with Matt at the care home I visit on Wednesdays. His 'go to' bread is always a 'snake bread' - with whatever ingredients we are using with the rest of the students

Today we were making Danish pastries, so we had some tinned apricots - and I always bring in marzipan, since that's such a favourite with Matt. 

Once he had made his sweetened dough, he rolled it flat and lined it with flattened marzipan, on which he placed apricots - then, for good measure, he sprinkled over some sultanas.


Matt's loaf is on the right - along with some Danish

Sunday 17 May 2015

TWEETING MY LATEST PIZZA (to #veganrecipehour and #realbreadcampaign)

I made a vegan pizza for dinner yesterday, and I wanted to tweet the procedure I used in assembling it. Just one pic of the finished product doesn't convey the whole story.

However,Twitter absolutely refused to let me upload pics from either my iPhone 5 or my MacBook; I kept getting this msg:

Uploading photo failed! Please try again later.

So, I'm going to pretend I'm tweeting from here!


Building a  pizza: H/m T/sauce&hummus w. asparagus and roasted red pepper   

Thursday 14 May 2015

REAL BREAD WEEK (9-15th May 2015)

The week of 9-15th May 2015 is Real Bread Week, organised by The Real Bread Campaign when everyone is encouraged to make their own Real Bread.

Here's how the week went for me:

Monday 11th May
I was short of bread for myself - so I made this seeded loaf with toasted sesame seeds.

And I was due at a coffee morning on Tuesday, so I made a batch of 
Chelsea buns (plus a GF, vegan chocolate cake for a coeliac friend who attends) for a coffee morning.

Tuesday 12th May

My usual session at Myday services this week had been moved to Thursday afternoon, so I was able to get to Taunton Association of the Homeless much earlier - 3pm instead of 3.45.

Early as I was, I found one of my students already in the training kitchen, making some frying pan soda bread!

On the menu was a lentil and potato stew or hash, which we then go on to make pasties with, so we quickly got cracking with that!

We were soon joined by 2 more students who set to to make the dough for the pasties. Once these were shaped and proving, the 1st student made another soda bread in the frying pan - at the same time, teaching one of the other students, whose first session this was.

Lentil and potato pasties and frying pan soda bread 

Tuesday 12 May 2015

INTERMITTENT FASTING - a de-luxe 5:2 fast day with a difference



I only decided during Thursday morning this week, that if I wanted to get a fast in this week, I’d better get on with it. I rarely have breakfast these days, so that was a good start.

My initial thoughts were that I’d have a low calorie dinner – something like a 150 calorie (or less) veg curry - and not eat until lunchtime on the Friday. However, during the morning I made a batch of Chelsea buns (much prefer them to hot cross buns). I wanted to drop some off at the local garage where the guys had done me a huge favour (long story, won’t bore you with it here, but it involved a dead battery for the second time in a month), and wouldn’t accept payment.

In the afternoon on the way back, walking past the pub, a little voice in my head said, “Why not a swift half?”
Me: “But I’m supposed to be fasting!”
Little voice: “You can always build it into a FD – just count the calories.”

So that’s what I did. And a half of Buncombe golden bitter went down a treat. Checking later on I found it was 111 cals.

It was only then that I thought I’d turn my FD into a DL (De Luxe Fast Day), one with all the trimmings, and just see how much bang I could get for my buck.

I made the veg curry – spiced with Frank’s chilli sauce and a teaspoon of my home made curry powder:

134g chopped onion
white cabbage
green cabbage
carrot
cauliflower
1/2 teaspoon mixed herbs
8g Franks Chilli sauce
5g curry powder
400g tinned tomatoes - 76

I still can’t get over just how flavoursome a simple veg stew with a tin of tomatoes can be – however, I added 10g of soya sauce and a tsp of bouillon powder.

A small saucepan full to the brim (before cooking) amounted to 250 calories and made about 7 large serving spoons – 3 and a half of which just filled up a side plate. I needed some carbs, and, rather than using rice, I decided to have some curried potato wedges. 150g of microwaved potato, quartered and fried with a few squirts of One-Cal and a sprinkle of curry powder came in at 115 cals.

So the meal itself came to 240 cals (125+115).

I enjoy a drink before dinner, so I had a small glass (200g) of home made stout (74 cals) and I poured myself 50g of wine (45) to have with it. However, I’ve taught myself to be so abstemious with wine that I only drank just over half of it, pouring the rest back in the bottle and saving myself 20 cals.

This brought my tally for booze – including the Buncombe, earlier - to 210.

So, 240+210=450, leaving me with 150 cals to play with. I still hadn’t tasted my Chelsea buns, yet, and worked out that each one would be 277 cals. Half of one – 139 cals – would leave me 11 calories short of my allowed 600.

So, my FD included an afternoon beer, a pre-dinner glass of stout, a (miniscule) glass of wine, a veg curry with curried wedges, and half a Chelsea bun.

There’s never any need to feel deprived on this WOL!