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.

Monday 17 October 2011

"Breadmaking made easy", Burnham, Sept - Oct 2011

Monday 17th October.


Christmas loaf and pane casereccio (rolled, filled pizza) tonight, the last session.


In this classroom I have a PC at my disposal, so I have been able to put pictures of the bread they were making up on the screen (from my blog). We were halfway through making the pane casereccio when I suddenly realised the computer screen was blank - and the PC was dead. Thinking it was either something I'd done or it was a computer fault I just left it. Shortly afterwards I noticed one of my ovens had gone cold. I still didn't twig. It was only when I noticed that the bread in the oven wasn't browning as it should have been that I realised the power was off. It became obvious that a circuit breaker had tripped somewhere.


I checked in the next room, where the sockets were still operating OK. I found a pair in the small kitchenette - about 20 metres away from the classroom where we were working, but still. Then another 2 sockets were found, so we were able to keep on baking.


Not sure if my four ovens had caused the outage, since we'd used them without any problems in the previous weeks. 


It was nice to hear that the group were sad about the course finishing and were wondering what they'd do with their Monday evenings from now on. I was given a lovely card from everyone thanking me for my efforts over the past 5 weeks. They were a lovely bunch and we had a lot of laughs. I shall miss them.


I have only one pic to post from this session - showing how one student, Joan,  shaped her Christmas loaf, using tinned apricots. [That's still to come.]


Monday 10th October.
Sizzlers and Chelsea buns on the menu today - although Will opted to make a Peshwari naan.

Excellent session, but no pics since I forgot my phone!

Monday 3rd October 2011.
3rd session - Tarte Alsace and Apfel kuchen tonight. The students are now no longer beginners - they all know what to do:
Make the savoury dough - put it to one side, make the fruit dough, shape it and put to prove; shape the first dough, add toppings and put to prove.

They're all very organised and it all works like clockwork - except for the photo-copier! [More to come]

Here's a couple of pics from the session:

Remembered to gather these Apfel kuchens together for a group photo...

But only just remembered in time to take this pic of Tom's Tarte Alsace before he put it away in his basket.


6 students, 4 women and 2 men - none of whom were breadmakers, except one had a machine.

The venue is an ordinary classroom, but, since I have 4 ovens I can carry around with me, we can turn it into a kitchen of sorts.

Each week we make two batches of bread - generally one each, sweet and savoury. The first evening the students made soda bread - I demonstrated a plain one, while the students made a spicy fruit loaf - and also a batch of fancy dinner rolls.

The breads made on the second evening were chosen by the students. The main focus was meant to be on loaves of bread, but one of the guys was desperate to make a pizza:

And here it is.
Here's a focaccia and a batch of sweet breads - pain au chocolat and jam doughnuts:

The two large ones are the doughnuts and the others are the pain au chocolat.

Here's a loaf with the buns.
Next Monday we're making Tarte Alsace and Apfel kuchen.

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