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.

Friday 18 May 2012

Sedgemoor Manor Junior school

10 parents (all mothers) and their children have been on a Family Learning course for 3 weeks and I was asked to run a breadmaking session with them on Wednesday afternoon.


The plan was that the parents would come in at 2pm, we would make pizzas together, then the children would join us at 3 and we would make some pet pain au chocolat.


In the event, 7 mothers turned up and we made a batch of dough out of which we made sizzlers and pizzas:


Cheese and tomato pizzas and cheese and tomato or mushroom sizzlers.
So far, so good - but then at three o'clock, chaos ensued! 


I was busy in the school kitchen moving the pizzas about in the ovens - when I got back in the hall, all these extra people had arrived. 3 more parents and goodness knows how many children! I never got around to giving everyone a name label as is my usual wont - it was just too hectic.


I also like to get everyone around a group of tables, but the tables in the school hall were of a type new to me. They're circular, with stools attached to the table - 8 to each one - so it wasn't practicable to put them all together. 


This meant I was going from table to table - 4 of them all told - demonstrating shaping the chocolate rolls and the different shapes. The parents who'd made the pizzas found themselves teaching the other mothers and their children how to make a bread dough, which was a plus. But it was pretty hectic.


In between all this I still had to keep an eye on the ovens.


All in all it was a really enjoyable, satisfying, session - despite all the mayhem. All the families went home promising to carry out their homework - which was to go home and teach someone what they'd learned today.


I managed to take a few pics:


One of the youngsters, Hannh, who did get a label, bringing her bread to the kitchen
Two more batches. Just putting the finishing touches.

And one more

Some varieties of chocolate leak more than others. This is Sainsbury's Fairtrade milk chocolate

All the batches reflected the enthusiasm of the children - they loved it.





No comments:

Post a Comment