Entries tagged with bread on I'm glad it burnt

Makowiec

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:24:01 +0000

Continuing on our journey into the land of bread... here is the second loaf, a Polish poppy seed swirl cake called Makowiec. We used the recipe from Taste.com.au - this is a great website, kind of like the Australian equivalent of the equally great BBC good food.

You can see from the photos that we decided not to smother it with lemony icing sugar. This was because, pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong! And when it came it, we couldn't be bothered (It was the right decision in the end anyway...)

We ran out of plain flour and had to use wholemeal flour - which made it look (and taste) much more bready than cakey.
We also used 50 grams too little of poppy seeds, which resulted in very sloppy innards
We had no rolling pin!
To add the chaos we were simultaneously cooking tea (Creamy pesto gnocchi)

We put the hefty lump of gloopy dough into the oven, and crashed out for 40 mins whilst it cooked, disappointed with our efforts and not expecting it to work out at all. But, despite appearences this rather ugly looking thing tasted much better than the Finnish Pulla bread.

Finnish Pulla Bread

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 13:31:20 +0000

First in a series of bread-related posts is the sweet and slightly over powering Finnish Pulla bread. The recipe is Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's and was in the Guardian newspaper, but is also available online as part of his Cardamom recipes.

Hugh describes it as a brioche-style bread (Light and rich), but our attempt proved extremely dense and quite dry. Still delicious don't get me wrong - and the smell was amazing... enough to bring my housemates of their rooms!

Perhaps the reason it turned out so heavy is because I didn't knead the dough enough. That's something I hope to improve on over the forthcoming recipes.

Being quite stodgy, and not really knowing what the bread is supposed to acompany, we ended up using it to absorb some tasty tomato and basil soup. Even though I think it's a desert bread, the combination was yummy.

I'm not ashamed to say (as a bloke), that I platted with confidence. It's quite tricky because once you've stretched the dough to 40cm as described in the instructions - all it wants to do is retract to it's original size. So you have to work quickly!