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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Day of love? or Baking maybe ;) ?

So it was another Valentine's Day that went by quietly, the brightest aspect being that I decided to be in a baking frenzy :). Well food is a way of showing love isn't it ;)?

(1) Making that perfect whole wheat bread has always been such a dream, and I came a whole lot closer with this recipe from Chinmayie on Love Food Eat.

Changes:
- Did not have flaxseed powder so left it out
- Added some wheat gluten
- Found I was at the end of my atta, so mixed a wee bit of maida at the end, probably 1/3 cup or so.
- 2 hours for 1st rise, 1 hour for 2nd and it really was easy and brilliant!
- And I musn't forget to mention my amazing KitchenAid that saves me all the kneading!

I need to get/swap/buy one of those smaller pans so that my loaves get to normal size, my present one is the aluminium long one, and seems like everything only rises up to a 2/3rds size due to the length of the pan. But doesn't that texture look amazing? It was! The only thing I'd change would be to increase the salt a bit (feeling less guilty using organic rock salt ;)).


(2) By afternoon I had this wish to try a chocolate lava cake, have always had a fascination for them. And Valentine's and Chocolate just seem to go together :). As is usual with me, I did not have the ramekins needed by the recipe so tried it in muffin pans instead. It looked too undone at 8 minutes so kept it for a wee bit longer and it turned to a sort of brownie cake. Even worse, I realized the recipe used self-raising flour and I used plain maida :(. End result, yummy and edible, but definitely no lava cake!

(3) Had to carry on the mood and finished off with a whole wheat pizza - 100% whole wheat and yes, I am very very thrilled. No photos as I hate taking food photos in the night and this one was definitely not going to stay until morning. My recipe started off from this link. But as many of the review comments have mentioned, I also tried making it completely whole wheat and it came out pretty well. Only change next time might be I might throw in some gluten and (once again) increase the salt a bit.

6 comments:

  1. Sounds good! Haven't made pizza in ages...will hop over to look at the recipe you linked.

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    1. Thanks Aparna :). The other thing that appealed to me about this recipe was that it recommended to bake the base for 5 minutes before putting on the toppings. Not the standard all at one go as I've seen in other recipes - that makes it a pain to slide it onto the stone/tray!

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  2. haha yes, that's perfect valentines'day !
    no day is complete without good food, so does V day ! ;-)

    That bread looks good :-)

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  3. Aah@what better way to celebrate any day let alone V-day! Good food! yummm

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    1. Yes I agree :). Thanks Sirisha!

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