A white Christmas...

Well, it may not have snowed, but we can still have a white Christmas. Time for the first try baking a white sourdough loaf. I'm keeping the exact same recipe as before, but just substituting white strong flour for wholemeal strong flour. Aage has been fed solely on wholemeal flour though, so there are still flecks of wholemeal throughout the dough.

The round one was shaped and kneaded by me; the other one by my brother. They're both look really quite tasty!

Aage comes home!

I'm home for the break now, and Aage came with me! He needed feeding, and my mum's been pretty keen to bake a sourdough loaf, so we're doing another standard sourdough loaf. The sponge is made now and we'll turn it into a dough tomorrow morning :o).

C is for cookie...

(...that's good enough for me). I made Trish a batch of cookies. The same basic recipe as usual, but half were chocolate and almond cookies and half were bacon cookies. Also as seems to be normal now, I made a hash of measuring out the ingredients. This time, they ended up rather a lot cakier than usual. Still pretty tasty though :o).

I was right

Yup, all good :o). I haven't actually tasted it yet, but it certainly looks good! The biggest issue with having such a moist dough so far is how much harder it is to slash the top of it before baking. These won't have as nice a crust as the first loaf did as a result.

An unintentionally moist sourdough

It happened again... I ran out of flour. But I decided that there was just enough to make a workably moist dough, so all was well. I think. We'll see when it finishes baking! Anyway, here's the recipe:

An Unintentionally Moist Sourdough
Ingredients
For the sponge

• 200g Strong wholemeal flour
• 250ml Water
• Decent chunk of sourdough starter

For the dough

• 10g Salt
• 180g Strong wholemeal flour
  

Method

1. Mix together the ingredients for the sponge, put in a bag and leave overnight.
2. Add the salt and the rest of the flour.
3. Knead until smooth.
4. Make a round, put in bag and let rise for about an hour.
5. Tip out, form into a round and leave to rise for another hour.
6. Repeat step 5.
7. Deflate, divide into two portions, shape into loaves, put in a bag and leave to prove (I ended up going out and left it for about 8 hours!)
8. Bake at the highest possible oven temperature for ~10 minutes then turn down to ~200C for a further 30 minutes.

Here are the loaves before proving.What they look like ready for the oven.