Still not baking

While I'm posting stuff that's not-quite-baking, it's occurred to me that I never followed up on the initial bread machine post from last year. It didn't take too long to hone the bread machine recipe into one that is actually not bad - though it bears very, very little resemblance to the one in the manual that we started from. But in case it's useful to anyone out there, here is what we have settled on as our "standard" bread machine loaf:

A Better Bread Machine Loaf

Ingredients

• 270ml Water
• 7g/1tsp Salt
• ~1tbsp Olive oil
• ~1/2 tbsp Sugar
• 180g Strong wholemeal flour
• 180g Strong white flour
• 7g/1 sachet Yeast

Settings

• 1lb/1.5lb Loaf size (our machine only does two sizes - this is the smaller one)
• Dark crust
• French bread programme

The regular programme works fine, but the French bread one has a slightly longer rise time, which seems to give a marginally better result. Likewise, the 50/50 brown/white flour split gives a nice texture (in our opinion), but it does work pretty well using just one or the other.

Almost baking

By long standing convention, pizza and pancakes are not "baking" for the purposes of the blog (mostly because I make them so much more frequently than anything else and I'm too lazy to write them up every single time). But we'll make an exception this time around because, rather incredibly, I don't think I've ever made drop scones/scotch pancakes before - at least not that I can recall. Well, today I fixed that!

Drop Scones

Ingredients

• 200g Plain flour
• 2 tsp/10g Baking powder
• 1/2 tsp/3.5g* Salt
• 50g Caster sugar
• 1 Egg
• 270ml Milk

Method

1. Mix flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a mixing bowl.
2. Beat egg and milk together.
3. Pour liquid into dry ingredients gradually, mixing to a batter around the consistency of double cream.
4. Fry a couple of tablespoons of batter at a time, flipping after ~2-3 mins once a crust has formed and the surface goes bubbly.

Here's about half the stack. The other half might have got eaten before I thought to take a picture...

These were amazing though! Soft, light, fluffy - and very, very easy!

*In case anyone's wondering, after struggling for years with measuring out salt accurately and screwing bread up far too many times because of it, I finally went and bought a teeny tiny set of digital scales that weighs down to 0.01g precision. While I use it almost exclusively for salt, I suspect most other people who own such scales are very keen to measure quantities of herbs extremely accurately. Still, I'd definitely recommend it for anyone who also struggles with getting quantities of salt perfect when baking!