baking and some more baking Just a few days after I had made the pesto braided bread and patted my back 🙂 and Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen comes up with the August We Knead to Bake challenge…. a savoury filled bread and the bread had to be decorative. Couldn’t do the Russian Braid again so the earnest hunt began for a decorative bread. The first place I hunted was my book marked and saved recipes and lo behold came across rose buns to try from Fauzia’s Kitchen Fun. More than the filling what caught my eye was the shape. I searched for other decorative shapes but the rose rolls were stuck in my head. So one more bookmarked recipe or rather technique over and…

  Home Bakers Challenge # 1  This is my first entry for the Home Bakers Challenge, a group where enthusiastic home bakers bake every month according to the challenge set. The group was started by Priya of Priya’s Versatile Recipes. This month the recipes were selected by Gayathri a member of the group. She gave a choice of five recipes. I spent nearly a week trying to decide which one to make, sweet or savoury, savoury or sweet. Kept on scrolling down the recipes umpteen of times. Finally decide on a savoury recipe as for the past few weeks I have baked so many sweet treats. I am glad I chose to make the pizza rolls. I decided to make the dough at home and…

an early Christmas treat!    What is a Swedish tea ring? Its a sweet pastry/ bread traditionally served during Christmas as a tea time treat or for breakfast. Thus the name tea ring. Its very much like the cinnamon buns but this tea ring is shaped into a wreath. The filling can vary from nuts to dried fruits and different spices. When Gayathri the initiator of the Baking Eggless group sent the recipe as the challenge for this month, I took one look at the picture and thought, that it would be complicated. It actually is not and its fun to make different shapes with yeast dough. I will be certainly making this recipe again and again as the tea ring was absolutely delicious. Perhaps…

J’adore ce pain The July challenge from the we knead to bake group  was Gibassier (pronounced as zee-bah-see-ay). This aromatic, delicious, rich, breakfast bread or pastry hails from the Lourmarin village in the Provence region of France. It is usually flavoured with candied orange peel, orange zest, orange blossom water and anise seeds (fennel seeds). It is brushed with clarified butter and sprinkled with caster sugar. It is believed that the doughnut like bread or pastry got its name from the mountain Le Gibas that can be seen in the horizon of the village. For more information about this delicious bread or cookie as some in France call it visit Aparna’s blog, My Diverse Kitchen. I was doing more research on the bread on the…

aroma therapy   While the bread was baking, the whole house was filled with the aroma of basil. My neighbour smelt basil all the way near the lift of our floor. She came to check what was cooking. Remember in my last post I mentioned that I made some pesto, well I used it to make some delicious bread which I wanted to bake for such a long time. Using biga to make the bread was the other temptation. Using biga makes the bread more flavourful. It gives more strength to weak flour. So the plain flour that we get in Kenya and India is quite weak compared to the ones available in the western countries. Its also amazing how two pinches of yeast can…