Adventures in bread making (and other baked goods)

The thing I love most about our house is the kitchen, or rather the kitchens. I haven't worked out if it's a Mauritian thing, or an Indian Ocean thing, or maybe a Chinese thing, but we have 2 kitchens; a big open plan one with a sink, oven, and lots of cupboards and work surface, and a much smaller kitchen with the gas cooker and a sink, for frying and cooking 'smelly' food. 

(Not relevant to the story, but the lizards like both our kitchens equally, and as you can see, the wall of the big one is painted hot pink!)

I grew up eating amazing homemade cake and when I moved to France, it was one of the things I missed most about England. Unfortunately, cooking anything in a kitchen the size of most people's guest loo was a bit of an exploit, so I didn't do a lot of baking while living in Paris. Now though, I have no excuse.

For Christmas I was given Mary Berry's Baking Bible, and for my birthday this year I received a subscription to Good Food magazine so I have plenty of inspiration. Finding equivalent ingredients, however, is another story. I thought it would be an interesting experiment, for example, to replace courgette with the calebasse chinoise from our garden in a courgette and lime cake recipe. Big mistake. I ended up with a stodgy mess that even my greedy husband refused to eat, and that's saying something.

This week, I decided to try making my own bread. Mauritian bread is not bad, a kind of fat, slightly softer baguette. Sliced bread is pretty terrible though, it often doesn't have a crust, which I find a little strange. For my first attempt, I used Mary Berry's basic cottage loaf recipe which calls for strong white flour. Flour here is graded by number - self raising flour is 45, all purpose flour 65, brown bread flour 110 and chapati flour 160. I had all of those in my cupboard except 110, so I thought I'd go with the 'strongest' number I had, and used the chapati flour.

The resulting loaf looked like this: 

It was still a bit raw and doughy in the middle and generally not that nice. I ate the crust covered in butter and threw the rest away. On day 2, I used the same recipe but with all purpose flour and more kneading and proving time. I also made a different shape from the one Mary suggests. I ended up with this :

This one was not bad at all. especially toasted. Day 3, I changed things around a little and made banana bread and pizza base (both delicious!) And finally last night, I prepared the dough for this one, which I baked for breakfast this morning:

New recipe (BBC Good Food website) and brown bread flour (type 110), in a loaf tin (bright yellow, silicone) Verdict - better than the others! The French have an expression "C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron" ("Practice makes perfect", or literally, "It's by forging that one becomes a blacksmith") Hopefully, by baking, one day I will become a baker!