Banana Bread & Foccacia

With my long Christmas break, I have been having some fun in the kitchen. Some of the baking came out good and some were a little disappointing. 


Banana bread, I made this before but it was a little dense according to my dessert critic. So this time, I am trying Peter Reinhart's recipe, except I can't help but reduce the sugar. 

I think it tasted much better than the earlier one that I did. The recipe says to let it rest for an hour before cutting it but there was someone who couldn't wait and had to have a piece. So the first piece looked a little dense. 

The banana bread was nice for a few days. It didn't dry up and it was nice when lightly toasted in the oven and enjoyed with a cup of coffee for breakfast. 

Then one evening I also made garlic and herbs foccacia and we had it hot from the oven with minestrone soup. A nice hot bowl of soup with homemade foccacia. 

Salami & Cheese Pizza

My first time making pizza dough. I just picked a recipe from one of the library recipe books that I borrowed. It was rather simple to make. I made extra dough and stored it in the freezer so that it can be easily defrosted for whenever we feel like having pizza again. The pizza base was a little thicker than what we like but it was still delicious with all the salami and cheese. I ate more than I should. Ha Ha.

Spreading tomato paste on the dough.

Layering with salami and cheese.

Into the oven it goes.

Salami and Cheese Pizza. 

Love the slightly burnt bits.

The second time we had the pizza, we were a little bit more creative, we had mixture of egg plants and also anchovies. I loved the egg plants. Yum!

Mini Panini & Chorizo Onion Rolls

Found an interesting recipe in Bourke Street Bakery recipe book for Olive Oil dough. First make a small portion of fermented dough which was rested for a day and then added into the dough mixture to make the bread.  

From this basic olive oil dough, you can make a few types of buns in the book. So I decided to try to make half a recipe of panini and half of chorizo and caramelised onion rolls. Making bread takes a long time and a lot of patience. A lot of resting and kneading but like many bread maker will tell you, it can be therapeutic. For me, it is double bonus because I love eating bread. 

The chorizo and onion rolls came out really nice, except that some onions got a little burnt. It still didn't take us very long to finish it.

Final proof before baking.

Ready to eat Chorizo & Caramelised onion rolls.

The panini was interesting too. I read the recipe a few times and I am sure it says to cut it 4cm x 4cm. It looked rather small to me but I followed the recipe anyway, thinking that the final proof and the baking process will make it bigger. Well, it didn't really get much bigger. 

It was so cute to see them rising in the oven, they looked like little pillows. The texture was nice and soft and it stayed soft for a few days too. I think the fermented dough gave it a nice flavour. I had it for breakfast, lunch and dinner the next day. 

Mini Panini

That is my giant hand holding a small piece of panini. I guess it is good that it is small, then I can have seconds.

Panini with salmon and soup.

Roti Canai

Never in my life did I think that one day I will make roti canai. It is something so easily available and considerably cheap back home in Malaysia. Almost any time of the day or night, you can get roti canai. They are normally available at hawker stalls that we call "mamak stalls". Mamak in Malaysia refers to the Indian Muslim community. You can probably say that they monopolise the roti canai making industry. 

These mamak stalls sell many different kinds of roti but my favourite is still the original roti canai, freshly pan fried and served with curry. Sometimes these stalls can be very busy and they prepare the roti canai in advance. That is when everything goes wrong. Roti has to be served hot from the pan. The texture has to be crispy and flaky. If it is prepared in advance, it loses all that quality.

Preparing the dough for resting.

There are many variations to the roti canai, endless creations really. You can have roti with banana, also one of my favourites, roti with egg, roti with cheese, roti with milo, roti with sardine, roti with nutella, roti tissue where the roti is not folded when fried, therefore you get all the surface to be light and crispy or you can have the total opposite which is roti bomb where the dough is not  flatten much and fried thickly to get a doughy texture. That is the one that I absolutely do not like. 

Not so square plain roti canai.

 I guess you can say that I miss Malaysian food very much because I went searching for recipes to make roti canai. I found a few recipes from bloggers and decided to try ieatishootipost's recipe because he explained it quite thoroughly and he even had a video of him flipping the roti. It was a very helpful site.  It requires some skills to flip a good roti.

Roti for dinner.

It was really quite interesting that the recipe actually didn't use that much oil. I thought it will be so oily that I won't ever want to eat roti again. I rested the dough in the fridge overnight and I made fresh roti for dinner and lunch the next day. For dinner we had it with lamb curry and indian style thoran cabbage. Yummy.

A nicer square roti.

The roti turned out pretty good. It was crispy and not too oily. I still need to practise on the flipping though. I managed to get a nicer square after a few rounds of practise. I also made roti cheese and roti telur (egg) served with bacon. Next time, I want to try with vegemite and cheese. hehe....

Any orders?

Roti Telur with bacon.

Roti Cheese.

Holiday bake - Cheesymite scrolls

After the exam we got 2 weeks break and without realising it, it is already a week into the holiday. I just want to share with you what I baked this week. I made Cheesymite scrolls but the result wasn't good. It wasn't soft and the texture was more like a cake. I was also a little too generous with the vegemite, so it was quite salty. To make it worse, I overbaked it a little too. So triple failure for this bake. Oh well, I will just have to try it again. 

Vegemite is very Australian. It is the same as what we call Marmite back home. I remember when I first visited Australia many years back, I bought vegemite as a souvenir to bring home. Cheesymite scroll is a very Australian bun. It is a spiral bread with vegemite and cheese on the inside. I really like eating Cheesymite scrolls but not these that I made.

Simple Bun Dough.

The dough that I made was a simple bun dough which I proved for 1 hour until it doubled in size. It looked well risen but I am not sure why the end result of the texture wasn't soft. 

Rolled the dough flat.

Spreaded the vegemite and sprinkled with cheese.

 I didnt know how much vegemite to use, but now I know, this is too much. After I was done spreading the vegemite and sprinkling the cheese, I rolled the dough up and cut into 4-5cm thick. Placed them in a tray and let it prove again before baking them.

They have risen and are ready to be baked.

 They actually look quite nice except for some burnt bits. But too bad, it wasn't as tasty as I wished it was. 

Ready to eat.

Week 7 Focaccia

Bread time! 
Today we learn about yeast. All the recipes for today had yeast and flour as the basic ingredients. What is interesting is that even though all had similar ingredients, the end result for each was so different. By just changing the ratio and also cooking method, it creates something totally different to one another.
Today's menu had Focaccia, Chelsea Buns, Savarin and Brioche. 

That is my focaccia having it's first prove. 

The focaccia has no butter and is a fairly whitish dough but the Chelsea bun dough on the left is so much yellower because there is butter in it. It is so cool to see the dough double in size when it was proving. I was getting worried when my focaccia took much longer than others to rise. I thought I killed the yeast! Luckily it did rise after almost 2 hours. 

Our brioche

I have never seen or heard of Brioche before this. The texture is more like a cake and has strong buttery taste. The dough was more like a paste than a dough. It was rather wet and when proving it, it doesn't only rise, it has blisters in the paste. I too got a blister on my thumb from stirring the butter into the paste. It was so tiring. Luckily we work in pairs, so my teammate and I had to rotate the stirring task. Phew! We now all have popeye biceps.

Our Savarin Aux Fruits

Savarin... once again, I have never heard of this dessert before. It has it's own special savarin moulds which had a hole in the middle. It comes out like a ring and then we pour sugar syrup over it to let it soak it all up. Then fruits and whipped cream are filled in the centre before serving. I tried to carve a rose with the strawberry. Does it look like a rose? Well, it was good practice.

Pouring syrup into the savarin. 

I thought I wouldn't dare eat the Savarin because it must be very sweet. To my surprise, even though we poured sugar syrup over the savarin, it wasn't too sweet. That is because we use light syrup which was more water than sugar really. And because there were whipped cream and fruits to accompany it, what's there not to like about it. 

Our breads at the end of the day, we have focaccia with rosemary, chelsea buns which has raisins, currants and orange peel and the brioche which was plain. 

Focaccia, Chelsea Buns and Brioche.

It was a great week. We have a new trainer and he is just great. He is very organised, explains things clearly, doesn't mind people asking questions, demonstrates and gives tips to make things work better. I think I will learn a lot from him.