For a while there I didn’t feel I could justify making baking posts because I was mostly just continuing my adventures with the bread machine. I had guests come to stay a couple of times which proved my theory right on the delights of putting on a loaf first thing and having time to shower, tidy the flat and make some soup before my guests arrived just as the loaf came out of the machine. However as I was mostly just playing around with different packet mixes to see which settings gave the best results with a fairly consistent starting point. (I did discover that different brands, despite having nigh on identical weights and ingredients, produce vastly different results!) I have in the interim, developed opinions on the best settings to use on my machine and, while yes, I would still likely never have bought one myself, I am delighted with it and it has earned its space on my kitchen counter.
Then in March my colleague left us and as his last week involved him being on early shift and thus precluded us taking him to the pub, we had a coffee and cake morning for him. Lots of baking was done and cake eaten. And, because if I have a niche in baking it’s unusual savoury pastry treats, I dug out the pastry swirls recipe and made little pesto puffs for the occasion which the guest of honour proved particularly fond of so success! (I often find at these sort of occasions people overcompensate by making the sweetest, richest recipes in their repertoire, so making a savoury option as a contrast will go down well.) I actually made a double batch, one lot of pesto and one sweet batch made with nutella. They were a great success, except with a late arriving colleague who mistook them for cinnamon rolls and was somewhat discombobulated by the pesto when he bit into one!
And I started writing this entry about my baking progress and then never actually finished it! It’s been months, this file was labelled ‘march baking’, it is most definitely not April any more. However, I may have stopped writing about it, but I definitely did not stop baking. I didn’t bake as much as I might have hoped, but that has been impacted by different external forces, between work and the weather I haven’t had as much time for baking or other cooking as I would have liked, but I’m still managing to carve out some time.
Unless I’m baking for a particular event – the puff pastry swirls for my colleague leaving, or the brownies for the triathalon folks – then I tend to bake on a Sunday evening when I know I’ll be on early shift in the morning. I like to do a batch cook on a Sunday night more generally but it’s more vital when I’m going to be on earlies and there’s a high chance I’ll be too tired to cook anything too adventurous. As that quite often involves making a pasta bake or something similar – a big dish of cauliflower cheese, a pie or a quiche perhaps – I often motivate myself to do it with the thought that well, I have the oven on anyway, I might as well bake. I was reminded about this tendency this afternoon as I made three cheese and spinach muffins, these are particularly complex muffins, but my usual go-to muffin recipe is really quick and straight-forward and can be easily adapted to almost any fruit I have in the house at short notice. (I’ve even make them with frozen cherries before.) A while back I resurrected an old favourite by making Danish pastries, but with rhubarb I’d found on special. I will say that using up food stuffs that I bought on special, whether fruit or pastry, has definitely been a theme of my baking lately. I think if I were going to set a target for my baking for the rest of the year, it would be to try more new recipes because after an adventurous start to the year I’ve definitely been falling back on old favourites.
Cupboard Life 