my New Toy

2008 marks a new beginning for me.
The arrival of a baby and an arrival of my new Zojirushi bread machine. My previous ever faithful Princess, caused a blackout at home, due to inactivity, during my 9 months of pregnancy. And it was the best excused to replace it since am on maternity leave and bread is a basic staple.

Its one of the cutest smallest machine that is portable and makes great loaves of bread.





Here's the yummy treat - Choc Chip Bread. My hubby's favourite.





And these are using new recipes that i discovered, mixing bread and cake flour= the perfect plain soft loaf.

Choc Chip Bread

Happy 2008!

To usher in the new year, my neighbours decided to have a small coundown gathering by the poolside, and each of us had to bring something home made.

As i had a dinner party to attend prior to this, i made my bread machine do most of the work. The only problem i faced was that the machine never beeped for me to throw in the choc chips, so i had to knead in the choc chips and let the dough rest in the machine. The end result was still satisfactory, using the delayed bake function.

As you can see, the choc chips were melted into the dough. A real chocolate treat for all and this loaf was made using only Harvest King flour with unsweetned choc chips. The texture turned out less dense and had a lot more holes.

The beauty of this loaf was that when it emerged fresh from the machine, it was crusty and tasted really good.
This morning when i had a slice, it still tasted just as soft and good.

Apple Cake, Brownie & No Knead Bread

This one week break from work, has been a wonderful recharge for me. I baked non stopped, from blueberry muffins (which i totally forgot to take pictures of) to trying to do the NY Times no knead bread. The blueberry muffins were Xmas Presents for my neighbours.

What filled the air in my home was aroma of nice smelling prducts that was enjoyed by my neighbours and here's proof to demonstrate what i've done. In just 3 hours, these were the end results that came out of the oven.

An Apple cake , which is a simple butter cake recipe topped with sliced apples.





And my 2nd attempt at making Roses' brownies. Its still the best brownie recipe to date , the recipe is compliments from Rose's the cake bible website www.thecakebible.com

The crust was flaky and the texture was fudgy.





One of my neighbours tried making the brownie from the same recipe,last evening, but becaused she reduced the sugar to 180 gm and baked longer, i assumed, it affected the end result and it did not look like the above. Her crust was hard and the fudgy texture was dense.

After reading many posts, i took up the challenge of doing the no knead bread. I left the dough sitting in my dinning room for more than 25 hours before i attempted to handle it.

I must confess, the dough was soft, bubbly and hard to handle. i ended up having dough all over my fingers no matter how much flour i dusted. In the end, I gave up shaping the dough and just scooped it into my corning ware and sent it to the oven to bake. Some pecans, walnuts, flax seeds were added to the final proofing stage and i dusted semolina flour all over.

It emerged as a rustic loaf but the texture needs more improvement. It smelled and tasted yeasty and not to my liking though, although my neighbours' thoroughly enjoyed it .