Making a wholemeal of it

It’s been a couple of weeks or so since my last post. I took some time out over the Easter break to entertain visitors, plant up new window boxes and generally have a relaxing time. I’ve also been doing a little baking experimentation. Before making the pitta breads described in my post It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier I did quite a lot of research into recipes. Many of them indicated that plain or strong flour could be used. The use of plain flour seemed a little odd to me, but if you’ve been following this blog you’ll know my knowledge and experience of bread-making, although growing, remain somewhat limited. Overall, therefore, since pitta are flatbreads and the yeast-to-flour ratio is high, I concluded that the type of flour would not be as relevant as it would for a pan loaf.

I had bought a bag of wholemeal self-raising flour for a recipe that I ended up not using and I didn’t want it to go to waste. When I buy pitta breads from the shop, I frequently prefer wholemeal ones. Taking the information at face value, therefore, I tried out my recipe with this flour; if the difference between strong and weak didn’t matter, I figured that the difference between self-raising and plain flour wouldn’t matter here either.

If you like your pittas to resemble large thin oatcakes, this is definitely the recipe for you! They tasted lovely, but the dough was hard and difficult to knead, there was not even an inkling of a rise and there was not a chance in Hell of splitting the finished breads to fill them. Perhaps I should have donated them to the Olympic Games discus competitors…

I thought perhaps that using half wholemeal and half strong white flour would solve the problem. Indeed, it did improve things a little, and the bread ended up a little lighter, but remained almost impossible to split, having few air pockets and a slightly crumbly texture.

Finally, I just went right out there and bought some strong brown flour. From the word go the dough felt different – smoother, lighter, more elastic and more malleable. The pittas came out delightfully soft and easy to split. One thing of note, though, was that they didn’t puff up in the oven quite as impressively as the white ones did. Rather, they developed multiple large air bubbles. When reheated, though, these popped back up and the small areas in between offered only slight resistance so they were still easy to split. My conclusion, therefore, is that pittas do need to be made with strong flour to be able to hold any rise achieved. I have amended the tutorial posted in It's a pitta I didn't try this earlier to reflect this finding.

But what to do with the bag of self-raising wholemeal flour? Well, as I had some lemons in the fridge, I created the recipe below for lemon and pine nut muffins. These were much more successful than the self-raising-flour pitta breads and go rather well with a cup of tea and a good book!

Lemon and pine nut muffins

125 g plain white flour

125 g wholemeal flour

100 g caster sugar

3 tsp baking powder

Half tsp salt

175 ml milk

75 ml vegetable oil

1 egg

Rind and juice of 2 lemons

75 g pine nuts

Heat the oven to 200ºC/400ºF/gas mark 6. Grease a 12-muffin baking tray or line it with paper bun cases. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, lemon rind and salt. In a separate bowl beat together the milk, oil, egg and lemon juice. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir gently until the dry ingredients are moistened, but do not beat; the mixture should remain lumpy. Gently stir in the pine nuts. Fill each bun case 3/4 full and bake for 20–25 min or until a cocktail stick inserted in the centre comes out clean and the cakes feel firm. Leave to cool on a cooling rack.

Smouldering inspiration

The past week few weeks have felt like the new start that is supposed to be hailed by Spring. We have celebrated several birthdays, latterly sun has been shining and blissfully warm, and things just feel somewhat shiny and new. Speaking of shiny and new, one of the birthdays was mine and I was lucky enough to be bought an Amazon Kindle.

I have generally been something of a book purist, resisting the electronic revolution and waxing lyrical about the feel of a print cover, the paper page and so on. However, print books have their downsides. I mostly use quite a modestly sized backpack style bag owing to a bad back and, therefore, only have room for small, slim books. In addition, I am pretty much blind as a bat; things become blur-free around an index finger’s length from my face. When I was younger with a lower prescription, I loved to read a few pages at night to help me relax and nod off to sleep. To be effective, though, this requires lying down on my side without my glasses. Given the current degree of my myopia I have to hold the book so close to my face that turning pages or holding up the heavy side of a large book can be a pain, especially when it clonks me in the face if I do nod off before I put the book down.

The Kindle has solved both these problems. It’s the perfect size for my handbag and I can enlarge the font to enable me to read at night without catching pages on my nose or scaring myself awake with a paper slap on the cheek. In the handbag, though, I felt a little protection would be warranted to prevent scratches to the screen. I had a look online for covers and the array is quite bewildering. Materials include leather, faux leather, neoprene, canvas, silicone gel and knitted polyester, and prices range from around £5 for a cheap gel skin to around £70 for the Diane von Furstenberg designer clutch case. After falling off my chair at the upper-end price, I decided to just make my own. After all, it could hardly be simpler to knit a little bag.

Some of you will know already I’m a keen knitter, which means I have various odds and ends of left over wool just waiting for such a project. I dug out some sock wool and whipped up the cover below.

For a bit of interest, and to distinguish it from the ubiquitous ribbed sock-type covers, I used 4 X 6 basket weave stitch (for the knitters out there). I’m rather pleased with the results, even if I do say so myself. Overpriced designers eat your hearts out!

Perhaps I’ll start a range for the ever-increasing assortment of electronic devices entering our lives….

A quiet week

Well, it’s been a quiet cooking week this week. This is mainly due to the fact that my freezer was fit to burst with all the left over homemade goodies from the previous few weeks. It has also been a bit of a blessing in disguise, as the delectable Mr M was off sick and out of action to do his share of the cooking while I was busy in my other guise as a freelance editor/writer. Sunday was, though, the poorly man’s birthday, so I offered to bake him a cake to celebrate and take his mind off his stuffy nose and cotton wool head.

We don’t eat a lot of cake in this house because it takes too long to get through it with just the two of us. It’s a shame, really, because I enjoy baking and do in fact make a mean Victoria sponge. M’s birthday is my annual concession. The past few years I’ve made a chocolate cake, the recipe for which I obtained from my mother in law and which is really chocolaty without being sickly and sweet. This year, though, M chose a carrot cake.

I was intrigued by this choice, since he says he’s hardly ever eaten it. I find this gap in his gastronomic life surprising, as I think carrot cake has come up in most conversations I’ve had about cake since its rise to prominence in the late 1980s, and most people seem to love it. Indeed, I had a part-time job in a baker’s shop years ago and carrot cake was one product absolutely guaranteed to fly off the shelves. Also M’s mother is a marvellous cake baker, but it seems it’s just not a cake she bakes particularly. It turned out that people have brought carrot cake into the office on birthdays and Mr M had been particularly taken with it—the delectable eating the delectable!

I have to say, this was rather a satisfying cake to make because it’s so simple but the result is impressively very tasty. I really do recommend it to anyone who isn’t confident about making cakes. There’s no creaming of the fat and sugar, you don’t have to worry about the batter curdling when you add the eggs, and there’s no issue about the technicalities of folding in the flour to while not knocking out the air. Admittedly, if you have to grate the carrots manually it might be a little tedious, but if you have a food processor, it’s extraordinarily simple (and it’s quite fascinating watching that amount of something get shredded so quickly!).

The traditional topping for carrot cake is made with cream cheese but I couldn’t find any, so I made up a mascarpone icing instead. The orange and lemon yielded a subtle citrus infusion, and it has a freshness that complemented the cake rather well.

Last week’s tutorial seemed quite well received, so I’ve done the same thing again this week. Feedback on whether these are useful is welcome—and of course on the cake if you make one yourself!