Christmas is here!

Its cold, its fresh, its festive: gotta be December, gotta be Christmas! As we busy ourselves baking the traditional Christmas cake and doing up the house, there are also more social get-togethers with friends, as we let our hair down, and unwind and get set to welcome another year.

We took the opportunity of a more relaxed Saturday to hand make a festive bread: I love saffron, cardamom and orange zest, and I love bread. So why not put it all together in one recipe to make "Pulla Bread"?! This is a Finnish semi sweet pleated bread that is enjoyed with coffee on special occasions. For my recipe, I added a lot of Turkish saffron and used honey instead of sugar. What we enjoyed the most was the braiding of the flour to make a lovely pattern.

Unfortunately I have no idea how it tasted: we packed up the whole bread for a friend whose home we were visiting for a festive dinner. Definitely one to do again, where the pleasure in making is as much as in the eating!

Light Rye Bread

Hot off the oven

Festivals in India are traditionally yet another excuse to make and gorge on sweets. But this Krishna Janmashtami, I felt I should try something different. I resolved to try and make something new for each Indian festival at the minimum, but also for a number of other big festivals internationally. This is more of an aspiration: for sure a lot of perspiration! Let’s see how it goes.

I started off my new resolution by trying to bake light rye bread from first principles, ie the old fashioned way of beating up the flour by hand and putting into an extremely hot oven. I must say the experience was rather therapeutic and relaxing, and we got a chewy but healthy (and dare I say tasty) bread to show for the effort! No additives, no unhealthy ingredients. I substituted agave nectar for the honey in the recipe but it didn’t seem to matter. What will be interesting is to see how long the bread stays moist. I have observed that home made bread dries out very quickly particularly if refrigerated. So an excuse to gorge on it until you finish it the same day!

Auspicious beginnings: let’s hope this continues.

Light Rye Bread

August 18, 2014