How not to bake bread

So here's another post that's not about cupcakes, or makeup! I do bake cup cakes, honest! It's just I've become slightly carried away with The Great British Bake Off (UK TV series) and have set a challenge to bake something from the show each week. Last week was upside own cake....which didn't last long enough to photograph but was almost successful.

This week was bread! I love the idea of bread. But i'll freely admit I really am not a fan of kneading. It's time consuming, messy, takes up the entirety of my work surface and I never seem to get anywhere with it. So, with the arrival of the new Kenwood Masterchef with dough hook (more on my love/hate relationship with Ken another time) and spurred on by TGBBO I thought to myself on Wednesday night when I got home from work, I know, I'll make some bread!!

I had this bright idea at approximately 7pm....at approximately 12am I was just about ready to collapse into bed having just finished baking!

This was of course not before giving sleeping Husband the fright of his life by setting off all the smoke alarms in the house at 11pm...turns out a 230 degree celsius oven tends to smoke a
bit :)

It was nothing short of traumatic and ended with me sitting on the kitchen floor, staring into the oven at nearly midnight like I was having some sort of psychotic episode and had mistaken the oven for the television.

Anyway, cut a long story short, I made some bread. And it worked!! And here's a picture to prove it. The moral of this tale is, don't start baking bread at 7pm.

Less of a post, more of a trial run

...to see if I can't do this thang via the iPad. So far so good.

Here's a gratuitous picture of a chocolate roulade (a Mary Berry recipe if you're interested) I made for pudding last night.  It's huge. TV remote is in the photo for scale. Not strictly a cupcake, but tasty none the less! It took a bit of fiddling to get it to load up and the involvement of Picasa Web which is unfortunate. But I think I've cracked it. 

Onwards!

Want to get the perfect dome? – go have a serious word with your oven

So, in the begininng I made alright cup cakes. They tasted nice, I covered them in sparkly bits to make them look pretty, everyone ate them. But hiding underneath all that Dr Oetker jazzle was a sorry secret. My cupcakes were flat. Flat as a witches whatsit. Indeed sometimes they weren’t just flat but they 'splayed'. Yes that right, much energy appeared to be going into pushing outwards into a mushroom shape rather than upward into the ideal aesthetic for the top of a cupcake.....the dome.

To begin with I told myself it didn’t matter; my little deformed creations tasted nice and no one complained. But as with most things I do in life, I soon started to pile on the pressure. My cupcakes had to be perfect. The flat topped mushroom shaped cupcakes of the early days were good enough no more. And so I began my research (with the help of Google) into the mysterious art of achieving ‘the dome’....

Turns out it’s not all that mysterious at all really; the oven wasn’t hot enough.

The oven said it was hot enough, but the oven was lying to me. I proved this to myself and the oven by sticking my new oven thermometer in, turning it up to 170c (no fan) and watched in wonder and amazement as the oven beeped at me to tell me it had reached its designated operating temperature, when in reality the little swine was running at approximately 140c!!! Another 10 minutes went by before I final gave in and twiddled the knob as it was quite clear that my oven had no intention of ever doing what I’d asked and held its ground at a stead fast 150c.

So in my house if you want the oven to run at 170c you have to turn the dial to 190c. It’s fine. This is not a particularly arduous solution to a small problem and it means that from that day to this, every batch of cupcakes has come out with a dome Sir Christopher Wren himself would have been proud of.  

So, there you go. Hopefully if you stumbled across this post on your own quest to create the perfect domed cupcake it’s been of some use.

I bought my oven thermometer from Amazon, I paid a fiver, but now you can get it for £2.70. Brilliant!

I love cupcakes and I love make up.....I figure I can't be the only one out there in the universe.....so I shall write about both until somebody finds me....here goes :)