Google
 

Saturday 30 August 2008

Starting allover again...

It´s all so quiet around here... The reason for this is the fact that I will remember 2008 as "the big wedding year"... About ten days ago, I´ve arrived in Germany, went straight to another friend´s wedding and have been preparing my own, second wedding since then. After the first, rather home-made affair in Australia - this is going to be the full shebang with church, lots of family and friends, and - of course - loads of food and wine!

Luckily, most of the preparations have been taken care of by my parents - thank goodness - so things aren´t quite as crazy around here as one might imagine otherwise. Still, there´s plenty of stuff to do and I won´t be blogging very much until it´s all over. Well, who would have thought...

To top it all off, my husband and I will be attending another friend´s wedding before finally heading home again. And we haven´t even been able to go to all the weddings in Australia and Germany we have been invited to this year!

I wish you all a great time and hope to return to blogging as soon as normal life kicks in again!

Friday 1 August 2008

BBD#12 - Small Breads

No, I did not throw my wildly growing sprouts into these bread rolls. Although I admit that I was mightily tempted..;-) However, with friends coming over for dinner the other night, I didn't reckon that I should subject them to an experiment with - at best - questionable outcome.

Oh well, I will come up with something eventually. But this time, I decided to rather go with the recipe of a trustworthy blogger. Having seen intricately shaped sacaduros ages ago at Chili&Ciabatta (and always wanting to make them) plus another deadline coming up all to soon - I was set for another installment of Zorra's Bread Baking Day: Aparna of My Diverse Kitchen had chosen "Small Breads" as her topic. Bread Rolls is something I make far too rarely, so I was pretty happy about this theme!

Alas, as you can see, they don't quite look like Petra's. Due to work, I needed to make the rolls the evening before and rewarm them right before dinner. That's why I decided to leave out the crucial ingredient, stupid me.

When shaping sacaduros, you put a cube of butter with a little flaky salt into the middle and fold thin strips of dough over it. While baking these strips partly unfold and get all nice and crispy, thus revealing their buttery innards. However, I was afraid that it would get all soggy when rewarmed and decided to leave out the butter. Without it, the sacaduros unfortunately turned out rather flat.

On the positive side, I was really pleased with my combination of bread flour and 70 grams of spelt flour for a hearty but still refined flavour.

And in case you're interested, that's what we were using the bread rolls for: mopping up the juices from salmon and vegetable parchment parcels. Made with lemon juice and white wine, there was a lot of nice broth to mop up!


PS: As you know by now, blogging deadlines are not my forte (probably because all my energy is used up meeting professional deadlines...ok, no more excuses). Anyway, today is the national day of Switzerland, and Zorra, missing her homeland, has asked to cook something red, white, or Swiss to celebrate the day. Dutifully, I made rice pudding with canned cherries this week - and took horrible photos of the rather nice rice pudding. That's why I'm posting an old and never published photo of an equally tasty but ultimately more photogenic rice pudding. Enjoy, Zorra!