What’s this Reblogging then? Trying it out

I was reminded by Misk’s great pitta post this morning of just how much I love the perfect pitta recipe from Dan Lepard which is one of the Short and Tweet challenges this week and can be found in Short and Sweet, Dan’s new book.

Turn your oven to max and bake these soon!

About Re-blogging

I am just experimenting with the reblog button here.

You need to click on one of the photos above to go to the old post and if you commented then you can read your old comments too (horrors! I am often surprised when I find my old comments on people’s posts having no memory of writing them hee hee)

 I am not convinced it adds much to the blogging process to reblog my own posts, so I probably won’t do it again but it was interesting (for me) to see how it works. I think the idea is that you do it to other people’s posts, so you showcase someone else’s work on your own blog. I am not sure that my friends would like me to do that? Do you who read this blog want to know what else I have read and found interesting in this way?  Surely it is nicer just to put a link in a relevant post. Or write an enthusiastic widget ?  This whole pinning and reblogging thing is a bit over the top, I am looking at something called Storify too, I am not sure about any of it. Anyone else got any views on this to share?

I notice it leaves out the quotation marks round the quote from Dan Lepard and it doesn’t put in the link that I embedded in the original post. Both these things are elements that should be present and I am not that impressed.

I’ll write a new post later today about something else!

Snapseed, Shards and Spirals

Snapseed is an inexpensive photo editing programme for the Mac that I am quite fond of and try to use with restraint, though I do love the textures that it creates as above.

This is one of my most recent batches of sourdough rye crackers cut out with a spiral roll stamp which is a good use for this funny little object apart from making pretty patterns on small dinner rolls. Celia made some very good rolls with hers in her Playing with Bread post when we were going mad for Rosetta rolls last year.

Here are a couple of the other pictures, including some rather elegant, or so I thought, shards. These keep so well in an ordinary kitchen tub with an airtight seal. I keep the little packets of absorbent gel that come with camera equipment and put them in the tubs. You can dry them out in a warm oven when they get damp and re-use them, very useful! These crackers are well worth making if you have some spare time and a little old starter that you are not sure what to do with. I have adapted the original recipe to use other ingredients that I like, so don’t be afraid to do that too!

They do end up quite floury so I decided to dust them down with a clean paint brush as I don’t like the taste of rye flour when it is loose on the surface of a cracker. I did feel a bit like Mrs Matisse dusting the fruit (Great Housewives of Art) but it was all in a good cause. I am always delighted with the way that the sun transforms the appearance of bread. Rye has a characteristic grey tone normally but in the sunlight everything is touched with gold.

Making Good use of Oven Space – Breadbox

Zeb Bakes Bread

I am often asked if I repeat the breads I bake and the answer is that of course I do, but just as no two days are the same, no two breads that I bake are ever quite the same, I’m a home baker after all!

We have favourites and variations on themes so this is what I am going to call a Breadbox post, it will probably have a bread I’ve blogged about before but these posts will have nice pics ( I hope) of those and any half baked thoughts that are floating around in my head. Continue reading