Tag Archives: baking

Bread from English Flours milled at a Welsh Watermill

Made with Felin Ganol milled rye flour

I don’t know if the expression ‘ Sending Coals to Newcastle’  means anything to non British readers?  It’s an expression for sending something to someone which by definition they already have in abundance, so sending bread to a miller would seem to be a slightly crazy thing to do, like sending moon dust to the moon, but that’s what I did a little while ago.

Rye is not as popular in England as it is in the Northern European countries. We get less choice in the sort of flours we can get. It is nigh on impossible to find a shop that supplies cut rye grain, the only suppliers being the mills. The Rye flour generally available is quite coarse and while of course one can bake with it, I like to use a finer flour when I am trying to make European style rye. Continue reading →

Simon Rimmer’s Mint Chocolate Biscuits

Zeb Bakes Simon Rimmer Mint Chocolate Biscuits

I have been away, I hope you didn’t miss me too much, and as I am probably one of the more disorganized bloggers around I don’t have a secret supply of posts that I write in advance, no ‘here is one I prepared earlier’ in this house.

But last night I returned to find one, just one, of these over-the-top cookies left in the tin that I left for My True Love to console himself with while I was away. So I thought you might like to hear about them.

I made these Mint Chocolate Biscuits last week from a Simon Rimmer recipe on the BBC Food Site that EM told me about as I was thrashing around trying to figure out how to tackle this one –  for which my profuse thanks as always!

My brief was to produce a chocolate biscuit with a layer of squidgy minty stuff in it, covered, ideally completely in DARK chocolate.  MTL was not amused as he reported that the only ones he could find in the shops were milk chocolate and that would not do. He referred to a biscuit called a Yo-Yo in a green packet and said they were no more and he was sad and lonely without them. Continue reading →

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.