World Bread Day 2010 - Chelsea buns with fennel and apricot

Zorra of 1 umruhen bitte is once again hosting World Bread Day. All you have to do is bake any kind of bread and post about it on Saturday, October 16, 2010. Easy!

I had been eyeing up Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chelsea Buns with Fennel and Apricot for a while. I love dried apricots, and the combination of fennel and apricot seemed intriguing. The recipe from The Guardian is here.

To be honest, I wasn't overly enamoured of the fennel and apricot combination. I found the aniseed flavour to be a little overwhelming - maybe because I used ground fennel instead of fennel seeds?

If I made these again, I would change the method as follows:

• I would use less fennel (as I was using ground fennel);
• I would activate the yeast separately before putting it into the dough mixture - I found the rising of the dough to be rather lacklustre;
• I would use an eggwash to brown the dough on top, because I ended up with slightly overbrown bottoms and pale tops on my buns;
• I would probably ice the buns with water icing as opposed to using the milk glaze, which didn't add a lot, in my view.

Thanks to Zorra for being our host for World Bread Day once again, and you will be able to check out the roundup of breads from all over the world shortly on her site.

World Bread Day 2009 - Carrot Walnut Loaf

My how time flies when you're having fun. I cannot believe that it has been 12 months since the last World Bread Day. However, today is indeed World Bread Day 2009, and is once again hosted by Zorra of Kochtopf. To participate, all you have to do is to bake or buy bread of any kind and blog about it - simple!

Until I started blogging, I would never have dreamed of baking bread, but I am so glad that it is an art I have discovered - the variety and flavour of bread that you make yourself surpasses any supermarket bread, and you would be amazed at how easy it is. The biggest trick is making yeasted bread on cold days, when the yeast needs a little help to get going.

This year, I have made an unyeasted Carrot & Walnut Bread. The recipe comes from page 46 of the November 2009 edition of Australian Good Food magazine. Now, the bread in the photo is rustic to the extreme, and I found it a little off-putting. However, I am so glad that I ignored the photo and forged ahead - this bread is moist and delicious, with a wonderful crunchy texture from the walnuts. It actually reminded me more of a cake than a bread because it was so sweet and moist.

I did have one hitch with this bread in that the 30 minute baking time in the recipe was clearly not long enough in my case. I thought that my bread was ready at that stage, but the next day when I was cutting it into slices for work, I discovered to my horror that the middle section of the bread was still uncooked in the centre. Dang - all that lovely bread went into the bin. However, the end parts which were cooked through and which I did get to eat were fantastic. I would definitely make this bread again.

If you would like to make this bread for yourself, you will need:

2 1/3 cups plain flour
1 cup wholemeal plain flour
2 teaspoons bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)
1 teaspoon salt
1 grated carrot
1/4 cup toasted chopped walnuts
1 cup low fat yoghurt (I just used low fat vanilla)
1/2 cup skim milk

Preheat your oven to 230 degrees Celsius, and line a baking tray with a silicone baking mat or baking paper.

Sift the flours, baking soda and salt together into a bowl, then add the carrots and walnuts. Mix well.

Stir the yoghurt and milk into the flour mixture to form a soft, sticky dough. (I found that I had to add some water to make the dough moist enough to work with. I also find that using my hands to mix the dough is easier than using a spoon or a knife.)

Turn the dough out onto a floured bench and knead into a large round or oval shape. Place the dough onto the prepared baking tray and make shallow diagonal slashes across the top of the dough with a sharp knife or box cutter.

Place the bread into the oven and bake for 30 minutes or until golden brown and hollow sounding. (You may need longer than this - I should have!)

Remove the bread from the oven and allow to cool on a wire rack before serving slices smeared with butter.

Do check Zorra's site for the World Bread Day 2009 roundup here.

World Bread Day - Oatmeal Pumpkin Cranberry Bread

Zorra of Kochtopf is hosting World Bread Day again this year. To participate is simple - bake or buy bread and post about it on 16 Ocotber 2008.

I wanted to try something a little different to what I have made previously, so I selected Oatmeal Pumpkin Cranberry Bread from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. Zoe writes that this bread is great to make for Thanksgiving, because it goes well with turkey and contains the flavours of the season.

We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Australia, but the flavours of pumpkin and cranberry appealed to me, as well as the fact that this bread contained a whole lot of different flours that I have never used before. I stuffed up in that I thought that grinding buckwheat would give me whole wheat flour. When I subsequently Googled it, I found out that "whole wheat" flour is the equivalent of our wholemeal flour, and that buckwheat is actually a seed that does not contain gluten. Oh well, I already had the buckwheat, and its lack of gluten content didn't seem to affect the final product. This bread was delicious with a dab of olive oil spread.

To make it the way that I did (goofs and all), you will need:

half a small Japanese pumpkin (a US pie pumpkin)
2 cups lukewarm water
1 tablespoon instant yeast
1 tablespoon salt
75g melted butter
1/3 cup honey
1/2 cup oats (not instant)
3/4 cup rye flour
3/4 cup buckwheat flour (or whole wheat flour in the recipe)
4 cups plain flour
1/3 cup cranberries
1/3 cup sunflower seeds (the recipe called for pepitas)
spray oil

1 beaten egg to "wash" the unbaked loaf

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Place the pumpkin cut side down on a baking tray lined with baking paper or a silicone mat, and bake for 45 minutes. When the pumpkin is done, it will be soft and scoopable. Remove the pumpkin from the oven and start by scooping out the seeds, then scoop out the flesh and puree it or mash it. Keep one cup of puree for the bread, and store the remainder for another recipe.

In a stand mixer bowl, mix the yeast, salt, melted butter and honey. Add the oats, pumpkin and flours, and combine the ingredients using the dough hook attachment on your mixer.

Cover the dough, and allow to rest at room temperature for 2 hours or until the dough rises then flattens on top. Place the dough in a covered container in the fridge until baking day.

On baking day, spray a loaf pan with cooking oil. Take one third of the dough of the dough, dust it with flour and shape it into a ball. Flatten the dough nto a disc, and roll it out into a 1/2 inch thick rectangle. Sprinkle the seeds and canberries over the dough and roll it up, then fold it over once more to encase all of the seeds and cranberries.

Mould the dough with your hands into a small loaf shape, place it in the oiled loaf pan, and allow it to rest and rise for 2 hours. Twenty minutes prior to baking time, preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and place an empty deep baking dish on the bottom shelf of the oven.

Brush the risen loaf with egg wash, and place it on a centre rack of the oven. Pour 1 cup of hot water into the empty baking dish in the bottom of the oven, close the oven door and bake the loaf for approximately 45 minutes, until brown and firm.

Remove the baked bread from the oven and allow it to cool on a wire rack before serving.

Makes 3 small loaves.

World Day of Bread - Chelsea Buns

Zorra of Kochtopf is hosting The World Day of Bread on 16 October 2007 for the second year in a row. This blogging event simply requires participants to bake or buy bread and blog about it - it's that simple!

My success to date baking with yeast has been limited - read "my bread didn't rise". Despite this, I decided to give it another chance and selected Chelsea buns as my bread of choice. A wonderful summary of the history of the Chelsea bun by Anna of Baking for Britain can be found here. I loved Chelsea buns as a child, with their soft, spicy, fruity centres and bright pink icing (although according to Anna, they should be coated with a honey glaze before baking rather than iced).

As with many traditional favourites, there are a myriad of recipes for Chelsea buns. The recipe which I chose can be found here. The beauty of this recipe is that it didn't require the dough to proof overnight like some other bun recipes, and given my short timeframe, I couldn't devote 24 hours or so to making my buns. The only changes that I made to the recipe were to use 1 sachet of live dry yeast instead of compressed yeast, and to replace the suggested spices with one teaspoon of cinnamon and one teaspoon of cardamom. I used only sultanas for the fruit component of the buns, consistent with those buns which I remember from my childhood.

To try and trick the yeast into rising, I placed the bread dough under my bedroom touch lamp, which generates quite a bit of heat. This seemed to do the trick, as my dough actually rose, making for a very happy Cakelaw :) I also chose to ice the buns in accordance with the recipe and the buns that I am used to, even if this is not strictly traditional for Chelsea buns.

I took the buns into work to share with my colleagues, and gathering from the speed with which they disappeared, I think they were a hit ;)

Thanks to Zorra for hosting the World Day of Bread, and I look forward to being inspired into baking bread more often by the roundup!

Postscript: The roundup is now available here.