MESSY BAKER

I've been obsessed with the idea of chocolate biscuits all last week. Its not that I even like chocolate (I know, I know, I am weird in that way), but the idea of making biscuits with little Ms Rantlet got stuck in my head and it wouldn't go away.  So on Friday I got my weekly grocery delivery with everything that one would need for making biscuits, so all was left to do is find a recipe I like. A friend from Oz sent me a recipe from Edmonds, a classic - but it required condense milk, one thing that I did forget to order, so it was back to the drawing board. I've been following Jo Whatley on Twitter for a while and her recipes always look very inspiring, I am even considering buying her book - A Passion for Baking . I found her recipe for Chocolate Chip cookies online and decided to follow it (with a few variations) before making a final decision on the book Chocolate Chip Cookies adapted from "A Passion for Baking" 100 g unsalted butter at room tempera...

One would think that a new house bigger house would also mean more space, more space for cookbooks. Apparently it means more space to unpack all the boxes we had sitting in storage for years and years. And unsurprisingly most of these boxes contain cookbooks that Mr Ranty and I have collected over the last decade or so. Our cook books are very much split into “his” and “hers”, with not much cross over in the middle : - anything to do with spice (Thai, Mexican, Georgian), anything weird (Molecular and Methodical) or Kiwi is in “his” pile - anything to do with bread and preserving is in “hers” pile And to be honest, Mr Ranty has been experiencing with some spicy and odd combinations preserves, so that is slowly migrating into “his” pile, and all I have left is bread - which suits me just fine.   So, I am going to do a review of some/all books I have, starting from easy, beginner style books to more advanced sourdough books, with some cakes and cupcakes thrown in fo...

Mr Ranty has been boasting on Twitter about my bagel making abilities, shaming me into admitting that I haven’t made them for over a year. Now that I have a shiny new oven and boxes full of flour and chillies, I have no excuse, so this weekend seemed perfect for bagel baking. Yes, chilies, you read that right, I have boxes and boxes of the stuff, thanks to Mr Ranty who is prepping for a Chile Cook Off event, but that’s a subject for another post.   I was debating which recipe to go for – I’ve only ever tried Julia Child (with Lauren Groveman) bagel recipe, after getting inspired by her video, but the last couple of times I used that recipe the bagels turned out a bit dry. So I researched bagel recipes and settled on Sophisticated Gourmet and A Beautiful Mess recipes – which a pretty much identical. The flour to water ratio in the recipes made sense and it was fairly close to what I was used to with Julia’s recipe. When it comes to the flavour of the bagels, I would reall...