MESSY BAKER

Jamming in London When The jam mistress offers you to write a blog on her site, there is only one thing for it – grab your laptop and go! I first met Vivian a couple of years ago when I was muddling my way through batches and batches of bad marmalade – after one lesson from her, my marmalade is nearly perfect, even won three Silvers at Dalemain Marmalade awards! However, when it comes to jam making, I still have a lot to learn, but it doesn’t stop me from making jam from any fruit I can lay my hands on. I am very lucky to live in the South East of London where fruit are plentiful and neighbors are friendly – not something I’d expect people associate with any part of London :)  Last year I spotted a number of large wild plum trees and was looking forward to picking some to make it into a jam. After a courtesy check with the neighbors I picked a large bag of plums, leaving plenty for birds and any other jam foragers. On the way back I saw another tree loaded w...

I finally caught up with all by blog posts and actually doing May post on time – yay me! This month’s project is Borodinsky bread – bread I used to eat a lot as a child. I remember my grandma coming back from a work trip with five loaves “just for the weekend” – so as you can see its been a family favourite for a while :)  I love baking rye bread, and have baked a number of German style loaves, as well as made up my own recipes using rye flour, but for some reason I never tried a hand at making Borodinsky bread. Well, this is the whole point of this project – to learn new and to re-discover old recipes!  I wanted the bread to be as authentic as possible, so I decided to do all of my research in Russian, mainly looking for GOST (ГОСТ in Russian) recipes. GOST is a set of technical standards maintained by the Euro-Asian Council for Standardization, Metrology and Certification (EASC), and in the old communist days, all bread production had to comply with that standard. ...

I really need to get better at this – its past mid-May and I am only just posting April project. But – the good thing is that I just finished May bread, so next post shouldn’t be too far behind.  My planning was completely off this month – I decided to bake Colomba Pasquale – a traditional Easter cake – for Easter celebrations this year. But, what I forgot to do is to check my calendar - I celebrate both Catholic and Russian Orthodox Easters – both of them fell at the beginning of the month this year, plus I had booked a trip to Russia with my little ones at the beginning of the month, so there was no way on earth I was going to finish my baking on time.  Anyway, I got there at the end, and to make up for the lateness, I’ve made five (yes, five) loaves just to test out different recipes and shapes. I tried using very traditional as well as more available ingredients, tall and round panettone cases and shallow and wide “dove” cases, and I finally came up with something I a...