Baking adventures

This is my first time making laminated bread– the recipe goes along the lines of: Mix ingredients (flour, yeast, butter, milk), first proof at room temp – much like normal bread, except for the extra butter Chill in fridge for a few hours to firm up the dough Make butter block Laminate for 2 folds (with 1 hour in the fridge in between) Laminate final time with spiced butter (butter + sugar + mincepie filling) Bake I found it quite a bit trickier than laminated pastry– the dough is a lot more elastic and hard to roll– one is supposed to not overdo the rolling so you don’t squash the butter layers together, but as the dough is so stiff, I am convinced I did squashed some of the butter layers… These buns also didn’t expand as much as the recipe indicates it should in the final proofing step....

This year lunar new year is on the 22nd Jan, and as it nicely coincides with @sundayafternoonbakingclub penaut butter theme, I made these bite sized peanut cookies as they are popular as new year treats (or rather, more popular than usual– I am fairly sure you can get them year round). They are really easy to make as I took the shortcut and made them with PipandNut crunchy peanut butter – you more or less peanut butter, oil, flour and sugar together, shape, and bake with an egg yolk egg wash....

Olive and sun dried tomato sourdough focaccia for this week’s @sundayafternoonbakingclub focaccia theme. The special sauce in this is my homemade chilli oil infused with chillis, Szechuan peppercorns, star anise and a few other spices. It gave it a nice bit of heat and also loads of flavour from all the other aromatics, and I definitely prefer this to plain olive oil. I started off with my basic sourdough focaccia recipe but used a 50-50 mix of white and whole meal bread flour— and also accidentally ended up with a 100% hydration as I sifted out the bran from the wholemeal flour and forgot to compensate for it 😆...