Can you believe it Friday again already.

Well everyone,
I've been having a little think and it seems to me that you probably don't really want to look at lots of pictures of various stages of my cooking on this Food Friday theme, now if I'm wrong please do let me know and I can revert back to that style of approach.

But today's baking is being accompanied by Neil Diamond and others of that ilk, at present Lonely Looking Sky from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a glorious piece of music in my humble opinion, which comes from my dad's side when it comes to music, and is a lovely accompaniment to an afternoon's pottering in the kitchen.

Today I've attempted 'Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake', another of Nigella's Domestic Goddess, will make an effort to pick another book next week and 'Pain de Campagne' from the Ultimate Bread Machine Cookbook, which I've also talked about before.  There is a slight theme in keeping reusing the same books, and I know I did begin this project as an attempt to use more of the many cookbooks I have accumulated over the years, well I do have a bit of a confession at the point in that most of them are still unpacked from our move last April, and the ones I did get unpacked and for reasons of an oversized sofa now been repacked again.

Now that was a little embarrassing I have to say, we got all excited in the showroom and ordered a lovely new sofa to go in the living room, it was comfy and roomy and had a lovely round chair to go with it. We were all sold. While we waited for it to be built and delivered (13 weeks or so, amazing), we built some shelves along the wall in the living room, for dvds and books and the like.  Well the day of the sofa's arrival arrived and we cleared the old cushions and beanbags that we had been using out the way in readiness. There was the usual huffing and puffing around the doors by the delivery men and then they started to assemble the pieces, this is where the slight embarrassment comes in, when one of them turned to me and said 'You did measure the room first didn't you?'

Well the shelves had to come back down and now the sofa fits very nicely, thank you very much, but the moral of this story is don't just think it will be alright, measure. And that is the reason the books are repacked and waiting till we finish the front room, which will house all books now. The floor is now varnished so progress is slowly being made.

Nigella did say it would sink and she was right.

Back to the baking though, chocolate loaf, what's not to like and this one is very dense and gooey, fairly easy on the making front and well worth effort, Nigella recommends leaving it for a day and eating it spread with soft cheese spread, you know the sort. Not sure this one will last that long, with kids and Dr J. all loving a bit of cake.

the biga looking quite sloppy

And the bread well this has a few more stages, but I had got it all in the faithful bread machine, so the only effort was measuring out the ingredients twice, once for the 'biga' and once for the bread itself, and the longer you leave the biga before moving on to the next stage the sourer the bread will be, mine got left for 3 hours, which was a bit longer than I should have left it so I needed to rethink a little and change the finished loaf. I would have run out of time if I had baked it as one big loaf, so it got spilt and rolled out to make 2 french bread shapes, which halved the cooking time, clever eh.  Have to say this was well worth the effort, and that would still be true if it had taken any real effort, I do love the taste and smell of fresh bread straight out of the oven. delicious.

made a bit of a mess, but great fun, making and eating.

 that's all folks, till next week
keep well,
ally x