The twelve labours of Hughes: half baked

It isn’t one of this year’s challenges but I did say I would keep going with the baking. I’ve been keeping myself quite busy on this as I wanted to start making more of my own bread and I also wanted to make my own musli bars (I spend far too much on these) - you can see what I’ve been making below.

For the bread I’ve just been making basic bread mixes – white buns and wholemeal buns – these are just white or brown bread flour with a bit of yeast, salt, oil and honey. The white buns went very well but I had some problems activating the yeast on the wholemeal ones – I knew thing hadn’t gone so well when the bread didn’t rise whilst proving but decided to bake them anyway just to see what the result was – as you can see in the photo it resulted in some very small buns with the density of iron!

For the muesli bars I went with two different recipes, one from weight watchers and one from Nigella Lawson. They both mainly consist of seeds, nuts, dried fruit and porridge oats. The main difference between the two was where the weight watchers recipe uses butter and honey to bind the ingredients together the Nigella one uses condensed milk. Both sets of bars taste very nice (even if I do say so myself) – but the Nigella recipe tastes nicer to me. The other plus on this is that the ingredients cost less than 7 pounds for 32 bars – quite a lot cheaper than the ones I’ve been buying at sainsbury’s.

I’ll keep going with the bread and post further progress here in the weeks/months to come