Things We Baked This Weekend III

Just half a focaccia for me please, I’m on a diet

This Saturday finally proved to be a good day to get some fresh flour from the mill. It is a bit of a journey for us and the last few weeks the weather was not cooperating (snow, ice, cold). The type of weather I like, but also the one that makes you want to stay close to home and hot cocoa and a warm fire. But we were dangerously running out of flour and then the baking would stop, and at this stage people are counting on us to bake! And we will not disappoint them. So this weekend we did some extra, extra baking with the new flour. Fresh flour is wonderful but if you buy it from a mill and not your average supermarket, you will, like we did, find out that it can act a little different every time you buy a new batch. So this new 25 kg bag of wheat flour did not want as much water as the previous bag. To us this is just a good sign that this is not a mass produced bag of blehhh tasting flour, but something that is alive, full of flavour and changing with the seasons.

It’s the same with milk. We use organic milk that sometimes makes for the perfect cappuccino and latte, but at times it just won’t cooperate and will only produce this fake foam. It’s different every time, because, in a normal world, cows are not milk robots. Same story for coffee. We roast our own coffee beans. You can blend coffees and get the exact same taste year after year (there are people working at big coffee companies who’s job this is). But coffee is a product as interesting and divers as wine and just as dependant on the climate. That’s what makes it exiting and worth exploring.

Back to this weekend’s baking. We did a lot of it. We made green tea and orange shortbread, custard tarts, meringues, pain rustique, sourdough bread, light rye bread with raisins, dark Frisian rye bread and focaccia with tomatoes. And we have some picture to prove it!

Pain Rustique, SF Sourdough and Rye breads.. and that was just the Sunday

These Custard Tarts are dangerously addictive and so much fun to bake!

You can find the recipe for the custard tarts here

Short is just another word for butter with shortbread but the green tea makes it ‘a healthy option’ right?