Journal
Banana bread comes together in one bowl: mash three overripe bananas, stir in melted butter,...
Mix 500g of strong white bread flour with 320ml of lukewarm water, 7g of fast-action yeast, 10g of salt and 2 tablespoons of olive oil, knead for 8 to 10 minutes, then leave it to rise for 1 to 2 hours. If you were after a how to make pizza dough recipe, that's all of it, and it makes two 30cm bases. What decides whether you bake a chewy, blistered crust or a pale, bready one isn't in that list, though. It's the flour you choose, and in an Irish supermarket the bags of plain, strong and 00 flour (a very fine Italian pizza flour) look almost identical, so the wrong one is easy to grab.
Halloween cookie bars take one tin and 20 to 25 minutes in the oven: cream the butter and sugars, beat in an egg, fold through a cocoa dough, stir in Halloween M&Ms and bake at 180C. The catch is the colour, because black cookie dough has a habit of baking to a flat grey, or turning bitter when too much colouring goes in.
Pumpkin spice cupcakes are a simple sponge. Cream 150 g of butter with 150 g of light brown sugar, beat in three eggs, fold in self-raising flour and 1½ tsp of pumpkin spice, and bake at 180°C for 18 to 20 minutes. That's how to make pumpkin spice cupcakes, and the baking is the easy half. The half that catches most Irish bakers out is the spice. Pumpkin pie spice is an American blend that rarely sits in an Irish cupboard, and without it you've baked a plain bun with a vague smell of cinnamon.
The perfect lasagne recipe comes down to four things: a ragu cooked slowly for at...
A great BLT recipe comes down to three things: crispy bacon baked in the oven,...
