Now that I can cook, onto baking!

Having successfully cooked a roast chicken and potatoes I feel confident enough to move onto the next step, baking! Freshly baked bread is surely the hallmark of being a great baker, if you can bake bread you can do anything! In my mind, baking bread involves hours of waiting for dough to rise, muscle-building kneading and general slaving away. Turns out it's not that difficult. Correction, the recipe led me to believe it wasn't that difficult. Mrs Magdaleen's recipe simply requires you to mix the ingredients and bake, that's it, no kneading, no waiting, quick and easy. Culinaria Greece requires some waiting and kneading, so even though their recipe was visually more appealing I opted for the easy route. South Africa - 1, Greece - 1.

Pretty, yes. Easy, no

In BOTH recipe books the bread recipe is on page 308 *cue creepy music and conspiracy theories*

Ingredients: Check!

Radio Romeos (Geia sou Giannena!) on full blast, live from Greece, via audio streaming on the tablet. God I love technology!

Let's make bread!

The first step is mixing all the dry ingredients together:

OMG! That totally looks like a heart!! Happy accident! I am Instragramming that right now!

I heart Instagram. And I heart hearts <3 <3 <3

Now comes the part where Magdaleen lied. The recipe says stir well, this assumes that the spoon isn't standing upright in very unstirrable dough!!

I resorted to a kind of kneading, it was more like squishing the dry ingredients left over into the clump of dough. I was tempted to add milk but I figured what do I know.

The next step/lie is to pour the mixture into a bread tin:

*unimpressed face* I should have added more milk.

Well let's pop these babies in the oven and see what happens!

Magdaleen (the compulsive liar) says: "Note: This bread does not rise very much, and has a moist consistency"

LIAR!!! After ten minutes the bread was almost flowing out of the tin. If this carries on while it's cooking for the next hour we are going to have words Maggy!

After an hour I took the loaves out but they were still doughy inside and were an icky white colour. I put them back in the oven, a couple of times. After an hour and almost 40 minutes I was over it! The bread looked the right colour....

......but was still a bit doughy on the inside.... well tough titties we're eating it like that now! Cheese will fix this

Emmental AND Gouda because who can choose?

Yes, I have been told that I cut doorstops instead of slices of bread. And don't even start on the cheese slices! I once sliced my thumb open while cutting mozzarella and went for surgery to fix it, general anaesthetic!!! I had cut a nerve and the surgeon told me in no uncertain terms that if I ever wanted to pick things up without them falling out my hand I had to go for surgery, eek. WARNING: BLOOD AND GORE PICS COMING UP, PARENTAL GUIDANCE IS ADVISED!!!

And another time, I took a chunk out of my arm while trying to curl a ribbon with kitchen scissors.

 

 A frikken ribbon.

I WARNED YOU!!!! Stop being such a girl, it's just a bit of blood.

See, my avoidance of the kitchen thus far is totally justified!

So how was the bread? (How can you even think of food after all that blood and gore??). Well, the bread looked good, but man was it nasty tasting! I doubled the recipe, so not sure if that means I should have halved the bicarbonate of soda? All you could taste was bicarbonate of soda!! I did eat two slices though just to show myself a little bit of support and encouragement. I spent the rest of the day on the couch reading a book, nursing a headache and trying to find clothes that didn't feel so damn hot on my skin...oh fuck.....NOBODY EAT THE BREAD!!