David R. MacIver's Blog

Testing, testing. Is this thing on? (Also, Cheesebread)

Good lord. There’s a blog here. I wonder how that happened? Whose is it? Mine, you say? Wow...

In keeping with my new enterprisey status, I’d like to begin this post with a little Q&A session.

Q: Why has David not been posting humorous cooking anecdotes?
A: Because he’s lame.

Q: What was David doing at 2:30AM?
A: Making cheesebread.

Q: Why on earth was David making cheesebread at such a silly hour?
A: His body has this really funny trick it plays on him. When he’s tired he thinks “Hm. I’m tired. I think I’ll go to bed early”. He does so and most unusually falls right to sleep. He then wakes up a mere three hours later still tired but totally unable to get back to sleep. On this particular occasion, after two hours of trying to sleep he decided to make use of the wonderful distraction that is the internet and upon repeated application of StumbleUpon found his way to an interesting looking recipe. Given that he’d recently been complaining about not doing any proper cooking, had all the ingredients to hand and suddenly possessed a great deal of spare time, a better question would be:

Q: Did David have anything better to do at 2:30AM than make cheesebread?
A: No.

David will now cease this bizarre affectation of referring to himself in the third person.

The recipe I used is pretty much taken from that post verbatim. I may be slapdash with other recipes, but you don’t fuck with bread or the bread mafia will come round to your house and break your kneecaps (also, worse, you’ll get lousy bread). I ended up adding about half a cup more flour, as the dough was looking very gloopy (I’m not sure why).

So, after a careful perusal of the recipe (for those just joining us, that means “I vaguely eyeballed the ingredients and ensured that I had all of them”) I set to work. I got all the ingredients out and put the oven on to preheat.

The astute reader will note that you do not need to put the oven on to preheat at the start of making bread, as it has to rise for over an hour.

The not so astute David took about 10 minutes to realise this before looking sheepish and turning the oven off.

Anyway, other than the mentioned gloopiness I followed the recipe fairly exactly. No comments there. I will add that when doing a quick eyeball of the ingredients you should also do a quick eyeball of the cooking implements, as I realised too late that this was a two tin recipe and I only had one bread tin. I ended up using the excess to make a small round loaf on the base of one of my other baking trays.

I also ended up being impatient and putting the small round loaf in after only half an hour of rising. I shall be prepared when the bread mafia come for me.

This stuff smells amazing while baking. Rather unsurprisingly, a combination of the smell of freshly baking bread and grilled cheese. Equally unsurprising, the impatient version of the loaf was too flat. Still tasted pretty good though, as the rapid vanishing of over half of it demonstrated.

The second one rose a lot more, so I’m expecting it to be a lot better, but I’ll wait ‘till the morning to actually open it and find out. I’ll add an update then. For now, I’m going to go make another attempt at that sleep thing.

Update:



A little disappointing. The loaf seems to have collapsed overnight. It’s still a lot less dense than the trial version, but doesn’t have the really appealing consistency of the version I linked to. I think I should have let it rise for longer than I did (it was about an hour, but it might have been on the short side of ’about’. Quite possibly I should have mixed it more vigorously than I did). Also, I think I should have used a sharper cheddar. Still, tastes great, and is light enough. I’m going to enjoy it. :-)

Comments

Mike on 2007-09-02 04:59:00:

Hello,

We would like to do an interview with you about your blog for
www.BlogInterviewer.com . We’d like to give you the opportunity to
give us some insight on the “person behind the blog.”

It would just take a few minutes of your time. The interview form can
be submitted online at http://bloginterviewer.com/submit-an-interview

Best regards,

Mike Thomas