Coffee Muffins

I’ll tell you a secret, until this very night I have never tasted the somewhat strange combination of stale bread and summer fruits that makes up one of Britain’s most loved desserts.

Over the past few months the need to finally try this dessert has come over me slowly. It started with the Great British Menu, a TV show that highlights modern twists on some of our favourite british foods. With James Sommerin’s Summer Pudding Trifle and to a lesser extent Nigel Haworth’s Summer Fruit Pudding.

Now that the summer fruits are finally available, and the weather (albeit briefly and in amongst thunder storms) is getting better, the need has become stronger.

Summer Pudding served with Creme Fraiche

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I am going to let you in on a secret, I love fruit breads! I don’t buy them often but when I do I skip my normal breafast and eat the toasted bread with the tiniest sliver of butter, my idea of heaven. So when I started flipping through my copy of Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread I was overjoyed to see so many wonderful recipes that I could try at home.

Artos Greek Celebration Bread

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So you baked your first loaves in the BBA challenge. You have two fresh loaves of beautiful bread that are wafting wonderful smells through your home, and you just want to try it. Right now. Well go on. The problem comes once you’ve had that first warm slice – what do you do with the rest of it?

A lot of people seem to make it and give one loaf to a neighbour. I wouldn’t know a neighbour of mine if I passed them on the street. Now maybe that’s a bit sad, I am sure I’d like to get to know my neighbours – but knocking on their door one night with a loaf of bread in hand may put me firmly into the crazy neighbour spectrum.
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Some weeks ago I bought the Bread Bakers Apprentice, as I had heard so much about the Bread Baker’s Challenge. The aim of the challenge is to cook our way through all the breads listed in the book in order!

Anadama Bread loaf

The first recipe in the book (after several chapters on the theory of bread making) is Anadama Bread.
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Cherries are an integral part of the summer for me, and linked with France because of all my childhood holidays there. On one holiday in Paris as I got on the metro, the doors closed! My Mum and I on one side, my Dad and little sister on the other.

I was distraught, in the days before mobile phones, how would we ever find each other again? However due to my Mum’s quick thinking I didn’t worry for long. Because thankfully we had the cherries, and my biggest of memory of the day is sitting on the platform eating cherries!

Fresh cherry bread, yum!

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Following on from my weekend of baking, I decided to try this recipe from For the love of cooking which was one of the first food blogs I added as an RSS feed back at the start of the year. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out you should!

Banana and Blueberry bread

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A couple of weeks ago I was given a copy of Good Housekeeping: Great Baking (the fiancee was worried I wasn’t creating enough cakes, cookies and such) and since then I have been leafing through it’s 600 recipes whenever I get the chance. Again it’s another American cookbook so the conversions are annoying but at least there is a table at the back.

Cinnamon Bun

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