I love Soft Pretzels or Brezel. I love their smooth golden crust with the soft chewy centers with butter drizzled over it. Yum! I would eat it everyday when I was living in Berlin some years ago. It just something I could never get tired of eating.

I'm so glad I found on The Fresh Loaf a great recipe for it. This recipe was submitted by Floydm and it is really quite simple to prepare. I hand kneaded the dough for 10 minutes and I think my upper arms are going to ache tomorrow (what a workout) but very worth the effort. I also boiled them in water and a teaspoon of baking soda for about a minute on each side before baking them in the oven. I baked for 12 minutes and at 6 minutes rotated my tray 180° so they brown evenly. All in all I took about just over 2 hours to make (I left it to proof for an hour).

If you want the authentic real deal you will need to include domestic lye as a wash. I don't even want to try it. And if you must (and if you read German) you will find a great deal of information at Der Brez'n-Bäcker.

I am thinking of adding garlic the next time as a topping.

The bagels are being cooled. I've baked them and the sense of accomplishment is rewarding. Baking breads requires a great deal of patience and good time-management skills. If anything this is the best and most fun part of the whole joy of the creation of food. The whole discovery, experimenting, failure and the triumph of creating a successful dish! I am still brimming with glee with the successful activation of my cultures and very successfully creating bagels from it.

These bagels were nicely dense and chewy also really nice when toasted! Though I think I overdid it with the coarse sea salt topping. So sprinkle with caution.

With so much sourdough cultures left... what is next?!

The starter proofed quite well. Nice and bubbly. Added the remaining ingredients all but 1 cup of flour (according to the recipe) and mixed with my trusted rubber spatula. It was a pretty wet dough and so I did a manual wet knead, working the dough as much as I could. I added the rest of the flour and it was still quite wet. So I added more, of about 1½ more in total. I transferred the dough to the counter and tried to knead it - it was tacky and I couldn't do a windowpane test (I really must work on this.). I proceeded to dividing the dough up into 18 little balls of 100gm each left it to rest on baking parchment lined cookie sheets for 20 minutes.

After letting the dough rest, I shaped them and again left them to rest for 20 minutes. Since it was getting late and I really wasn't up to baking bread at midnight. I thought I'd try the overnight retardation technique of leaving the dough overnight in the fridge to extend fermentation, giving it more flavour. I had to do a "float test" to see if the bagels were ready to be retarded. I took a bagel and dropped it in a bowl of tap water, it floated up within 10 seconds. Hooray! Got them packed, layered between lightly oiled parchment paper in plastic square containers.

Let's see how we do tomorrow!

So after the Peppermint cookie disappointment I had to do something to make up for my dissatisfied food tasting crew at Blackmagic Design. So I stuck to something I know will work and will make them believe I was worthy again. The good ol' Chocolate Chip Cookie. And since it's the festive season, I decided to give this ol'skool classic a nuskool makeover - just for Christmas, I added chopped cranberries, pistachios and white chocolate chips for that red, green and white - the corporate colours of the season.

As hoped, everyone was pleased and renewed their trust in me as their in-house pro-bono baker. Woo!!

Like it or not, you can't deny it. With the streets decorated with merry hollies and carols in the air, it's coming. With so many Christmas baking recipes and ideas - I couldn't quite decide which to attempt first for this season. I was thinking Candy Canes - but a friend said they wouldn't be appreciated because they're so easily available. So I thought Peppermint cookies? Why not? Never had Peppermint in a cookie - unless it was with a cream filling. And so I began the Peppermint cookie experiment.

They were meant to be twisted up (like candy canes) but the dough was too soft and broke apart too easily while I was rolling them into strips. I didn't want to add more flour (in case the final baked product got too dry) and I was using my brand new Silpat - which was already making my dough rolling easier. Silpat is wonderful! I haven't used it in the oven (still a little skeptical) but I love the non-stick surface, and it's all light, thin and so easy to wash! I bought mine for SGD$49.90 at Shermay Cooking School. It was a bit costly but it works so great I am actually considering getting another. So back to the cookie dough... I had them all rolled up into 1 inch balls and so I decided to make things simple and just bake them as they were, press them down with my thumb and sprinkled sugar over it.

Baking the cookies were the best part, it was like peppermint aromatherapy. The sweet vapours of peppermint and sugar embrace you when you opened the oven to take the cookies out. Eating them were on the other hand - not bad but really unusual. You can feel the trail of peppermint vapour going down from your mouth into your stomach. I might have added too much peppermint in this regard. I realise now why I've never had peppermint in a cookie - the medium of carrying peppermint should be in a liquid form or a candy form. To have it in a solid cookie medium was weird. It felt chalky and dry but it wasn't dry it was a moist crumb, but it just felt that way.

So... I think the next time, I would sandwich the cookies with a peppermint cream filling instead.

The final part of my Big Bread Weekend of merry bread making! Let me begin by saying that a month ago when I first tried to make pizza dough I had no idea what was ahead of me, the whole science, debate, discussion and rules of a true Neapoilitan pizza.

The recipe of my first pizza dough I made was from Chubby Hubby and 101 Cookbooks - the recipe they used are taken from Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread. The baked pizza crust had a wonderful wonderful texture, perfect the way I love it - chewy and slightly crispy at the edges! I was quite happy.

Then my pizza making world opened up when I discovered Jeff Varasano's site and The Pizza Making Forum. Wow. To half the world, Pizza is the perfect meal. The amount of information and serious discussion over a mixture of flour, water and yeast. The way these people were describing their pizza making experiences and how things should be with their spreadsheets and baking percentages can be initially very intellectually intimidating. And I'm thinking, I just want to make pizza! Why so complicated!? It doesn't take too long though before you get caught up in the excitement and want to work at making the perfect pizza crust (with the given constraints like having a normal oven with no baking stone). You see? Ignorance is bliss. I was happy with my first, now I just want to keep making it better.

And now that I know a little more, I laugh at my old self when I actually rolled out my first pizza dough. Silly cow. Everyone knows you don't do that.

So let's be clear. This recipe is not a Vera Pizza Napoletana. It's not entirely authentic. It can't be. My home electric oven goes only to 250°C at max, I have no baking stone but I LOVE this dough! After a month of experimenting, I've arrived at this recipe. I probably still have a long way more to go, but I think this is a good basic and decent dough a pizza making noobie can make at home.

Chewy Cinnamon Scrolls is part 2 of my 3 part Big Bread Weekend. These little buttery cinnamon scrolls in pretty paper cups fresh from the oven really hits the spot. Comfort food. Warm rolled up chewiness in cinnamon and hazelnut butter, the aromatic wafts of cinnamon on a monsoon afternoon makes it all okay. And yes, monsoon has started 1 or 2 weeks ago after weeks of horrible haze from the neighbour's deforestation exercise and then suddenly one afternoon the sky decided to pour forth it's frustration and angst from the pollution. And Singaporeans, PRs and expats united together and for once warmly welcomed the screaming rain and thunder. It's always a dramatic monsoon.

This recipe is an amalgamation of the one in The Bread Baker's Apprentice : Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread and Donna Hay Magazine (Issue 8). This basically a bread recipe so, it requires some time to allow the dough to ferment. Fermentation, I have learnt is the work of 2 very important elements, Yeast and Lactobacilli (bacteria that produces lactic acid from the fermentation of carbohydrates). So in idiot terms, the yeast creates the bubbles and the lactobacilli the flavour. There are 2 ways to ferment your dough, you can either do a warm rise or a cold rise. A warm rise is leaving the dough out and wait for it to rise gradually create flavour - this can take 12-24 hours. The variation in room temperature and the amount of yeast used can make a difference in how well the dough rises and ferments. You can be lazy like me and do the cold rise - which in many ways better too. In this whole process of fermentation, the yeast only requires about 2 hours to create all the fun little bubbles - and it works better in a warm environment. This only allows the Lactobacilli only 2 hours to produce all the wonderful flavours and it works well in any temperature. So by preparing the dough the night before allows the dough a long time to develop wonderful flavours for your bread.

You need a fair bit of time to prepare and bake bread anyway so best to read up the recipe and plan your time accordingly.

"Patience is a Baking Virtue"
Peter Reinhart

How wise and true. More specifically, Bread Baking. So much time and consideration goes into baking a loaf of bread. I had finally gotten my hands on The Bread Baker's Apprentice : Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhart. I've read so many good reviews about it through countless blogs and websites and I so wanted to have a copy so I could be a part of this very special world of bread baking and to finally understand all the cool bread baking lingo, such as proofing, autolyse and window paning. Now, I'm in. I was giggling and smiling to myself as I paged through the book carefully, my colleagues rolled their eyes at my insanity and told me to just start baking and feed them instead of showing them all the pretty bread pictures.

This is going to be my Big Bread Weekend a three-part super carbo creating crash course in bread making with the help of The Bread Baker's Apprentice. I'm going to be covered with flour. My kitchen is going to be covered with flour. And I will hopefully develop some patience in that process. Hahahahaaaaaa!!

First, I made poolish. It's a pre-ferment of Polish origins, a mixture of flour and water mixed together and fermented to help save time and to improve flavour and structure. I made poolish primarily because I wanted to work on my pizza dough and I read that including a starter in the dough will make a big difference. This is will elaborate in a later blog entry when I make pizza (again) tomorrow. And so since I have this big pot of poolish and I only need so much for the pizza I thought I would try to make Poolish Focaccia from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. With this recipe using a pre-ferment, I need only 1 day to make it whereas the regular one without the pre-ferment takes 3 days. Being the impatient and impulsive person that I am I naturally chose the poolish version, makes sense right? Since I have a big pot of it sitting in my fridge.

You will need 6 hours to make the focaccia alone, this excludes the time for the poolish to ferment, if you include that you will need about 9-10 hours. I used a lot of the waiting time to wash and clean up.

Patience is a baking virtue.

I ordered 3 back copies of Donna Hay Magazine and I think it's undoubtedly the best food magazine I've seen. The overall layout of the magazine is so clear, easy to read and well designed. The photography and styling of the shots are so well composed and inspiring! The writing, content and direction was, also so delicious and well organised. The paper used has a good heaviness about it, makes it feel good to journey from cover to cover the wonderful world of Donna Hay. I was smiling through every page! I immediately went online to apply for a one year subscription.

I was going though Issue 27 the one with the beautiful cupcakes on the cover and found Butterscotch Cupcakes and decided that I was going to make them for Dixie's birthday (yesterday). The sweet comfort of caramel drizzle combined the really moist and tender cupcake along with the awfully sinful dollops of double cream frosting was delightful and brought big smiles to the cake eating crew. One took a small bite and stuffed the rest into his mouth. I was left amazed and secretly happy.

Singapore Gaga is really one of the best feature documentaries that has been produced in Singapore. It's one that really defines what Singapore is about in an authentic manner that is charming and honest. Featuring famous personalities such as Singapore's self-declared National Treasure - Mr Ying the busker you see at MRT train stations, Margaret Leng-Tan - Avant Garde Pianist and many more truly unforgettable characters.

If you haven't already seen it, you can watch while flying Singapore Airlines or buy the very newly released DVD from Objectifs (2A Liang Seah Street, Opp Bugis Junction) or at Kinokuniya, Earshot, and also from Objectifs’ website for overseas orders.

This is a film every Singaporean should see - really! It will make a great Christmas gift and you won't regret it. Go tell everyone you know!!

View the trailer here.

Director Tan Pin Pin is also Singapore's one and only Student Academy Award winner which she won for her documentary Moving House.