Baked goods abound in our house at the moment – so much for the post-Christmas diet, eh? We’re in April already, the summer hols loom large, but,despite all my best efforts, including three half mile swims a week, no pounds have been lost, epic fail as my kids would say. Baked goods are nothing if not hard to resist. It’s the smell of them gets to me every time, especially straight from the oven. There’s a kind of no hold bars undignified race for the scrummiest looking biscuit, the fluffiest looking cake or the stickiest looking flapjack. And age or fairness doesn’t come into the race. It’s very much you snooze, you lose in our household
So, me and the kids have got the baking bug, along with most of the rest of the audience of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood on the Great British Bake-Off. We’ve watched all the episodes, and the Junior Bake-Off series too. And we’ve been inspired to give the recipes a try, not just watch others toil over a hot stove creating, at the tender age of 9 or 10, the most fabulous themed cakes. And we’ve branched out from bog standard, plain vanilla cupcakes in white cases. Last week we experimented with cupcake ‘fillings’ – finely chopped glace cherries make a great juicy, sweet addition. We’ve tried apricot flapjacks – yum – and we wondered, as we scoffed them if the addition of a handful of dried apricots to the oaty, buttery, syrupy mixture means the flapjacks count towards one of your five a day. Oh, wait, can’t keep up, seven a day. And now we’re trying something new. Baking with the addition of yeast. This adds a different dimension to the whole baking thing. Because this time there won’t be any instant gratification. We won’t be whipping up cakes, and eating them within 20 minutes or so, still warm from the oven. No this time we have to wait. For an hour or so at least. Not easy, is it? Waiting. Not for children, or adults, especially when your house becomes filled with that wonderfully yeasty smell as the dough rises. But it’s a good lesson in learning patience. You lift the corner of the tea towel, and you can almost watch the dough grow. Or so you think. We chose to make teacakes this time, not unlike the seasonal hot cross bun. We all love a buttery, spicy toasted teacake in our house. And what could be better than a HOMEMADE toasted buttery teacake. We used a slightly adapted version of the Hairy Bikers’ recipe from the BBC website, covering them with a tea towel whilst the dough rose, rather than the clingfilm they suggest. It’s a tradition in our house, to use a slightly damped, clean tea towel to cover the bowl whilst waiting for dough to ‘prove’.
Kneading is great fun, if a little messy. But then that’s partly what baking is all about, isn’t it.
The mess yields edible results. You, and the kitchen, are guaranteed to be covered in a white mist of flour, especially if helped by a 7 and 10 year old. And it’s good exercise, getting those bingo wings going. It’s great fun for kids to try too. Perhaps not a great example to set, but I always think it’s a way of taking out any bubbling resentment, imagining the dough being the teacher who gave you double detention for chatting in class, or the bus driver who pulled away from the curb as you panted towards the closing doors. Or is that just me?
Making things with yeast can become a science lesson in its own right – if you want it to - in a fun, learning through play kind of way, without being too earnest. It’s quite amazing to think that a finely ground grain mixed with water and yeast (actually a living fungus! Ugh….) makes something as yummy and versatile as bread, isn’t it? And also amazing to think that, as we can discover on Exploratorium , the granules of dried yeast most of us use today lie dormant until they come into contact with warm water.
They then begin to feed on the sugars in the flour, carbon dioxide is released and bread (or teacakes!) rises.
And, when you toast them, spread them with butter and enjoy with a cup of tea, you know the wait has been worth it. There’s a great sense of satisfaction to knowing you made them, from start to finish.
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