I love making bread and I am not talking about bread from the bread making machine. I enjoy the whole process. Making bread gives me a great satisfaction.
The start of my bread making goes back to my early years in England. In those days all you could buy in the shops here was mainly the "big white, sliced" and coming from the Continental Europe, where good bread making was considered as important as good cake making, I had to do something, so I started to make my own. The early days of my bread making was a very much a hit and miss affair, not helped by not being able to get the right ingredients. That all has changed now, there is not much we can't get in the shops, including a very good bread of all sort, but at a price.
But I still like to make my own. Over the years I have tried and tested various recipes, with various degree of success. Then some years ago I came across this book of bread, the best I have ever seen and it has become my "bread bible".
I have tried various breads from this book, but I usually make what I call "my everyday bread", mixing together various flours.
I usually make 3 loaves, 1 for now and 2 for the freezer. I find it freezes very well and it is just as good later.
This brings me to the reason I am sharing with you my bread making.
This week I came across the "baking cloth". As you can see, I use a clean tea cloth to cover my dough, but in Norway ( and may be in other countries), they are using a special cloth, which seems to be hand embroidered and specially stitched for the purpose. Isn't it a lovely idea, much nicer then my tea cloth!
The two blogs where I have seen this cloth are Hanne's and May Britt's blogs. The pattern, they are working on, comes from Northern Quilts, and the girls are doing a giveaway of the baking cloth pattern.
It is getting dark now and it started to snow. I hope it is not going to come to much. They had some heavy snow falls in the north of England, unusually early. It has been very cold, even the day temperatures hovering around 0. But it is cosy inside, the house smells of freshly baked bread and the fire is glowing.
It is time to settle down to some stitching.