Fold in the Flour ...

  I hope that you don't think me rude by my absence over the last few weeks. In the time since Sam's birthday, life seems to have been incredibly busy and I have had very little time to myself, never mind time to indulge in much baking. In the main, I've had to enjoy others doing it through Great British Bake Off, and while it's been great watching how things panned out (congratulations to John Whaite, this year's winner), it's been too long since I've been in the kitchen for a proper baking session. I'm hoping to rectify that this weekend, and I must admit my baking break has certainly given me some time to plan a few things, which I'm really looking forward to trying out. Ready for baking In the meantime, I did manage to try a few things inspired by GBBO, but just really didn't have time to do them justice or blog about them. I took a few snaps though, so thought you might like to see what I got up to. Unfortunately, most of them d...

Back in February, one of Mike's colleagues heard about my baking blog. She kindly offered me some of her sourdough starter, called Sophia, whose origins lay in Chicago some 8 years ago. I didn't know much about sourdough at that point, but what I had was all good, and from that knew that an 8 year old starter was not something you'd come across all that often, so I jumped at the chance. A few days later a plastic tub was nesting  in the fridge with a strange, gloopy substance inside. I'd been given some instructions on how to feed her, and referred to The Fresh Loaf - a website devoted to all things bread related, and which includes a brilliant community forum. The first time I fed Sophia, I transferred about half of her to a clean kilner jar, added the refresher of flour and water, and stirred. I couldn't bear to just bin the other half, so began a second jar (now known as Olivia). I began to read up on how to actually transform the alchemy taking p...