Yorkshire Pudding: the Secret is NOT in the Recipe

Finally, success!

The failed one :D

Long, long time ago, I baked Yorkshire pudding once. Mekar seadanya, tarok di blog biar bisa ikutan event online World Bread Day: After Hours Party. Lumayan happening kala itu di kalangan foodblogger Gen X. Ahemmmm...

Beberapa tahun yang lalu sering bikin adonannya, tapi digoreng! And you know, it's delicious! Minyak memang enak 😄

Now the triumph finally arrived! Akhirnya bikin lagi properly — ngembang maksimal, dry crunchy on the outside, kopong tapi ada lelembutannya di dalam. Gurih, eggy, enak.

My Personal Review

Tekstur mirip kulit kue sus, tapi ngaret kayak roti. Maybe because I used a blender to mix the batter? I don’t know. I figured, kalau disiram gravy memang bakalan enak banget.
But nevertheless, tetep enak, nyenengin, gampang bikinnya, seru ngeliat mekarnya di oven. Therapeutic, even.

The Real Secret

Sneak Peak and a Gratitude

It's been awhile.

Here I just need to share some photos I took for the next two books by NCC. Some kind of sneak peek, you may say.

Often times I was asked how to capture whole cakes, especially decorated cakes where the decoration must be captured as accurate as possible, without making the photos boring. Here I share some pictures from the upcoming book, they are all whole cakes, all decorated as the book suggested, hoping you can learn from them, same things I learned through one year trying to capture the beauty of 101 minicakes and cupcakes. If there are things you still want to ask, please do ask me, I will be more than happy to assist.

To me now, the previous long process of food photo session becomes much simpler and shorter. And easier, too. Good for my sanity. For one day session containing 5-20 food items to shoot, I used only 1-2 styling theme. So it was similar styling for 5 to 10 items, with small alterations here an there. Not only this strategy simplifies the work significantly, it also makes it easier for our editor and graphic designer to put them all together in one solid design concept. So, everybody's happy, and I hope our readers will be, too.

Monkey Bread

It is Bread Week on Natural Cooking Club! Time to put your favorite bread recipe into action, knead and rise, bake and celebrate this humble food ever exists!

I love bread for its everything. Versatility, variety, history, and ultimately the fun of making it. Just like diving, you'll find what you specifically look for. If you seek adventure, you'll find one. Whether in yeasty dough, rustic starter sourdough, or the light soda bread and baking powder biscuit, you'll get a personal different experience you hardly forget. If you seek comfort, making it was like a meditation, and nothing can beat the comfort of home-baked bread coming right out of your own kitchen. If you need to get your creative juice running, endless of possibility was laid out in front of you, creating your own version of bread that adds to the already gigantic global variety. If you seek romantic past time reminiscing, the aroma will take you there, to the time where life was simple and problems were either to make loaves now or later after the strawberries were picked.

I love Monkey Bread. I love how it looks, how fun it is to make and eat, and how the unbeatable sweet cinnamon bursts in your mouth, covers your fingers to lick clean. I even love the name! For this Monkey Bread, I used my favorite Classic 100% Whole Wheat Bread. Seriously, you can use any bread recipe you like, even biscuits, which I actually plan to make one with. The "monkey" is the shaping process. You ball the dough, dip it into melted butter, throw it in cinnamon sugar mixture to coat, arrange in a pan. You can add nuts or raisins to the cinnamon, add honey to the melted butter, anything you fancy. You can even fill the ball first before dipping and coating, i'm thinking.. cheese cream?

That's it. When you turn it out of the pan onto a plate, you get a beautiful mounded pull-out breads. 

Shiny, gooey, rustic. There, you get your monkey :)

100% Whole Wheat Loaf

"Who says whole wheat bread has to be dense, dry, and tasteless? This 100% whole wheat recipe features the delightfully nutty taste of wheat in a fine-grained, moist, faintly sweet loaf."

You know what, they speak the truth. When I read the review, it didn't take long before I ran to baking store  and be back in my kitchen to try the recipe. By the time the sun smeared the sky purple in the afternoon, I've had a wondrous yeasty fragrant kitchen and the best home-baked wholewheat loaf for my afternoon tea. Could life be any sweeter?

I'd been in quest for a good one-hundred-percent wholewheat bread for quite some time that I almost gave up. They're always too dense, too dry, didn't taste really good, or I had to give up some part of the flour for white flour. But this, I love! Got it from King Arthur Flour website, tweaked a little bit, and I have a foolproof recipe I always can count on. Been baking this several times now and for me it's a life saver. Can't count on the so-called wholewheat loaf they sell in the bakeries, let alone supermarket. You have to find a European style bakery to get a full wholegrain bread in Jakarta. Last time I checked, only Vineth Bakery still sells this thing. Others only sell the fake ones, the ones contained only about 10-20% wholewheat flour in them. And they don't even taste good.

One afternoon I enjoyed it with homemade chocolate-peanut spread and fresh cheesecream, another time I had it with vegetables and homemade mayo for lunch. Call me wholewheat crazy, I'm happy.