I love baking. Well, maybe love’s too strong a word, but it’s fun and strangely relaxing. However the last few times I’ve done any baking I’ve made things where I’ve known the recipe so well I didn’t have to look at it. And I’ve tweaked it to my tastes and baking habits. Which is great, but felt it was time to bake something new.

My mum’s been at me for a while to bake bread. She kept saying to me over and over again how easy it is and how cheap it is and how good it tastes. I can’t disagree with any of those things she said. I came across a bread recipe which sounded incredibly easy and pretty much fool proof. For some reason I’m slightly scared of baking bread. I just know how wrong it can go!

I found this recipe for Ciabatta bread. 1 minute bread – how hard could it be? It really wasn’t that hard at all. Made the dough on Friday night and I was a bit scared as to how wet the dough was. It was pourable! But I kept the faith and the next morning I baked the bread and tadaa….

I need to tweak the recipe a bit – add a bit more salt, add a few more herbs and add a little less water, but it worked out better than I thought and tastes really good! I was a bit of a doof and in my excitement of actually baking I put greaseproof paper down and forgot to put flour on it. Which led to the bread getting stuck to the paper. Not doing that again!

Next in my bake heavy weekend were some cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes. I’ve got my ‘own’ recipe for double chocolate chip muffins. Really simple recipe where you shove everything in a food processer, blitz, pour and bake. This one’s a bit more complicated.

Chocolate souffle cupcakes with mint cream is the recipe of choice. Souffle do scare me. I’ve never done anything souffle-ish. I just had this image of it not rising/cooking and just coming out bleugh.

Pleasantly surprised that the recipe worked brilliantly. Again, I need to tweak a few things. Though I did have a few scares along the way, when the butter started separating from the melted chocolate mix and it really didn’t look good. Next time I need to add a little less coffee and try and grind the instant coffee a bit more – it just didn’t dissolve and some of the cupcakes have almost whole granules of coffee! Here’s how one of my cupcakes turned out:

I’m surprised how light it is! Even a day later after everything’s sunk a fair bit. Very, very chocolatey. I might want to try using chocolate that’s a little less dark – even though I love dark chocolate, it’s very dark and rich.

Since spying that recipe on Smitten Kitchen I’ve seen a few more I feel the need to try. Though with the amount of time I spent in the kitchen this weekend I don’t think I want to do that level of baking for a while. But I want to try something new again!