Hello my lovelies! I sat in on a bread class that I will be helping to teach. I’m thinking about balance. I have started working on Christmas recipes. And I found an amazing honey bargain. And the sun is trying to come out today! Go sun go! This cold snap has stalled all the seeds I planted thinking spring was here.
I’ve talked before about intending to teach some classes at Crave cooking school here in Wellington. With schedules and life and back and forth the right opportunity hadn’t come up. Well now there is an opening to co-host a sourdough and bread roll class. I sat in on the class this weekend in preparation for my first stint. It was great fun and I am looking forward to getting into it. I’m nervous obviously. I feel like I have the background of knowledge to teach and answer questions but it’s hard to get up in front of people and I don’t have the rhythm of the class down yet. Wish me luck!
One thing I am quite conscious of is making sure I keep a day off each week. Saturday has been my no-work-of-any-kind day so far and since the classes are all Saturdays I need to make an effort to schedule a different day in those weeks to have some downtime. I guess I never really stop baking and cooking so in some way I’m always thinking and researching and learning. But I need that bit of distance regularly. You can get away with it for a while then it breaks you.
While I am super into Christmas, blogging schedules sometimes have you making all sorts of things out of season. For this one I’m not complaining. Christmas treats are delicious so working on them in August is no hardship. For me at least. I’m working on a couple of traditional European cookies – florentines and pfeffernusse. Hopefully coming your way at a more appropriate time of year. In talking about it, it’s already September so I do actually need to work out travel for Christmastime and remember to schedule my Christmas cake for November! It’ll be here before you know it…
There was an added bonus to working on those cookies. As if I needed one. A lot of traditional European recipes use honey. Pfeffernusse in particular. Honey is getting expensive you guys. I don’t want to become one of those terrible people who say things like “back in my day you could get…” but it’s totally true in this instance. Recipe testing with honey can be a tall order. So I had a look around on the internets and found that a honey producer that I already liked (Mountain Valley Honey) sells a bulk baking honey. For what is an insane price compared to retail. It’s not raw like their standard range and is a blend of all the other honeys. I’m hoping it will have a great strong flavour that will come through nicely. Can’t wait for it to arrive.
Make bread. Take time out. Feel the Christmas love. Save the bees. Look after each other.
xx
