There's something very pleasant about a rainy Sunday, when you are certain that it is going to rain and can plan accordingly. I spent the morning making milk rolls and a cake, and am now sitting in front of the Aga listening to the last lumps of ice fall from the roof of the defrosting fridge freezer. It's badly needed doing for days, since the top freezer drawer would no longer fit in, and a lump of ice at the back of the fridge was stopping the door from closing with the salad tray in place, but freezer defrosting and a muddy day hard at it in the garden don't mix.
The rolls were from that stalwart, the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book. I first made them in my teens from my mother's copy. Since my student days I've had my own, slightly later edition, but I don't imagine the recipe for milk rolls has changed. Originally I was going to try my hand at Rose Prince's plaited milk loaf out of the Telegraph, but when I looked at the ingredients more closely and saw that it used a full kilo of flour I thought that was going to make more rolls than the two of us needed. Milk rolls are nicest eaten fresh, not something to stockpile. The Good Housekeeping recipe calls for a more manageable 225 grammes of flour, which makes eight small rolls. You rub in a small amount of fat, and mix with 150 millilitres of milk, though I have a feeling that I cheerfully muddled metric and imperial measures and used a quarter of a pint. The texture of the dough felt about right anyway.
The dough and the shaped rolls took far longer to prove than the book said they would, despite my halving the recommended quantity of salt, which I'd expect to speed things up since salt is antagonistic to the action of yeast. We started reducing salt in cooking for health reasons ages ago, and by now our tastes have adjusted to prefer what we're used to. I halve the salt in Elizabeth David's everyday bread recipe as well. Getting back to the slow rise of these rolls, the dried yeast theoretically expires at the end of this month and has been open for I don't know how long, so maybe it isn't as lively as it used to be. Incidentally, if you ever have a yeast dough that absolutely refuses to rise it's worth leaving it overnight in the fridge before binning it. Even tiny amounts of yeast can work wonders, given time. Also incidentally, I never understand those (always male) authors of baking books who get all strict and shouty about weighing the liquid because it is more accurate than using a measuring jug. The moisture content of flours varies, so you don't know exactly how much liquid you'll need until you see how things are going.
The cake was a recipe I have never made before. It is carefully written out in handwriting that no longer looks quite like mine does now, on audit paper filched (shame on me) from an accountancy firm I ceased working for in 1985, which could be something of a record for delayed action. It was a Cumbrian lemon cake, copied from the Times, and taken from Theodora FitzGibbon's A Taste of the Lake District. It uses the creaming method with a fairly high ratio of fat to flour, flavoured with the rind and juice of a lemon and some candied peel. I had a stray lemon in the fridge that needed using, and the tail end of a pot of peel. The quantities, if you are interested and in ounces are fat 6 (4 butter, 2 lard), caster sugar 5, self raising flour 8, two eggs, two ounces of chopped peel. The only part of the instructions that caused me doubts was the suggested one and a half hours cooking time at 350 Fahrenheit. I don't do degrees F (odd, when I do ounces, inches and miles) but translated to 180 Celsius it didn't sound right. Only eight ounces of flour for an hour and a half in a medium oven? I set the alarm for the hour, and by that point the edges were starting to catch. I haven't cut it yet, and it may yet be that the centre is underdone. We shall see.
Bread and cake combine well for a baking session, since you can get on with mixing the cake during the first proving, and the dough won't mind waiting an extra five minutes if you've got to a critical point with the cake mixture. So, it was a very pleasant sort of morning, listening to Pienaar's Politics and Private Passions while the freezer dripped gently in the background. The BBC was definitely on to something when they invented the Great British Bake Off. My slightly burnt offerings don't approach Mary Berry standards by a thousand miles (or one thousand, six hundred and nine kilometers), but the Systems Administrator came back for a third milk roll.
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