A Doughy Cooking Experience

To round off this year of cooking and blogging, I made some treats to share with friends. Most of these treats were made using dough - so I got quite a lot of experience with that whilst making these. I didn't take step by step pictures, but I'll attach a brief explanation for those who would like to try these recipes!

Foccacia

To make this Italian bread, I used this video recipe:

Although I did make some changes to the ingredients I used:

500g white flour

2 tsp salt 

2 tsp yeast

350ml water

50ml olive oil

Diced fresh tomatoes (instead of cherry tomatoes)

Cubes of mozzarella cheese (instead of feta)

A spice mix I sprinkled over the top before baking consisting of sea salt, oregano and rosemary (instead of fresh basil)

The foccacia came out surprisingly better than expected, with a hard crisp outer layer and soft insides. I just cut mine into small bite sized pieces, but you can also use the foccacia bread to make tasty cheese toasties!

Pretzels

To make these mini salty pretzels, I used another video recipe:

I pretty much followed all the ingredients as is listed in the original recipe:

500g white flour

50g white sugar (instead of brown sugar)

1 tbsp yeast

2 tsp salt

300 ml water

3 tbsp bicarbonate of soda

I made the pretzels into smaller versions, which were much more handy to bring in a box. They were pretty tasty, although I do suggest using less salt over the top of the pretzels for mini versions. To see the written recipe to these video guides, check the description box for each video.

Mini pizzas

As for these mini pizza recipes, I used a video recipe for the dough:

The ingredients are as listed:

1 sachet of dry yeast

2 tbsp salt

4 cups of white flour

1 1/2 cups of warm water

I then used the following ingredients for toppings:

Caramelised onions 

Tomato paste

Diced tomatoes

Grated mozzarella

And a sprinkle of sea salt and oregano. 

These mini pizzas were super fun to make, but also quite time consuming! They were tasted almost like a pizza cracker, because the dough was very crisp/crunchy. I suggest to avoid leaving the dough out for too long as it may dry out - so get cracking once the dough is rolled out!

Caprese skewers

Ingredients needed include:

1 pack of bocconccini

1 pack of cherry tomatoes

1 bunch of fresh basil

For this last recipe, it's just another go at the caprese recipe that I've previously done at a lunch party. The only difference is that I cut the bocconccini and cherry tomatoes in half, and skewered them together with a piece of basil in between so that the skewer would be small and more bite sized.

Hope you can try one of these recipes out!

- C