Herb Beer bread.

Sometimes, food for me is like a journal. The taste of certain food evokes a distinct feeling, a memory or simply captures the scene at that moment. I guess I like baking also because it momentarily brings me away to the time when I was traveling. Wondering along the streets and finding little surprises. The unpredictability of things!

Everyone remembers Köln for the Dom. Its never ending spiral stairs and of course the shopping!

But my first memory of Köln was walking in the rainy city with my friends, searching for something I can't quite remember. Feeling hungry and sad because we could not quite find what we were searching for and ended up at a bakery ( which happens to be a really good bakery, because about one year later I landed up there again to have lunch!). What caught my eye there was beer bread! In the cold rainy weather, feeling low and empty, beer bread came to the rescue, alright maybe I am dramatizing a little but I had really fantastic beer bread for the first time in my life. ( And I honestly thought it was beer flavored bread, well it isn't surprising to have this sort of stuff since we were in germany, where Beer is dirt cheap! )

And so today, I decided to recapture that memory. Its also partly because sister tan is complaining that I am baking too much sweet stuff and odd to quit sugar for once. Little did she know that I don't really like baking healthy stuff. hahaha!

I found a couple of beer bread recipe and decided to modify a little,

Adapted from Recipezaar

Ingredients

3 C Flour (Sifted. Very important step!)

3 Tsp Baking Powder

1 Tsp Salt

1/4 C Sugar

1 Tsp Garlic

1 Tsp Oregano
1/2 C Parmesan

1 (12 ounce) can Beer

1/4 C melted butter

1) Preheat oven to 178 degrees

2) Mix dry ingredients and beer

3) Pour into a greased loaf pan

4) Pour melted butter over mixture

5) Bake 1 hour, remove from pan and cool.

Its so simple, smells fantastic and taste even better than it looks!

Bread Pudding

Ingredient for the day is 面包。( Bread) The first time I tried bread pudding was in one of those buffet restaurant and felt it tasted really good, especially with the warm vanilla sauce. Did not realise how easy it is to bake it till today. Until I got this recipe. I used 8 slices of bread instead of the 6 slices stated in the recipe. And would suggest using lesser sugar. if you are female baking for your girl friends. I've discovered that women and men have relatively different taste buds or rather different tolerance of sweetness. Perhaps females are alway watching their weight, or are more concern about weight issues, hence sugar or sweet stuff is somehow emphasized.
 

I really had no idea how bread pudding would look like fresh out of the oven. Since I usually see it in a restaurant half eaten already but koh took a look at this picture and said it looked fine. So yup it looks like that. 



Soft and moist on the inside.