Pizza to be Proud of

The picture is not so alluring but I was in a hurry to tuck in to my freshly baked pizza. The dough had puffed up beautifully around the edges and the underside had cooked through, a home-made pizza miracle had happened and I don't get those very often.

The dough recipe is from Dan Leppard's book Short and Sweet and pizza is this week's ShortandTweet challenge. The weather has turned beautifully warm and sunny and I really enjoyed tucking in to my pizza outside in the early evening sun.

I am going to attribute some of my pizza miracle to my new consignment of flour from Shipton Mill:

 

I ordered their strong white flour and am delighted with how easy it was to work with. It kneaded up into a silky smooth stretchy ball, rose beautifully and baked up without any gumminess at all. I ordered from their online shop and it arrived beautifully packed and pretty quickly too.

The pizza dough recipe is very straight forward but you are given options to make a slower rise dough which I must try to see if the dough tastes even better with a long rest. I use a baking stone in my oven to try and maintain a high temperature as the pizza goes in. I also prefer pizza to have very little topping which is useful as it does make it easier to get the base cooked through, as well as easier to eat with your fingers. Over on the BBC website there are some interesting  Pizza Notes put together by Dan on achieving a good home made pizza.

Dan's  recipe makes quite a large batch of dough and I turned what was left into a rosemary loaf which also baked up pretty well. This was a good accompaniment to cheese and cauliflower soup.

I missed writing up last week's challenge but I did have a go at the weetabix muffins and they were quite good, but no more. This was just personal taste and I could not even say why I would only describe them as quite good. I really liked the orange and cinnamon flavouring though and will try and incorporate that into a different muffin recipe next time I am looking to make some breakfast muffins.