Short and Tweet Challenge 11: Soft baps and Cider vinegar muffins
This week’s #shortandtweet challenge from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet was for Soft white baps pg 60 or Cider vinegar muffins pp 65-69 or Superwraps pg 72. As far as I know, nobody attempted the Superwraps [update: mea culpa, I was wrong]. The runaway baking, taste and texture revelation for this week was for those of us who’d never attempted the soft white baps before. The photograph above is an stack of enticingly soft baps from @tomasi_carla who captured the essence of these baps when she said they have “the sweet smell of babies”.
@tomasi_carla has more photographs of her baps and they are well worth looking at: she reports that she baked them at 200C but turned the fan off which may account for the comparatively paler colour of her baps.
I’m very pleased to welcome some newcomers to this week’s #shortandtweet: @lapindor of Lapin d’Or and More and @underthebluegum of Under the Blue Gum Tree. Update: please extend your welcome to @Jerronimissus of Jerronimissus.
Jane of Lapin d’Or and More baked both the muffins and the baps. I particularly envied the welsh griddle pan that figures so prominently in Cider Vinegar Muffins from Dan Lepard’s Short & Sweet.
The answer to the question Jane posed in relation to the soft baps lead to some controversy in my household: Baps, Barm Cakes, What Would You Call Them? As a Southerner, my Best Beloved does not distinguish between such baked goods. As a Northerner, a barm cake has a tangy bite from the barm leaven (a variation on sourdough) and a soft texture with a lightly-floured top: for me a soft bap has a lighter texture which can be compressed round a filling but will bounce back, and a sweeter flavour with a floury top. I will admit, however, that these views may be idiosyncratic, and might reflect living in the NW of England (we’ll leave aside my time in Scotland and that other soft roll delight, the Morning Roll, which has its own subtle differences despite similar ingredients and technique).
Take a moment to admire the gumtree and azure sky in the blog banner of Under the Blue Gum Tree. Read about Claire’s experience of dodgy yeast, and how her success with Dan Lepard’s micro-kneading and Easy White Bread recipe helped her out at culinary school. “For my final exam, I secreted myself at the end of the kitchen and hoped that the examiner wouldn’t notice that I was using an entirely different recipe for my rolls. Luckily I got away with it and couldn’t help feeling a bit smug when I got singled out for the quality of my bread. Thanks Dan!” Claire and I seem to have had some similar misgivings about the rise of the muffin dough at various points: The Short and Tweet Challenge. Claire reports: “My dough also didn’t rise as much as expected…So sure was I of impending failure that I even checked my storecupboard to ensure I could whip up a batch of baps instead. Still, I ploughed on with my muffins and when they hit the pan, they dutifully rose beautifully. Once baked and cooled, I slit one open and was relieved to see it looked just like the picture [in Short & Sweet]”.
@north_19 of North_19 has triggered a hunt for pig cheeks in several parts of the UK after posting her Chinese-style pig cheek baps. In the comments, there is even talk of bartering baps to wheedle pig cheeks out of butchers who don’t usually carry them but do have a strong interest in good bread. Nicola has provided a very useful series of photographs of various stages of the dough and its mixing as well as the recipe for her siren-call Hunanese-style braised pig cheeks.
Mitchdafish of Mitchadafish blog offers a gallery of filling ideas to excite meal times and hunger pangs: Floury baps. Like many of us, Mitchdafish delighted in this recipe: “The texture and flavour could not be beaten… if Dan had been in the room at this point we would have stuffed him in a floury bap, smothered him with sauce and garnish and gobbled him up”.
Misky of Misk Cooks baked the soft baps early in the week and shared my enthusiasm for them: Short and Sweet Challenge: Soft White Baps. Although Misky and her family enjoyed the baps, she felt that she’d discerned a “slight heavy chewiness”. So, in typical Misky style, she repeated the recipe the next day with a few tweaks to her original attempt: “The result was perfection. There was a volleyball-ish oven spring, very soft and tender crust, airy crumb. It was a totally different roll. I put it down to a few things: full-fat milk instead of semi-skimmed, real sugar, and mixed entirely by hand rather than using the standmixer. The blanket fold might be responsible for the near anti-gravity spring in the oven”.
@TonyInga of Pane Artigiano approached this week’s challenge with his typical zest: At Last! - Bread Baking! Now, just to add further unnecessary detail to Jane’s question above, I’d say that Tony’s baps look more like a cob (NB, not a crusty cob), albeit with this dough it would taste a little different.
@BakeCakeCrumbs of Cake, Crumbs and Cooking has some good illustrations of the dough mixing process (includes a Danish Dough Whisk - I have one of these and have a soft spot for it): Soft White Baps. The recipe stood up well to being halved and still delivered a delightfully soft bap.
@Choclette8 of Chocolate Log Blog was sufficiently intrigued by this week’s recipes that although she typically participates when chocolate in an ingredient, or a recipe can be tweaked to include it, she just had to try the cider vinegar muffins and produced a beautifully sunny-coloured result.
However, the prize for the most-gloriously coloured cider vinegar muffins must go to @CarlLegge of Carl Legge: Cider vinegar muffins, egg and salad. In a charming insight into what it must be like knowing people who live The Good Life, for Carl, this recipe “meant I could use our hens’ eggs…and the cider vinegar I had made earlier in the year”. Carl has some useful tips and you can learn just how helpful a salad ingredient chickweed is in these thin months for vegetables.
Update to add the write-up from @Zeb_Bakes of Zeb Bakes: Dan Lepard’s Cider Vinegar Bread Muffins with the understandably exuberant subtitle, These are the best muffins I’ve ever tasted!.
Jo’s made some interesting observations about subtle changes to the recipe from when it was first published in the Guardian.
“I approached the muffins with a little hesitation as when we had made them before they had always disappointed a little, tasty but very heavy and doughy, more like a crumpet inside than anything else. But, ever the optimist I thought I’d have another go. I’m really glad I did.”
“[The] cooking method is quite different from how it first appeared…The result transforms these little lovelies giving them a wonderfully delicate light crumb and that special muffin crust that you only get from baking them off in this way, soft and yet crispy with a little hint of toasted flour and with a bit of bite.”
Go, look at Jo’s folded dough which is a thing of beauty: note yet another person who has home-brewed their own cider vinegar. Admire the griddled dough below (Jo has useful advice on how not to over-cook them) and then move on to the lovely finished result.
And now - some Superwraps, Huzzah for @jerronimmissus who attempted these for us: Superwraps. People with a keen eye for observation (and a touch of covetousness) may well notice Nicky’s pastry cloth on which she rolls out the dough (go, look - it’s got helpful guidemarks). I think that a number of us will share a moment of understanding when Nicky reports crises of confidence along the way in making up this recipe. If anybody can cast light on various of the issues then please leave a comment for her. One useful note may be to consult the rye crispbread week where a number of us commented on the issue of rolling them to sufficient extra-thinness.
Nicky’s overall report is: “These tasted nice and it was good to do something a bit different…Now I don’t know if it was the oatmeal, if I added too much water or overworked the dough, or used too much flour when rolling, or cooked them a bit too long, or what but these were chewy. Dare I say, rubbery…I will definitely try these again with the quinoa and see how they turn out. A major plus was that my four year old happily gobbled a couple up and ate some of her salad so overall I think we have to class these a success!”
It is safe to say that the household and neighbours’ enthusiastic response to the soft baps means that they are now a permanent part of the baking schedule in my home. The oven spring of these baps initially took me by surprise but as I’ve recently baked a third batch of them, this does seem characteristic of the dough. 
My muffins are considerably paler than those from other bakers. I don’t know if this is related to the pale colour of the vinegar I used as other participants had the benefit of their home-brewed condiment. My muffins also look a little drier but this is probably because I forgot to cover them while they were pre-cooked on the griddle.
If I’ve omitted anyone, please let me know and I’ll update this post.
The challenge for next week is a return to interesting flours used in sweet recipes: Rye and raisin cookies pg 247 or Spelt and ginger cookies pg 245. If you blog about your experience with a recipe, please post links in the comments or tweet pictures or links to @foodcraftspace or @evidencematters using the hashtag #shortandtweet - Thank you. It’s the same procedure if you don’t blog but just post a photograph of your work. Please send the links by 8pm 22 January or as soon thereafter as practical.
Schedule for the #shortandtweet January 2012 challenge.
Outline for #shortandtweet challenge and its conditions.
Thank you to everyone for taking part. I look forward to seeing next week’s cookies which strike me as more interesting than your average elevenses (or 2amses if you’re a shift worker or insomniac).
