Keep Rolling

I would so love to catch the smell of baking bread in a bottle.

My dad went through a year-long phase of baking bread in the machine overnight so that we would awaken to the scent wafting through the house, calling us from our cosy beds to trip across the chilly landing and into the kitchen for breakfast. Still warm, the bread would instantly melt the butter and I’d bite straight in while it oozed into the pores. It was the kind of bread that you could still squish into dough and I loved it.

My dad’s phase might have passed (sad face), but our love of good bread has not. On my last trip away, I arrived home with red onion and gruyere focaccia as a souvenir. Most recently, my housemates and I knocked up some bread twists for a gigantic Burns’ Night dinner party (18 guests in a 3-person house). We cheated – if you can call it that – and used ready-made bread mix; we are students, after all. We mixed and kneaded and plaited together, and watched the flour and water become dough, and the dough rise, and the risen dough become golden rolls, tappably hard on the outside and soft and white on the inside. Served with our cock-a-leekie soup, made with homemade chicken stock (it was a pretty old-fashioned weekend…), the rolls soaked up the goodness and made for a pretty exceptional centrepiece on our tartan table.