shewhomust | Where there's toast...

The baking continues: between Christmas and New Year I tried out Claudia Roden's recipe for Florentine flat bread with grapes (Schiacciata con l'uva): the result was more cake-like than I had anticipated. If I do it again, I'll probably reduce the proportion of grapes and raisins to dough, and aim for a thinner but better risen loaf. The recipe calls for two layers of dough, and they didn't entirely unify.

weegoddess suggested going in the opposite direction, adding sugar and cinnamon: if cake is inevitable... And that would be an option, certainly, but I still like the idea of a bread with grapes in it, to eat with cheese.

On New Year's Day I played it safe and made the usual summer rye loaf, but since we were going out and wanted some bread and cheese before the party (we needn't have bothered, in fact, there was plenty of cheese there, but we didn't know that) I made a small loaf and some rolls to minimise the baking time. It behaved impeccably, and vanished very rapidly.

This left me wanting more rye bread, but also fancying a change: something darker and denser. So I returned to the oatmeal and rye mix - after a fashion, since I'd found a bag of wheat flakes in a jar at the back of the shelf. I went easy on the molasses - no more than a dessertspoonful, which gave colour and flavour but wasn't overbearing - and on the flour, too, stopping while the dough was still slightly tacky to the touch. That seemed to work, and the resultant loaf is moist and well flavoured: the sourness of the rye combines with the bitter burnt taste of the molasses, and the wheatflakes are coarse enough to add texture (mmm, chewy toast). It's the kind of loaf, in fact, that makes me think: where there's toast, there should be marmalade.

And as it happens, I have a bag of seville oranges...