Side to side!

I love fiddling with flour and slashes, as anyone who comes to our baking classes will confirm. Recently, I've started to experiment using a muslin cloth to create some nice looking loaves!

The loaf in question for this post is a combination of white and wholemeal flour - we call it a whitemeal.

After kneading and proving for one hour, I half covered the dough with a muslin cloth.

Then I covered (and I mean covered) the dough with plain flour.

Then I removed the cloth.

After leaving to prove for 45 minutes, I slashed the dough with a breadknife, at an angle of 45 degrees, then popped into a very hot oven for 30 minutes.

This produces great effects when baking, as the top of the loaf lifts up and pulls across the surface of the dough. Like this!

Great fun and it looks sensational to go from side to side!

End to end!

You can't please everyone. Even with baking. It's what makes the world go round. Take my kids. They don't like sesame seeds. Hate 'em. So we don't have them on anything. Instead we have poppy seeds. Which both myself and Mrs B are starting to dislike too. This got me thinking. A loaf with both toppings, neatly arranged with a no-mans land in the middle!

Of course, there are many toppings you could choose, but these were the toppings to hand so let's proceed!

I kneaded 500g of wholemeal flour, adding some sunflower oil to give a golden glow. After resting the the dough for 45 minutes, and knocking it back, I half filled two medium sized plates with sesame seeds and the other with poppy seeds.

Then, using a cloth to cover half of the dough (which was shaped into a round), I sprayed the uncovered half with water from my beloved vaporiser. Using a scraper, I lifted it from the board, upturned it and firmly placed it into the poppy seeds, covering the uncovered half of the dough.

Then I covered the poppy seed half of the dough with the cloth, sprayed the other half and placed it into the sesame seeds.

Then I removed the cloth and shaped the dough into a bloomer shape.

I left the dough to finish proving, for 45 minutes, then slashed it across before putting it into the oven.

After 30 minutes in the oven, here it is. A winner from end to end!