Kitchen 31 - Bread, Pavlova, Jelly and Oranges

Oh, what a day! Something was in the air today or the like but this day in the kitchen was certainly not the best.

I started by making the dough for the bread - you probably know by now that I love making bread!?!? Right, so I was vigorously kneading away, having a great time. Once the dough was ready, I left it to rise.

Then on to the pavlova, that beautiful merigue creation. Whisking the egg whites, everything going great. Until my class mate tastes her mixture and goes: Urgh! The mixture was salty, so was mine. So we had to start allover again. We just thought that our table mixed up some of the little measured cups that we had on the table. Right so we did it again.

Then I had a look at my bread - it hadn't even started to rise after a good 30 minutes. Well, just leave it and give it time. On to jelly. The gelatine took forever to dissolve. But then that came together with the orange and passion fruit juice.

Finally we had to segment some oranges - not too difficult I would say. However, still my bread was not rising as it should be. By that time we had realised that a lot of the other students' pavlovas were salty as well and that probably the whole sugar container was contaminated with salt. Some had more in it than others and the class actually turned into quite a scientific lab. Everybody came to have a taste of the strange saltly pavlovas. And there were some that actually didn't think it was that bad. Just like salty toffee.

Right, while that was going on, I was still worried about my bread not rising when I realised that I might have killed the yeast with too much salt. Because in the beginning of the recipe you feed the yeast with sugar - but if the sugar is partly salt then that actually can kill the yeast. Too much salt in the bread is not good.

Well, long story short: It did rise in the end, I baked it and although it was slightly oversalted, I still enjoyed eating it!