It’s a rainy Saturday afternoon, only Myself, Hubby and Luca are at home, we have been out to Reigate, checked out some lovely vintage furniture shops, been to Starbucks and stocked up on yummy toppings for our homemade pizza’s for dinner tonight.

Now the boys are chilling in the lounge, playing on the Playstation together, I have just finished making the dough for the pizza’s later and a huge 3lb loaf dough which has given my arms quite a work out, no bingo wings here!

It’s raining, the house feel’s cosy and I finally have time to sit down and catch up on my very neglected blog. I have so many recipes I need to type up but just have not had the time lately.

So here is the first recipe, ciabatta. I was a little nervous making this for the first time, the ones that you buy in the shop are always so perfect and look so good, but what I have found is, that compared with the homemade variety the shop brought are pretty tasteless. Homemade was no more challenging than any other bread I have made and the great thing is that it mades four loaves at a time, perfect to stock your freezer up with.

The ciabatta looked just like the ones you buy in the shop, perfect shape and size, lovely texture, but with so much more flavour, again I have made a rod for my own back and will not be buying shop brought ones ever again.

This recipe can also be used to make great garlic bread with, simply flatten the dough out, brush with garlic oil and you have instant garlic bread.

Buon appetito



Makes 4 loaves


500g strong white flour, plus extra for dusting
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
15g instant yeast
400ml tepid water
30ml olive oil

Place the flour, salt, yeast and 300ml of the water in a table mixer with a dough hook and mix on slow for 3 minutes (this will bring the ingredients together).

Then slowly begin to add the remaining water and mix for a further 5-8 minutes on a medium speed. The dough should now be wet and stretch easily when pulled. This will shock my usual followers, but I actually missed the hand kneading here, I have gone from using the machine to knead everything to loving doing it by hand, feeling the dough change under your hands is great. Shocking I know!

Place the dough into an oiled 2 litre square plastic tub (an old ice cream container is just perfect for the job) and leave it to double in size, this should take about 1 hour in ambient room temperature (20 – 24C/68 – 75F).

Tip the dough out onto a heavily floured surface and coat the top of the dough all over with flour. Cut the dough in half lengthways and divide each piece in two, so you have four pieces of dough (see photo above).

Stretch out each piece of dough a little and place on two lined baking trays to rest for a further 20 minutes. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 220C/425F/mark 7.

Bake in the oven for 25 minutes until golden brown.