The British Short Bread and The Not so Mexican Bun

The weather's become rainy and wet. I'm on leave for a couple of weeks, with the best friend due to arrive to India shortly. While I'm sure that in itself will be an adventure, as this weather ALWAYS does, it's inspired me to head closer to the oven and begin cooking.

 Something that took a temporary break, and given meat is no longer the favorite ingredient for yours truly to cook for, it had to be the dreaded dessert disaster series.

The Mexican Coffee Bun

Anyone from Malaysia will know what I'm referring to. This was the craze, at one point of time, and since I'm frozen in 2006, for me, this is still the craze. Every single one of my plimgrimage to Mal has always made me run to Roti Boy (I'm sorry folks, no other variation will ever do it for me. No- I don't care how good anyother brand of what you might have it is..)

So the weather was right, the inspiration struck, a crazy gene in my body said why not and I thought I would give it a shot. The recipe I followed was the shortest one that I guess may have left out a few crucial things, because my bun fell flat. Actually, to say it fell flat, would be to imply it rose at all, but it did not. I don't know what went wrong..maybe the yeast (I've never worked with that before!) or it was the kneading (too much? too little?) or the folding of the filling? Or it could be that I could not use bread flour and instead substituted with 1/4 wheat flour and plain flour.

One thing was perfect though, the look of the bun. The topping was a roaring success and the taste of the topping was (almost) spot on! The only thing I regret is being lazy and not running the sugar in the mixer and instead using granulated sugar for the icing

The British Short Bread

I'm not a great fan of biscuits or in this case short bread. I'd be damned if I've consciously had something called a short bread before, but thanks to a few changes in my home page settings I ended up on the BBC website. This was just as I was contemplating looking for another bun recipe.. but out popped the short bread recipe, teasing me with the fact that there were only 3 ingredients listed.

Surely I could make this, and it's a cookie, and well, I know the house would smell lovely (like Cookie Man in Garuda). And wham, I begun and narrowly thwarted a disaster, when for some reason, a few things didn't add up and I didn't get a dough. Another short recipe, another near dessert disaster. But thank God to this recipe/video, I realized that the consistency was all wrong, whacked more butter, then felt a bit bad for being a fat pig and substituted some olive oil for the buter.

Another key thing missing was, the technique to roll. Now I know a lot of you must think that I'm plain dumb and maybe if baking knowledge is the yardstick by which intelligence is measured, I would rate very low. The honest truth is I've never seen anyone bake cookies before, so I don't know you flour, push the crack together, roll, flour, remove and onwards.. and that's what the video shows.

I remember this woman from my Carrot Cake recipe too. She does have a tonne of recipes that look pretty interesting, that I certainly want to try and make.  Coming back to the point, it all ended well. My cookies came out just fine, if not perfect and well.. happiness was meeeee. I don't SUCK after all!!