Week One - Paul Hollywood's quince and camembert flatbreads

After a solid year of doing the 9-5 daily grind (or 8-6 if we're being realistic) in addition to at least 10 hours of commuting through our lovely city each week, I really haven't had much left in the tank for anything else. How very dull!

So this year, I set myself a new year challenge...and come rain, hail or other natural disaster, I'm going to try and stick to it.

I absolutely love to bake, sew and create and have umpteen cookery and baking books, all of which sit gathering dust on our kitchen shelf.  I have been particularly taken (read: obsessed) with The Great British Bake Off series on the BBC and have two lovely baking books from the program. We also took up residence in suburbia late last year and I have been blessed with the opportunity for domesticity on a level I never experienced in our pokey 2 bedroom flat.

Where am I going with all this? My challenge for 2014 is to bake one new thing each week. it sounds like a small task, but not just any old thing, I really want to try and push the boat out to challenge myself and bring  all my lovely books to life. 

In order to honour the series, I decided my first bake would be Paul Hollywood's quince and camembert flatbreads. The night before (after a few margaritas I should add) a good friend of mine had invited us to a neighbourhood BBQ and so what better occasion than this to try out a new recipe on some unsupecting victims (I mean taste-testers).

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with these flatbreads as I'd never made them before - I'd also never made dough using (my new) Kitchenaid (whom I've loyally named Mary after the Queen of baking, Mary Berry). I also found strong bread flour exceptionally challenging to find - 2 supermarkets were out of stock, and so I thought I'd try some flour from Lauke, who traditionally make bread mixes, but when I checked on the pack, the flour hadn't yet been combined with the rest of the mix, so I took that to mean it was just plain old bread flour. 

Well, how good are dough hooks on Kitchenaids? I just added the combined dry ingredients in, and then the water carefully and a bit at a time as directed. Hey, presto - dough!

Sadly, Kitchenaids can't do it all (well, Im sure they can, but a bit of personal input I believe is important) so out came the dough to meet its flavourings - quince paste and camembert. 

I'm not sure if I added too much water at the mixing stage (kitchen-aid rookie mistake #1?) or if the quince paste was particularly moist, but the dough was incredibly wet & icky to work with. The recipe said to work the paste and cheese in, then divide dough into small balls and roll flat - there was no rolling flat happening as it was just an icky sticky mess. 

I was lucky enough to receive a jar of home made quince paste from a colleague at work, and purchased a small wheel of camembert from my new cheese (and other random things) mecca - Aldi. 

I probably added another 200g  of flour through the continual covering of both the surface and the rolling pin before any of the balls resembled a flattened ball. Hey-ho a bit of improv never really hurt any one!?

An oiled, hot griddle pan at the ready I fried off my flatbreads - a little longer than the 2 minutes each side as directed - when I tried just the 2 minutes, they still looked a little translucent in parts, which to me = raw dough (yuk!) I'd say they took a good 4 mins each side, and although the finished product was a little darker than the perfect sample, they still tasted pretty good. 

I did pop round to my friend's with the flatbreads that afternoon to present for consumption at her BBQ...although when I arrived, there was no answer to my knock on the door. I knew I was about an hour late as the stickiness of the dough put me behind schedule...but surely so late so as to miss the whole thing! I called my dear friend who, very embarrassed, said she had completely forgotten about her BBQ and was still at the beach - her memory the victim of too many margaritas! I left her some flatbreads on the doorstep and went home to enjoy the still-warm spoils of my afternoons labour. Delish. But in future, I'd add more cheese...but I love a bit of cheesy goodness.