Chelsea Buns - le flop de jour!

Call me paranoid but I think that my cookbooks are conspiring to thwart my bread-baking plans. I have upgraded my cooking scales and spared no expense on higher quality ingredients. Yet, no matter how religiously I follow the recipes, it has been one cooking disaster after another and I have spent the entire week assuaging my guilt and disappointment by eating my failures. I feel like an ancient Greek alchemist attempting to turn lead into gold. Who would have thought that baking bread is so difficult? Is this some secret dark art that I am endeavouring to learn?

Le flop de jour? Chelsea buns - spiral-shaped current buns glazed in icing sugar. I created a dough that can only be described as some sort of biohazard. It had an unnatural elasticity and alarmingly clung to everything that it touched, which made kneading near impossible. Sadly, a lot of good flour was lost along the way.

The finished product looks and tastes more like a bun from the dodgy end of Chelsea. Clearly, there is something very wrong with this recipe. But, I am quite ecstatic that I managed to produce something edible.

In other news, I am inching closer to perfecting my banana bread recipe. This time, I opted for muscavado sugar, my favourite type, which gave the bread that lovely sweet flavour I was aiming for. Next time, I think that the walnuts will have to go as they have an overpowering taste. Banana bread is my refuge as a failed baker. My place of anchor whilst I figure out how on Earth to make dough that does not resemble plaster. It's no wonder since, let's face it, this is a cake masquerading as bread! Of course, that doesn't stop me from eating slices of it thickly smothered in butter...