Give us this day our daily bread

When my son was diagnosed with his allergies, one of the things that came up was wheat. I was determined that he should have his daily bread, and so set about making bread form various flours, until i found the perfect recipe, and the perfect bread. These days George is able to eat wheat so we use normal flour, but the best recipe i have found is one of Nigella's. I love the fact that it produces small,white, very soft little rolls- perfect for elegant dinner party or kids bun fight (and dinner at our house is often a combination of the two!).
I put 500g of plain white flour,1 packet of instant yeast,1 teaspoon salt, 1 tablespoon sugar into a bowl and mix it. I then add the milk and butter (Nigella recommends that you heat these two together to melt the butter, but butter doesn't last very long here in cyprus once out of the fridge, so this step isn't really one i have to do :) and mix with a wooden spoon until it comes together into a dough (if it is too sticky add some more flour). Now take your dough and knead it for about 10 minutes until it is nice and smooth. Place your dough into a greased bowl, cover with clingfilm and place in a  nice warm place (not hard to find here!) until it doubles in size. Punch the air out of your dough, then turn it out onto a floured surface.

 Now comes the fun part! Pinch off bits of dough the size of a walnut, and roll them in between your hands until they look like ping pong balls. Place the balls onto a greased cookie sheet, around 5mm apart. Then leave the dough to prove again, for around half an hour. When you come back you will have something like what you can see on the left here :) The little rolls end up touching.

Preheat the oven to gasmark 7 or 220C while your rolls are proving. Once the rolls have done their thing, brush them with milk, oil or egg and them dust them with seeds. Nigella suggests dusting alternate rows with different seeds. We tend to dust one row with poppy seed, leave a row plain, then one row of sesame seeds, another plain row, and then back to the poppy seeds, and so on until you have finished :)
It should end up looking something like this!



Into the oven then, for around 15 minutes or until the rolls are a nice golden brown.

They are fab straight out of the oven, all hot, with melted butter- yum! They are also very good for up to 3 days afterwards (if there are any left by that time of course!). Until tomorrow....