Don’t eat the dough

14 December 2005

I thought I might have a bunch of photos from Knole Park to share with you today, but the plan Suzy and I had for a bit of shopping, a light lunch and a stroll round the park quickly turned into one shop and an enormous, long, delicious lunch. And that was it. I did take some photos of that though.

We ate at Zizzi in Sevenoaks, ordering 5 starters between us: chicken and chestnut paté with toasted ciabatta and Crostini Formaggio di Capra (mine), Garlic Mozzarella Pizza Bread with caramelised balsamic onions and Bruschetta Genovese (Suzy’s) and olives. We had tastes of each other’s dishes of course and every time the waiter came past to ask if everything was all right, all we could do was nod and mmm at him with full mouths and warm bellies.

A few days ago I was overcome with urge to make stuff. Having read about and seen the photos of Elaine and Lily’s salt dough creations at wannabehippie.com, I decided, to hell with everything, I was feeling creative.

The first step was googling and, man, you wouldn’t believe the number of different recipes there are for salt dough, all with wildly differing ratios of ingredients and cooking times. In the end, I went for 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of salt, 1/2 cup of water and bunging them into the oven on the lowest setting for a couple of hours. The dough behaved well and I added quite a bit of flour to it as I kneaded it. Then I started to roll it out and cut out shapes using my biscuit cutters. I think my favourite design was using the doughnut cutter and the holly leaf cutter to make the garlands in the photo. Incidentally, I’ve no idea what the plait is for, all I know is that it looks good.

Over the next few days, I painted the decorations with acrylic paints. I only have red, green, silver and gold (the primary colours of Christmas!) at the moment and would like to expand my collection somewhat. The pots are about £3 each though, so it’s quite an expensive thing to expand. The trouble is, I now desperately want to make some more salt dough goodies, but (a) I’m not exactly sure what to make (hell, I don’t even know what to do with the things I’ve already made) and (b) I think my creative phase has waned a little. Unfortunately, I’m much more creative in my head than in reality and thus my ability to produce what I imagine comes and goes. Maybe I’ll make some dough tomorrow to see if it’s gone or not. I’ll either end up with more delights like those above, or just a mess and a bad mood.