You need:
* 160g of basic savoury bread sponge – there’s plenty of recipes for this on the web.
* 120g plain white flour
* 40g stoneground flour
* 75g water
* pinch of salt
* about 10 ml olive oil

Mix all the above together, knead until smooth and leave to rise for an hour.

For the filling I used (apologies for the lack of quantities, I can’t remember exactly how much)
* castello blue cheese (Andrew uses gorgonzola which Sainsbury’s didn’t have, but I think would work better)
* green peppers
* mild sweet peppadew piquante peppers, which we’re really addicted to at the moment
* red onions

I fried the onions, then added the green peppers, and finally mixed in the piquante peppers and the cheese.

To construct the calzoni you need to divide the dough into four and roll gently into rounds. Leave to relax for 2 minutes and then roll out into a circle about 15cm diameter. This bit was the really fun bit. The dough is so nice and soft and stretchy and quite forgiving. You can throw it around and pretend you work at dominos.

Brush the edges with egg, put a dollop of filling in the middle and fold over. Finally brush the tops with beaten egg and leave to prove for an hour. Bake at 200C for 15-20 minutes.

To be honest the filling wasn’t a huge success. The creamy blue cheese, bitter green pepper and sweet and spicy red peppers clashed a bit. However the dough was so nice and soft and light that they were gone within 5 minutes flat. Even the two I’d made for lunch the next day.

I’ll definitely try this again but experiment with some different fillings. They taste fantastic fresh, but they could also be good things to make a batch of at the weekend for lunch during the week.

Any suggestions for fillings? Andrew says it’s better to go for things that don’t change in size dramatically when cooked otherwise you end up with an empty calzoni.

On paper it looked like it might be a bit of a faff, but it was actually really easy, if a bit sticky.  The day before baking I put some raisins, sultanas and candied peel to soak in a LOT of brandy.  I also made some marzipan from ground almonds, caster sugar,  icing sugar and egg and kept it in a plastic bag in the fridge.

The stollen dough was a slight variation on normal dough, with an egg, sugar and butter added.  It used a 2-stage ferment and dough process,  which takes a bit longer but you need less yeast.  Get the ferment going and keep it somewhere warm for about an hour, then just add the dough ingredients, knead energetically (this is one of the sticky bits) and leave it to rise for another hour.

Finally you drain the fruit, drink the brandy (mmm) and fold it into the dough.  Roll the dough into a rectangle, roll the marzipan into a slightly smaller rectangle (another sticky bit), and place it on top.  The whole thing can then be rolled lengthways into a long sausage shape.  Brush with some egg and leave it to prove (rise a bit more), before baking for about 30-40 minutes at about 180C.  As soon as its ready you brush it with melted butter, and after it’s cooled you can dust with icing sugar.

Fruits:

• 180g mixed sultanas, raisins and candied peel
• Lots of brandy or rum!

Marxipan:

• 60g ground almonds
• 20g caster sugar
• 20g icing sugar
• Egg (beaten)

Ferment:

• 5g sugar
• 5g fresh yeast
• 60g milk or water (at 32C)
• 50g stoneground wholemeal flour

Dough:

• 30g sugar
• 70g strong white flour
• 40g stoneground wholemeal flour
• 1 egg
• 50g salted butter

We made a few of these over Christmas for various people, and a couple of tips we picked up:

1.  It’s definitely worth making the marzipan the day before and then keeping it in the fridge – it’s much less sticky and easier to roll this way.

2. Use your hands to fold the fruit into the dough. It’s easier to get it mixed in well, otherwise it all seems to end up on the outside.  You need to be careful not to break up the structure of the dough.

3. Dust with icing sugar just before serving otherwise it gets soaked up really quickly and disappears.  Andrew says shop-bought stollen contains lots of chemicals to stop the icing sugar getting absorbed.

4. The whole thing seems quite messy while you’re making it and doesn’t sound anything like the instructions, but it comes out really well once it’s cooked.  I prefer the rustic look anyway….

And that’s it.

I’m really impressed with the Bread Matters book – thanks Alice!  It’s worth reading some of the theory before getting started.  More adventures in baking to follow soon…

I’ve tried a couple of times in the past to make Pirozhki but I’ve never been pleased with the result – either the filling or the pastry wasn’t right. Given another surplus of cabbage from our veg box and a new recipe for them in the Bread Matters book, I tried it again, this time with tasty results.

This recipe might not be the quickest one around but the results were certainly worth the wait. The bread ended up taking a day and a half to make with lots of waiting to allow the sponge mixture had to ferment properly. I really hate those breads you get, typically from supermarkets, with tasteless burnt cheese on the top, so I paid special attention to when it looked perfectly cooked. Warm, fresh bread and soup is certainly a decent lunch combination.