New member of the MM House--Edward the Booble

Edward the Booble is the name of a mixer we just bought today. We named it after a dragon/dinosaur creature in Moomin books. Edward was so extra colossal that a ship was lifted when he was having a shower in the river. He also had a very kind heart. Every time he killed a small animal (after accidentally stepping/sitting on them) he would cry his heart out and then pay for their funerals. The new mixer reminded us of Edward the Booble because it, too, is big and powerful and got a long neck.

Edward is in fact a present from MM Mama. She asked us what we what, and then gave us money so that we could get the exact thing ourselves. She even gave more than enough, you know, the sort of thing only Mums will do :)

With the help of Edward I made three types of bread today: yeast sandwich bread, corn bread, and olive oil cake (recipes all from Bittman's book). I wanted to test how capable Edward is by trying out all his functions, particularly, egg-white beating, which I have only done once in my whole life, by hand. That was a close to arm-breaking experience and one time was more than enough. Since then I always move my eyes somewhere else as soon as I saw "egg-white" in baking recipes. But now, finally, it is time to come back to those pages!

Edward turned four egg-whites into firm foam in three minutes, and he wasn't even on the highest setting! My olive oil cake turned out puffy and tender, just perfect!

My yeast bread making though, wasn't so carefree. For whatever reason the dough refused to grow for two hours--it could be because I didn't have Edward work hard enough, or because it was cold today. Luckily the bread finally caught up in growing after I put it in the oven.

With Edward around I can make bread on working days--something I rarely did before. Ten minutes of non-stop dough kneading is just not a piece of cake after a long day, even though we both love the small of freshly baked bread (MM tends to love the bread itself better ;)