of pizza and sweet buns

When I was in Malaysia, I had the opportunity to make pizza and sweet buns for my 3 forever hungry brothers.

I got the recipe from this site which has very reliable, good and easy to make recipes for many food. You can get the pizza recipe here and the sweet buns recipe here.

I have had very very bad experience in making bread or anything that has 'yeast' as one of its ingredients. My dough wouldn't rise, my dough was too sticky, my buns turned out as hard as rock...

UK (winter) weather is just not suitable to proof my dough especially in that cold kitchen of mine. I remember having to *ehem* sleep *ehem* with the container containing the dough so that there was enough warmth for the dough to proof. ahhhh...such days hahah. Perhaps it's the time and effort wasted when making the buns has made me scared to touch any recipe that has any yeast in it.

Anyway, when I went home to Miri during summer, I tried making cakes and swiss roll which faileeeeeed. :( Reason: the quality of the ingredients which was so bad yet so expensive in Miri and it was the equipment I used in Miri. I wasn't used to it.

middle layer collapse. FAILED

So finally on the last week I was in Miri, I 'coaxed' myself to make pizzas and sweet buns for my brothers as they were pestering me to make ever since I came back.

Fortunately the house has a breadmaking machine so I threw all the ingredients into the machine knead the dough for me while I slept :P.

I just had to grate the cheese and cook the toppings. And it was puuurrrrfect.

recipe here

by right the cheese gratings should be bigger but that's the only grater I've got in the house. The presentation wasn't that good but the boys finished it in 10 min! Seeing them eat with gusto is already a great satisfaction for me :)

The sweet buns I made was surprisingly good too. In Jon's verbatim, 'this is definitely better than those I bought from the pastry shops'. So flattering.

recipe here

Once again the presentation isn't that up to standard but the taste is unmistakably good. I was supposed to use egg wash to make the buns 'shine' lol. I like the soft yet not too fluffy texture it has. My sweet buns just revolved around sausage and sausage and sausage because that was the only thing the boys love eating in the house.

Although the buns don't look that nice here, but do make those sweet buns if you have time, provided that you have a good weather. They taste really good! I took the dough out from the bread machine for some extra kneading for fear that the dough wouldn't be soft.

Although the price of milk is almost the same as in UK, I resorted to using milk made from milk powder. Baking cakes in Malaysia has taught me an important skill, that is improvisation - to substitude some ingredients for something cheaper. Something which I have learnt after the failure of the oreo cheesecake. argh. Anyway, happy baking!