Feeling Blue...

I make it a point to make a loaf of bread every week.


For this past week, I made a loaf of bread using this mashed purple sweet potatoes. There are two types of purple sweet potatoes available at the market...although both have got purple skins, but for one of them, the inside is orange and not purple. I searched around the internet and followed a suitable bread machine recipe here.

It was the first time I have tried boiling these purple sweet potatoes in water as I prefer to eat steamed ones. After leaving the sweet potatoes to boil for about 10mins, I returned to the kitchen and was shock to be greeted with a pot of water which had turned 'blue-black'. I was hesitating whether to use plain water instead of the dark purplish cooking liquid to make the dough. I wouldn't want to churn out another 'black beauty' (I have tried using oreo crumbs to make bread, and the loaf turned out charcoal black!). In the end, I still stick to the recipe, and used the cooking liquid as I believed the amount used was too little to cause any serious 'damage' to the finished loaf.


Indeed, the dough didn't turned dark purple...it was in a nice pastel purple hue. Although this bread can be made fully by the bread machine, I only used the kneading function(I let the dough knead for about 30mins)...it has long been a habit of mine to shape the dough and bake it with my oven. This way I get to play around with the shape of the loaf and control the browning of the crust.


When freshly baked, the crumbs was pinkish purple in colour. However, when left over night, the colour turned into a deeper tone. The texture was very soft and light on the day it was baked. The bread tasted sweet, just like a sweet bread and was good eaten plain. Unfortunately, this bread didn't seem to keep well. Left over night, the bread turned moist and was dense and heavy. On the second day, it tasted quite 'doughy'...the crumbs tend to stick to the roof of my mouth :(

I guess I won't be going back to this recipe again, as such I won't be translating the recipe and post it here.

On a side note, I have been quite bothered lately, with the downside of blogging. To me, the whole idea of blogging is about sharing and learning with one another who share the same common interest and passion. As much as I can, I will post the recipe for each single blog posting. For me, it does take up a fair bit of my time and some effort is required to put up each post...from baking, taking photos, typing out the recipes, writing up the post and providing relevant links as appropriate. I find it very disturbing whenever I encounter cases where my recipes were copied word for word and posted by others without any acknowledgement. This is especially so when the original recipe is in Chinese as I have taken the time to translate and type out the instructions. Even for recipes which are written in English, I do make it a point to type out the recipes from cookbooks and re-phrase the instructions to make the steps much clearer (or more long-winded, lolz!), which I thot would be good for beginners.

I thot it's time I put a stop to this. I looked up the internet and was happy to be able to find a 'solution' to prevent others from copying my text without my knowledge. I installed some codes into my blogger template to disable the 'right-click, copy & paste' function. It was quite easily done, but, it was not a happy ending after all.

It bothers me when readers commented that they find it troublesome to hand-copy or type out my recipes, especially when the instructions are pretty long (lesson learned...don't be so long-winded ;p). I don't mean to create the inconvenience since it defeats the whole purpose of sharing if I make it difficult for others to access the recipes. I tried to look up for ways to install codes so that with a click, one is able to convert the recipes to printer-friendly documents. However, I almost 'see stars' just reading through the instructions! I am simply too lazy and won't want to mess around with the html codes.

I have now removed the script that disabled the right-click function. I guess I have to come to terms that there is not much I can do to prevent others from lifting my text, and accept the fact that it's part and parcel of the blogging world. I would probably blog less in the future, as I think I should be spending more time coaching my kids with their studies! Maybe I should just stick to flickr....which requires less writing (something which I am really very weak at) and focus more on photography. All my photos posted here are simply 'point & shoot', without any techniques or skills. I would love to spend some time to acquire knowledge in this field...at least for once, I must get down to figure out how to use the various functions in my camera ;)