Eight Acres

Since I got my sourdough cake starter, I've been having fun experimenting with other uses for it.  I can be adapted to all sorts of sweet recipes, and as we don't eat a lot of cake, that is a good thing! mixing up the dry ingredients, the butter and some starter When I first received the starter it came with all these instructions about how to feed it and look after it.  This included feeding it every few days, not keeping it in the fridge, splitting it after a week and giving most of it away.  Needless to say I ignored these, otherwise I would ave no starter left!  Here's how to actually look after your starter: You can keep the starter in the fridge, in a glass jar - mine has been living there for several months. You just have to get it out every 2 weeks (or so), give it a good stir and tip out half (you can either give that half away, use it in baking or just tip it on the compost) Then top it up with a bit of flour, sugar and milk (or water),...

I have been keeping my sourdough cake starter in the fridge and every couple of weeks I take it out and either use or discard half of the starter and refresh with flour, sugar and water.  The other day I really felt like pancakes, so I thought I'd try making sourdough pancakes. I really just made up the recipe from the Edmonds cook book (so you could just use your normal pancake recipe), but left out the eggs and baking powder until right at the end, and added half my sourdough starter.  I made up the mixture in the morning and it was lovely and frothy by dinner time.  I added the egg and baking soda (instead of baking powder, as the mixture is already nicely acidic from the fermentation), and made the pancakes. I usually like very thin pancakes, but I found that these tended to break if they were too thin, so I had to make them thicker.  The pancakes had a pleasant sourness, which was lovely with a drizzle of butter and honey (as I didn't have any maple syr...

My friend gave me a bowl of sourdough cake starter, called "Herman".  A bit of a google revealed that this cake starter has been around for a long time, maybe not this particular starter mixture in my kitchen, but the idea of this cake starter has been circulating since the 1980s or earlier.  There's actually an entire website devoted to it, as well as lots of newspaper articles and forum discussions.  Have you heard of it before now?  Herman when he arrived - pictured with my Danish bread dough whisk, which was a very cool xmas pressie from a friend, and I've been using it at every opportunity In its current incarnation, the mix is given away with instructions on how to look after it for 10 days.  It needs to be "fed" with flour, sugar and water on day 4 and 10, and stirred on each of the other days.  On the 10th day the started is split into four portions, three to give away and one used to make a cake.  The recipe that comes with Herman is for a...