Foccacia art helps Karen Wright celebrate birthday

She lives close to Oxford, so we are down in the area staying in the caravan. The site we are on here is a stone’s throw from Blenheim Palace. We visited the palace this time last year and it is stunning. It is where Winston Churchill was born, and he is buried close by too in the local churchyard.

We have settled on a picnic by the river and the forecast is set fair. I like to cook when I am in the caravan and I set challenges for myself to see what I can make that is a bit different to what you might expect on a camping trip. For the birthday picnic I am making a Focaccia Bread and we will have a spread of cooked meats, cheese and olives. I have seen what is called Focaccia Art on the Internet so I had a practice run beforehand to see if it would work in my caravan oven. The art part of it involves using colourful food like tomatoes, peppers, red onions, olives etc to make a pattern or a picture on top of the dough before it is baked.

I loved making the bread and really it was very simple. It is a question of mixing the ingredients to make a dough then kneading the dough for about ten minutes to relax the gluten in the flour. It is a bit of a stress buster and the more you bash it about the better the texture of the bread. Then its left in a greased bowl covered with a tea towel for an hour to double in size. Then turn it out and give it a couple of thumps to collapse the dough. Then just ease it into a shallow baking pan that has been greased already. Leave it for another hour, this is the second prove. While bread proves, prepare your art materials. I carved a couple of tomato roses. I spiralled some thinly sliced red onion slices and added some strips of yellow pepper and some olives to my selection. I had some mint stalks with leaves and a bit of rosemary. When the second prove was done I liberally brushed some olive oil and LOTS of sea salt over the dough. Then cook at 200 degrees at 30 minutes.