Gosh. I'm flat out tired right now.
Well, i actually tried to bake that rice-cooker bread yesterday! Quite an interesting experience, where i screwed up twice; firstly, when i added too much milk (like i got my measurement wrong) and secondly, when i added too little flour because i was rushing my measurements as it was getting late. Late meaning 8pm, which IS late because the whole process is supposed to take almost 5 hours. 0.0
But anyway, the instructions said to leave it cooking in the rice-cooker for an hour, but my own rice-cooker had a bit of a problem because it kept switching from "cook" to "warm" every five minutes. So i put a weight down onto the button that pops up when it goes to "warm", so that it'll stay on "cook". Under the watchful eyes of my mother of course, so you can't say that i risked spoiling her rice-cooker without her consent.
So. It was supposed to cook for an hour.
And fifteen minutes after cooking, i was upstairs and started to smell something burning... 0_o
When i rushed down to check on the bread (getting a couple of blisters in the process), the rice-cooker fuse had blown. Like wtf. And the base of the bread was charred black. Amazing. So i guess that when they said one hour, maybe they took into account the "warm" part. Or maybe not...it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me. Maybe japanese rice-cookers are just different or something.
In any case, i flipped the bread over and let it cook on the rice-cooker's residual heat. And it actually worked out! My mum and i tried the bread with a bit of butter. It had a bit of a charred flavour but i felt it wasn't too bad, surprisingly. And i think it'd have been very good if the bottom of the bread wasn't burnt.
So in the end, i made a loaf of burnt bread...at the cost of two loaves AND the repair cost of my mother's rice-cooker (she might just buy a new one though since the rice-cooker's really old already). Not a very good tradeoff, i must say. The only good thing that came out of it was that i spent much less time cooking it than i had expected.
Still, the experience was priceless; the kind of irreplaceable experience that i should've had when i was a kid but didn't because i couldn't be bothered. And i still want to try baking again! Maybe i'll try that rice-cooker bread or some other variation next saturday. Or i'll give croissants a shot. And i'll be sure to WATCH the baking/cooking process this time, so there'd be no charred incidents.
The big problem came after that, however. I just couldn't seem to sleep! I don't know what the reason was...my heart was beating like crazy and i couldn't help it no matter what i did. If it was pressure that i put on myself again because i wanted to get enough sleep before work the next day, then i'd be very ashamed of myself. Although it could be something else...like perhaps because Arsenal had just lost to Manchester United (sigh) or perhaps because the charred smell from the burnt bread had permeated my room (as my door was the only one that was open when i was handling the whole incident) and the smell was getting my hackles up or something lol. Like it was my bringing forth my basic instincts or whatever nonsense. :|
So i'm just feeling literally like shit right now after having failed to get a single wink of sleep. Urgh. I hope i can last till the end of work today, although the situation seems quite bleak at the moment.
