Blooming technology! fine when it works. And the beer bread

I was going to upload photos I took of the beer bread....however, for some obscure reason my laptop has decided to delete my phone off of it.  After a bit of head scratching and googling, I've managed to get the laptop to recognise my phone, but now it won't transfer the pics over.  Grr, bloody technology, I hate it.  Have given up for now (too much trying to work things out confuses my brain no end and gives me a headache), I'll try again later.

So.….the beer bread - actually it's cider bread, the can that I thought was beer turned out to be medium sweet cloudy apple cider.  Oh well, I thought, nothing ventured nothing gained, so gave it a try.  I used 400g flour, a mixture of white plain flour (I rarely buy SR, just use baking powder with it) and wholemeal baking flour, I added 2 tsps baking powder and 1 tsp salt.  Various recipes I've seen say to add between 1 and 3 tbsp (yes, tablespoons!) of sugar.....that would have made the bread far too sweet, especially using medium sweet cider, so I just used 1.5 tsps sugar.   Then poured in the cider - I didn't measure it, just kept adding and mixing until the dough seemed about right.....on the sticky side, wetter than normal yeasted dough.  It doesn't need kneading or proving.  I used about 3/4 of the 440ml can of cider.  I put it in a lined tin and baked at 180 deg (mine is a fan oven) for about 45-50 mins, turning the tin round halfway through.  It rose quite well, although not nearly as much as a normal yeasted loaf.

The texture is good if a bit crumbly, it's a little on the doughy side and resembles a cross between soda bread and cake more than normal bread.  However, it tastes really nice, although is definitely on the sweet side, because of the cider I guess, it was lovely buttered and topped with a slice of cheese.  I doubt it will have good keeping quality, so it might be better to slice and freeze it after a day or two - although whether it will fall apart when defrosted remains to be seen.  I reckon it will make lovely toast though after the first day, we'll have some toasted for lunch today.

To sum up, it's really very good as an emergency bread when you have no yeast but some beer (or cider!) knocking about, I've read that you can even use sparkling water instead of beer.  In that case, you wouldn't have the raising qualities of a yeasty beer, you'd have to hope that baking powder and the bubbles in the water would do the trick.  I might give that a go.  I would just say that you shouldn't expect to be able to make sandwiches with it, it's a bit too crumbly for that.

IF I can get my blimmin laptop to download the photos off my camera, I'll put pics on later.

Photos added later