As Friday night was my turn to try cooking something new, I decided I would try to make pizza. Not exactly a difficult recipe, but I'd never tried to make them before and I wanted to learn how (as for me the frozen pizza is not a nice option).

I found a simple recipe for pizza base, bought all my ingredients, and started to prepare the bases. I soon discovered that I'd made a mistake when checking our stock of flour - plain flour comes in green packets and self raising in blue, not the other way around - and so I had only just enough flour to do the 3 bases I wanted. Focusing too much on finding the flour and not on the recipe, I dumped the flour straight into the mix of yeast/water/salt without sifting it first. I think this made stirring a little more difficult, and I was worried about breaking my wooden spoon until I found a large plastic spoon device left behind by Daniel which was more than up for the task.

The instructions then said to knead the dough for a little under 10 minutes. I didn't really know what kneading was all about, just that it involved working the dough around with your hands. After the dough stuck to my hands quite strongly and refused to let go, I decided I should check to see what the internet said about kneading. I learnt about the purpose and technique of kneading, but wasn't any clearer about whether the dough should be as sticky as it was. So, I asked Anne, who as usual had the answer I needed:

I added self raising flour (all I had left) and suddenly kneading became easy. With the bases ready, some toppings were prepared, including: button mushrooms, red and green capsicum, diced bacon, sliced ham, italian sausage and grated mozzarella cheese.

When everyone that I was cooking for had arrived, we added tomato paste and decorated with toppings, and cooked in the oven for 20 minutes. See picture for results, I thought they were quite tasty. I can now make pizzas! Perhaps I'll try a dessert pizza next time!