Last night whilst channel surfing we tuned into a bagel advert. The room went quiet, a sure sign that some thinking was going on, and then at the exact same moment we both blurted out that we’d love a bagel!!

It was one of those seminal moments when I realised I was going to have to take my baking up a notch!! Till now I’d only really tackled plain old bread and the odd cake but I certainly wasn’t going to go out and buy a batch of week old bagels when I had all the ingredients at home, if I looked hard enough. A trawl of the web and my “Nigella” (or pantry to normal humans) and I confirmed that we did indeed possess all of the ingredients necessary to create bagels, but not just any bagels, my FIRST bagels!!

We decided on fruit and cinnamon mainly because I had raisins, sultanas and cranberries to hand and I began to cobble together a recipe. It all looked pretty straight forward, soak the fruit, make the yeast mix, shake the fruit in cinnamon and sugar combining all ingredients, kneading, shaping and boiling before the final bake. I had to give it a shot.

So this morning, with the dazzler dispatched to his spinning class (I know!!), I set about creating my masterpiece! What the recipes don’t tell you is what a bomb site your kitchen ends up looking as you try to get the dough to the right consistency or dry out the soaked fruit, before tossing in sugar n cinnamon, or as in this case forget one of the ingredients and had to remix!! Maybe a hangover wasn’t the best day to start this on!!!

So I’m waiting now for the hour the dough needs to rise and enjoying a latte, wondering when my sous chef is going to come in and tidy the kitchen and thought I’d start this blog post, updating as we go along. So here we are with the dough in my FLABULOUS kenwood chef,from the seventies, rising away taking its own sweet time…

Anyhow after an hour of waiting I separated the dough into palm size balls and laid them onto a floured surface. I took a floured wooden spoon and poked them through to make wholes and then spun each bagel until the whole got to about 3 cm. then all I had to do was boil em on each side for 1 min and get them drained so I could bake em…

I drained em on a rack and then transferred to a baking tray, glazed with egg wash and baked for 25 minutes!!

40 mins later I had ready to eat warm cinnamon n fruit bagels nomilishus!!