Pizza Perfect!

Hello everyone!

For quite a while I had the urge to make home-made pizza, I haven't made it since cooking at school in year 8 (5 years ago :o) Last Tuesday after going food shopping, rather early for a day off college, I got all the ingredients I needed to make the perfect pizza. First I had to make enough room and clean the work top for me to roll out the dough. Then the cooking was commenced! 

Ingredients:

(For the base)

*300g strong bread flour (you can you white or whole meal)

*1tsp yeast

*1tsp salt

*1tbsp cooking oil

*200ml water

(For the toppings)

*grated cheese (as much or as little as you want)

*tomato purée

*any other toppings you feel like makes a pizza yummy to you; meat, veg (I chose   chicken strips, sweetcorn and red pepper)  
Pre-heat the oven to 240c/ gas mark 7

Method:

1. First I found a big mixing bowl and into this I put the flour, salt and yeast. Mix these together.

2. Make a whole in centre of the mix, then pour in the cooking oil and water. Stir all of these ingredients together until you achieve a soft dough.

3. Move the dough onto a floured surface and knead until it is smooth. Set the dough to the side and cover to allow it to rise. 

4. Whilst waiting for your dough to rest, you could start to prepare your meat or veg for the toppings.

5. When you feel that the dough is ready (your own judgement). Use a rolling pin to roll out the dough to the width and size you would like. (When rolling mine out, it was more of a deep pan pizza, if you prefer thin crust split the dough in half and make two pizzas).

6. Lift the base(s) onto greased tray(s) or baking sheet(s).

7. Onto the pizza dough base smother it with the purée with a spoon and sprinkle the cheese over the top. Scatter the rest of your toppings over the pizza and place into the oven to be cooked.

8. Leave in the oven for 10-15 minutes and serve when done. 

I hope that this recipe works for you, by all means take a look and change or add things you feel necessary. If you do make it, you could leave comments on how yours turned out.

Thank you for reading yet another blog post of mine, this one was a little different and I hope you liked it! :)

University here I come....

Hello everyone! 

Sorry I haven't written a post in a while I've been busy with college work, essay after essay, my personal statement, panto preparation and work. Don't get me wrong I love to keep busy, but this all of this has completely blown me away! :/ I should keep on top of writing blog posts as it will help with my ambition of becoming a journalist, so from now on I will try to squeeze at least a small post out to be published every week.
Anyway now that the apologies are out of the way, I would like to talk about it being my final year at college and having to start thinking about universities. Which is a very scary thought as I don't feel old enough to go to university, even though I am 18 (an adult). Looking into courses that would interest me is what I spent the end of my summer doing, and this Saturday I will be attending my first university open day at Southampton Solent mainly to look at the 'magazine journalism and features writing' course which highly appeals to me. I'd love to get into the magazine industry, writing stories for established publications about music, fashion, live events etc. to express myself. Either that or designing the layout of magazines as I love art and design. Ahhhh writing about this now is getting me so excited!!!! I may not be moving away from home to go to university, but I will still get the 'uni feel', making new friends and gaining more freedom, which I can not wait to do. 
Writing my personal statement has been one of the only downsides to the UCAS process as you have to write about yourself well enough to create a great first impression of yourself with the courses lecturers who haven't actually ever met you. From this statement it will be decided whether you will be invited to attend an interview. I found writing a personal statement very difficult as you have to rave and big up yourself which I didn't really enjoy doing as I don't really like saying things like 'I'm the best at this' and 'I'm better than this person because..' It took me a while to get the fingers tapping away on the keyboard as I was told to write an amazing opening sentence to hold the readers attention. This sounded so much easier when my tutor said it, I probably sat there for a good 15-20 minutes thinking of what to write. :/ When I finally finished I had such a sense of relief and now all I have to do is make small changes, I can submit as many drafts as are necessary to get it 'perfect'.
I will write another blog post about what I thought of the university after I have visited it, hopefully it will be the same way I'm feeling prior to the visit! Southampton Solent here I come........

Thank you for reading my blog once again, I would appriciate it if have any feedback, no matter how little, to leave it in a comment below! Thanks :D