Lammas Festival

Today, we celebrated the festival Sabbat of Lammas, or Lughnassadh. Lammas means ‘Loaf Mass’ – the celebration of the first grain harvest and the bread made from it. Traditionally held on the 1st or 2nd of August, it is a time for gathering in and giving thanks for abundance. Festivities included feasting, market fairs, games, bonfire celebrations, community gatherings and especially the sharing of bread.

So, we enjoyed making Damper Bread on our fire together.

Here’s the simple recipe I used for the Cinnamon Damper Dread dough which I made up last night:

Ingredients:

Approx 7 cups of self raising flour
2-3 tablespoons soft brown sugar
2 teaspoons sweet cinnamon powder (or cinnamon powder)
Pinch of salt
1 – 2 mugfuls of water

Directions:

Mix the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cinnamon, salt) together in a bowl.
Next, add water to form a stiff dough. Add the water gradually as you may not need it all.
Once formed into a dough, remove it from the bowl and knead for about 5 – 10 minutes, until it is pliable, soft, and not sticky.

And this is how we made our spirals to cook on the fire:

We took a piece of dough each and made it into small balls roughly the size of a walnut. This is about the right amount for one damper bread spiral, as if you make it too thick, you’ll end up with burnt bread on the outside but raw dough in the middle.

Then we rolled it between our hands to make long dough snakes, roughly a centimetre/half an inch thick and about 15 – 20cm (6 – 8 inches) long.

We wrapped the dough snake round our found sticks in a spiral.

Some of us chose to add some harvested fruit from the site, including apples and blackberries. Then we held the dough spirals over the coals once our small fire had burned down a bit.