Pizza Night! LOVE pizza. Since I learned how to make my own dough and experimented with different toppings and flavours, there was no going back to buying ready made or ordering a take away. Please give this recipe a go and see if you feel the same. You will save money AND it's so much healthier making your own from scratch. Double win, right? Extra bonus, it's also a really great thing to make with children, they will love it! I promise it isn't hard work or massively time consuming. Just a bit of time and patience, and before you know it, you will be devouring it and feeling extremely pleased with yourself!

Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe

So, it all starts with the store cupboard ingredients, for this version, I used a selection of Marriages flours - strong white, strong wholemeal and rye for the rolling part (I'll explain a bit later) Other key essentials, fast acting yeast, sea salt, extra virgin olive oil and warm water. That's it.

Ingredients For The Dough 300g Marriages strong white bread flour 200g Marriages strong wholemeal bread flour 8g fast acting yeast 10g Maldon sea salt 325ml of warm water A generous glug of extra virgin olive oil A handful of Marriages rye flour

How to work the pizza magic... You can chose to do it in two ways - by hand or, if you have a mixer with a dough hook, you can use that. Be warned, you can over work the dough if you opt for a mixer, it only needs half the kneading time, then if done by hand.

Measure your flours in a bowl, then in one side of the bowl add your measured yeast and then in the opposite side of the bowl, add your measured sea salt. Very important to keep the two separate, as the salt will kill the yeast, until you are ready to mix and knead. Next, add the generous glug of olive oil and finally the water and bring it all together to form a dough. Then knead by hand on floured surface for about 10 mins, until the dough is smooth and silky. If you opt for a mixer, mix on a low speed and keep an eye on it, when you see the consistency has changed, the test would be to turn off the machine, poke the dough and it should rise back up again.

Then place the dough in a bowl, cover in cling film or a damp clean tea towel, and leave to rise for an hour. Until it has at least doubled in size. You can leave this stage for you 3 hours, if like me, you are a busy mum and have a million things to!

When that's done, get some olive oil and oil your chosen baking tray, grab a handful of the delicious rye flour and flour your work surface with it (this adds great flavour!). Tip your dough on to it and with a rolling pin, roll the dough to the desired size of your tray. Transfer the dough to your oiled tray, trim excess off, cover with more cling film or tea towel and leave to proof for another hour. Place the cuttings in a food storage bag, so you can create your own sour dough for next weeks pizza, store it in the fridge. Highly recommend this little tip, makes the pizza taste even more special and all you'll need to do, follow the same recipe steps as above and then add the sour dough when you mix/ knead. Magic!

In the meantime, you can prepare your tomato sauce and toppings of your choice. In my tomato sauce, I like to add a can of tomatoes to a food processor and blitz lots of vegetables, spice and fresh herbs through it (brilliant for adding extra broccoli or kale to the kids dinner without them knowing!) Preheat your oven to 230c/ 210c fan.

When your dough has finished its final proof, dress the pizza with your homemade tomato sauce and your favouriate pizza toppings. Then place in your oven for 15-20 mins, keep a close on it. After all of this love and care, you don't want it to go too crispy!

Now, enjoy and make your own delicious pizza every weekend.

Lots of Love Moo Moo Cakes x