Emily and Matt

Internets, I confess that I’m not an uber cool newlywed housewife. Last night I “successfully” added loaf number 5 to the bread reject file. It turns out that I can’t bend bread recipes to my convenience. Telling my friend Jillian about loaf number 3, she said she hasn’t heard good things about silicone loaf pans. (She knows a lot about stuff like this, in case you were wondering about her credentials, because she baked me snickerdoodles when we were freshmen in high school and her mom sewed her prom dresses.) So I bought a metal one:

It looks so sad and dwarfed in its pan. The crust was also really thick and painfully crunchy. Yet, I didn’t think the pan was the problem. Something else must have been wrong. I turned to Megan, my cousin and cooking/baking extraordinare, who suggested that my yeast was bad and that I wasn’t kneading for long enough. I used new yeast and kneaded until the end of time last night and…drum roll please…it was still a failure. Truth be told, I was too ashamed to get photo evidence of my most recent let down.

On the bright side, loaf number 5 wasn’t as dense and was larger than the one above. Megan suggests that I knead by hand and not with my “handy” mixer, so we’ll try that once this loaf runs out. I also think I need to let it rise for much longer since the weather is pretty chilly these days.

One small victory was when Matt got home from practice, he asked for some of the partially failed bread! I thought last batch would have led to eternal breadmaking distrust. Yet, his “thumbs up” while chewing is encouragement enough to continue on. I’ll keep you all udpated.