BREAD!!

Well, yesterday was a long and tiring day and I wanted to make sure that I had time to talk about my bread experience in detail.

Yesterday:
Yesterday morning, was, like most of my life, filled with me struggling. I got my loaf shaped into a somewhat circular shape and got it down onto the pan:

After that simple task I thought to myself "wow, this couldn't be any easier! I can't believe I never tried this before" however this statement seems to work like the one "hey, at least it's not raining..." Being tired and it being Sunday morning I wasn't fully paying attention when I turned the oven on to preheat and then waited 10 minutes to warm up the glass dish I was going to make steam in. I sadly, forgot to take into account that the oven was at 450deg not 350 like I'm accustomed to, and that because of this, the dish would be much hotter than I expected... well you can probably guess what happened from here, yes that's right folks... I caused a perfectly good Pyrex dish to explode violently in the oven. It all thankfully stayed in the oven so was pretty easy to clean up, but boy did it startle me! Part of me suspected it would happen, but I poured the hot water right on in there anyway. I was hoping that the temp of the water would be close enough to the temp of the dish, it was not.

Anyway after that fiasco (which Danica, my roommate, magically slept through) I thought, well the worst is over, it must be smooth sailing from here on out. Now I'm wondering why I ever say such things. Because I was nervous about the bread sticking to the pan, I dusted it very liberally with flour. However, because there was so much flour and the oven was so hot the flour on the edges started to brown/burn and caused the fire alarm to go off... 3 times... yep that's right I had to run around waving my arms for about 15 minutes because I can't reach the fire alarms to shut them off, even with our little stepping stool.

Well, lets just say I'm glad the bread came out tasting good otherwise I might have just cried right there. Actually it even ended up being the shape of a heart:

We knew the bread would be good once we cut into it (Danica and Lane came to witness the bread out of the oven)

We ate the bread with olive oil that had Parmesan and cracked black pepper in it. Delicious!

After my bread making adventures of the morning I was pretty pooped, but that didn't stop me from heading up the hill to help out with decorations for the upcoming play this week so I could get "lab" hours for my theater workshop class. After 4 hours of that I had my chapter meeting until 8 and then went to bed early.

Today:

Today was a busy day. I had class at 9, a teeter totter shift at 10, a group meeting at 12 and then office hours from 1-3pm. Lucky for me there was a break between my office hours and my next meeting at 5:30. This left time to bake, read some of my textbook for personal finance, and write this blog entry.

I'm happy to say today's baking was much less painless than yesterday's. I made sure there wasn't too much flour in the pan and I made steam by putting water in pie tins and putting them in the oven 5 minutes before the bread. I also turned the vent fan on over the stove just in case. And here was the result!

This loaf came out round and the crust got a little darker than the last one. It's delicious and it took very little effort. I read for my class the whole time the bread was sitting out and then baking. I'm very glad I invested in this book. 

Well, that's all for now. I'm hoping to have more to report on the knitting front tomorrow once I get past this test for personal finance. Sadly I can't really read and knit at the same time, otherwise I definitely would!