Friday, February 18, 2011

Branching out

Once I mastered regular white bread, I tried to make raisin bread and dinner rolls based on the recipes found in the bread machine instruction manual.


The raisin bread was tasty, but the machine didn't get all the raisins mixed in and many were clinging to the outside. 


I tried again, but instead of letting the machine mix the raisins in I tried to do that step by hand. I rolled out the dough, sprinkled more cinnamon on, and tried to evenly distribute the raisins.  Then I rolled up the loaf, let it rise and baked that sucker.


Can you see the cinnamon swirl pattern in the bread?  This method didn't really work--not enough raisins.  I'm going to keep trying, though, because we have some true raisin bread fans in this house.


Then I got really crazy and decided to make dinner rolls.  Again, I let the bread machine do the majority of the work.  The recipe instructions called for rolling the dough into special "dinner roll" shapes, but that sounded like a lot of extra time and effort to me, so instead I just plopped balls of dough on the cookie sheet and called it a day.

My laziness paid off though--the rolls were fine in their blobby shapes and tasted delicious!  Making the leap from bread to rolls was a cinch.  A tad messier, perhaps, but completely a cinch!


With the help of the bread machine, I can see myself making rolls at least once a week.  Each recipe yielded 16-18 rolls, and that is enough to get us through the week. 


No more dough out of a tube for me!  Now that I've mastered bread baking, I really feel so Martha-ish.  Martha-like?  Marthalicious?

Yes, that's it...I feel Marthalicious!  Happy Friday, everyone!

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