The Blogger Bake Off is an online campaign that challenges bloggers to get involved by baking bread, and then acting by donating to end poverty. And then, challenge their readers and five other bloggers to do the same.
With the money raised, we will be supporting grass roots community projects aimed at ending poverty and hunger in Africa. We’ll be placing container kitchens, vegetable gardens and more in poor communities, sending emergency food relief where needed and helping these poor communities to help themselves.
The rules are:
If you are tagged, bake bread, do something you wouldn’t normally do, and blog about it. Upload your picture and recipe.
Give dough, donate to Breadline Africa and help us end poverty.
I decided to try the Artisan Bread in 5 minutes a Day recipe. Starting with water, sea salt (Fleur de Sel, courtesy of my lovely sister) and yeast:
Then I threw in the flour:
My flour resides in a 5 gallon bucket - inside the bucket:
And the series of buckets (2 are for dog food, and 2 are for flour):
Here's the dough, after mixing up the flour, salt, and water mixture:
All that was done on Monday. Well, I was busy from Tuesday through Thursday, so didn't get around to making bread out of the dough until Friday. I looked inside the container and the dough isn't looking so hot:
But, I followed the directions and tried my best to fold it into a boule. Here's the somewhat square boule on my peel (Alton Brown named his 'Emma'; I'm not quite as clever):
I let it rest a good long time, but it never did rise. I finally decided to bake it anyway. Even though I kept shaking it on the peel to make sure it didn't stick, it was apparently stuck anyway and it pulled into a rectangle as I was trying to place it on the baking stone. Ugh. Here's how it looked as it came out.
I haven't cut it yet to look inside, but I get the feeling it's a bit too doughy, as one reviewer said on Amazon.com about the recipe in this book. However, I have to say that the bits I pulled off the ends to try did taste remarkably like sourdough. Guess we'll toast the heck out of it before we eat it. My other baking ventures worked a lot better than the bread. Here are my sweet potato pie
and pecan pie
Guess I need to go donate some "dough" now. Speaking of donations; that'll be my topic for tomorrow's post.
"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance, the wise grows it under his feet." ~ James Oppenheim
