Greetings. How are you? I am fine. Remember writing letters when you were a kid and that's sort of how they would all start? Simpler times, man.
I am in the process of ruining some bread at the moment. Why yes, I DO have a bread machine. I am just so inept that it's STILL not working out for me, haha. (FYI the photo to the right is entitled "Oh My God, What the Fuck is Happening?!") Here's the thing, the bread maker only came with a couple recipes (and there's not a good one for whole wheat) so I have been scouring the internets for more. I found one that sounded good and got good reviews so I decided to try it. The recipe claimed to make a one pound loaf of bread and my bread machine can only make a two pound loaf at the smallest. I was worried that the smaller loaf would just end up getting burned so I doubled the recipe. Also, doubling the recipe meant that it used the same amount of flour that my usual bread recipe uses and that always works out fine. I had no reason to believe that this was going to be a fiasco! With one hour left on the timer I noticed that my bread had gotten so huge that it was starting to lift the lid on the machine! It's trying to escape, hide your children! It will consume us alllll!!! Ahem, sorry. So I decided to remove the bread from the machine and put it in the oven. This meant slowly opening the lid and using a rubber spatula to scrape the bread off of it. This meant puncturing the bread. Now it's all saggy, it looks like it just gave birth! That loaf needs a tummy tuck, fo sho. It's currently in the oven and I'm keeping a pretty close eye on it. Right now it's so tall that it's going to touch the top of the oven soon... That seems safe and not at all a fire hazard.
BREAD UPDATE!
OK, problem with moving the bread pan to the oven - it's not really intended for that. Only the top two inches or so cooked and rose properly. The top of the bread was bordering on burnt so I took the pan out and turned the bread out on to a wire rack. At this point, the handle of the bread pan (so that you can pull it out of the bread machine) flopped over the top of the bread and totally severed the loaf in half to reveal that it was still totally dough inside. This was when I decided to try and cram it back into the pan (with little effect). Plan B (or probably plan L at this point) involved taking the dough out and slicing it into misshapen bread-like monstrosities. Here's hoping they don't taste like balls cuz they sure as fuck look like it...
Incidentally, the top layer that rose OK does in fact look and taste like bread. Delicious bread even. You can sort of pretend like it's a baguette. If you have really low standards.
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