30 days of 29, day 13: Baking bread

As the more sharp-witted among you may have picked up, I consider myself to be a pretty good cook. I also consider myself to be an abysmal wreck of a baker. I really don't know what it is, but baking scares me. In fact, I once sat in front of the oven and wept as Nick's birthday cake baked, because I was so sure I had ruined it. I hadn't.

As it is, I have about two go-to recipes for when I want to bake something, and everything else is created in a state of abject terror when the mood strikes me, which is extremely seldom. Everything else is baked by Nick, who really knows his way around a rolling pin. And that works too.

But I wanna do it! Me, me, me! I want to be the kind of domestic goddess that can whip up a quick Sacher torte and loaf of bread and still have time to vacuum in my pearls before breakfast. OK, not really. But I do want to be a better baker.

Which is why, when Gibknitty suggested that I try my hand at baking bread, I thought "Well, alright then."

So, I tried my hand at this recipe for Almond-Chocolate bread.

Of course, I couldn't just do it normally. If course I had to bake it in the oven rather than use our bread machine. Of course I had to try to be smarter than the recipe, and then forget to pay attention to what I was doing. And of course that showed in the result. The bread didn't rise as well as I had hoped, and ended up pretty dense, but it was still really tasty.

So, I'm going to make it again.

Stick that in your back pocket, bread monkeys!