I received some starter several months ago and made this bread and it's really really good. It was so good that I saved a bag of starter for myself each time which meant that I was baking bread every 10 days. This was fun until it got too exhausting. My boyfriend, however, was extremely disappointed when I stopped baking the bread because he loves it. So, I decided to revisit this recipe mostly to make him happy and so I could bring home a loaf of cinnamon bread for Thanksgiving break.
One problem: I have no starter. According to the letter that comes with the starter, the recipe for the starter is an Amish secret and you can only obtain the starter from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from a friend who got it from the Amish! Oh no! Aaaaaaaand I call bullshit on that one. A quick Google search revealed several recipes for the starter which were all pretty much identical. So much for your secret, Amish people. So I did a bit of planning ahead and 10 days ago, I went to the store to buy some yeast to make my starter.
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble! Oh wait, wrong holiday. Anyway, I let the yeast dissolve in warm water (not hot, so as not to kill the yeast) and then added milk, flour, and sugar. Typically this starter is passed around in plastic bags but I felt like I had a bit more flexibility so I put it in a Pyrex bowl and loosely covered it with a kitchen towel for it to rise. One of the recipes I saw warned against using any metal bowls or spoons because it's bad for the yeast and the dough won't properly rise (?) so I was very careful to use only wooden spoons. I don't really know if this was necessary.
Anywho, here's my second problem. I don't want to have to pass starter dough to 4 people. It's exhausting. So, I found a comment in one of the recipes that shared my feeling on this. This person said that it's fine to just not add the ingredients during the 10 day cycle and just bake with what starter you have and it turns out just as good. So there's gonna be a bit of mystery attached to this cinnamon bread. I really hope it works.
So, for the past 10 days, I've been stirring my starter with a wooden spoon and it keeps rebubbling every time I stir it so I think that's good. Now on day 10, we're ready to bake! It looks like there's so much starter in that bowl. Hmm. I'm starting to really doubt my plan. It looks like almost a full cup too much starter. Too late now though! The recipe itself is really easy and they just list the ingredients all together and pretty much say "Add these." So I decided to use a little of my baking savvy and added all the wet ingredients to the starter first and then added all the dry ones. I don't know if I wasn't adding fast enough or what was going on but the batter got a bit lumpy. That's when I decided that the no-metal rule had expired and pulled out my hand blender. Things got a bit dicey here because seriously, the bowl was almost overflowing with batter. I started to feel better at this point though because I remember having that same problem the last time I made the bread so maybe the starter proportion is ok. I hope. :-/
So after mixing in all the ingredients (I should mention, there is some variability with this recipe. You can use either vanilla or chocolate instant pudding in the batter and you can add nuts or raisins or chocolate chips. I went with the vanilla pudding and can you guess? Chocolate chips, of course!), I had to prepare the pans for baking. What that meant was spraying them with Pam and then coating the sides of the pan with a cinnamon sugar mixture. I'm actually pretty good at that technique because I've had a good amount of practice and my mommy taught me how to tap the mixture around the pan. The final direction before baking was to pour the batter evenly in 2 loaf pans. Did I mention this makes 2 loaves of bread? I probably shouldn't blog when I'm this tired...
Where was I? Right, pouring batter. This is actually more challenging for me than it may seem. See, I have pretty tiny hands. So it's really hard to hold the big bowl with my tiny hands. I can pour two-handed no problem but when we get down to the end and I have to use one hand to hold the bowl and the other hand to scoop the remaining batter out, things get tricky. I could really use a third hand. Or like, 5 since I'm wishing for things. Might as well go all out. Anywho, after successfully pouring the batter (and by successfully, I mean that I finished but did get a bunch on my shirt), I sprinkled the remaining cinnamon/sugar mixture over the tops and stuck them in the oven for an hour.
Oh God, my house smells so good. Even if this bread tastes awful, it would be almost worth it just to experience this smell for a few hours.
So, after the specified hour, the middle still wasn't done so I left it for another 5 minutes or so. As a result the edges got a little crispy. Oh well. Doesn't matter, look how beautiful these things are:
Beautiful. Taste-wise, definitely delicious. It seems a little denser than I remember but maybe that's because I overcooked them a little bit or maybe the starter really was off or maybe my memory is useless. The last one is probably most accurate. In any case, mission accomplished. If anyone is interested in getting a bag of this starter, talk to me and I'll hook you up. I'm thinking that if I make this again, I'll follow the directions and then just freeze the starter I don't use for future use (apparently it keeps in the freezer for at least 6 months). Hehehe, it smells so good in here.
Critical Reception:
Well, the brownie cookies have been well, but not widely, received. I missed colloquium due to a bout of feeling miserably sick so I didn't get to share my brownie cookies. One of my office mates agrees that they're mysterious but thinks they're more cookie than brownie. I'll be taking some home this weekend so maybe my mommy can tell me what they are. Mommies know everything.
A Disney Moment: Saludos Amigos
Oh boy, we've entered into what I'll call the "Dark Times Disney Disasters". Ok, so maybe they're not that bad but the next 5 films in the sequence are not what I would call up to the Disney standard. The first of the next 5 films is Saludos Amigos or as I will call it "An Ode to South America". The very first thing of note about this film is that there are people in it! That doesn't seem right. If movies like Mary Poppins and Song of the South aren't included in the list of Disney animated films, why do we have to watch Walt Disney and his animators board a plane to South America? Crazy.
For those of you who don't know, Saludos Amigos is really just a series of shorts stuck together that all take place in South America. To give you historical context, these were made during WWII. That's all I'll say about that. The first segment is Donald Duck goes to Lake Titicaca. It's boring. The problem with this whole movie is that it seems like it's a Travel Channel special for all of South America with cartoons thrown in to make it more appealing. Except it's not. It's mostly just boring. Grr.
I don't even feel like talking about each of the segments. I will say that the segment about Pedro the airplane who carries the mail over the scary looking mountain was mean. We thought Pedro had crashed in the scary mountain! Jeez, even the narrator said "And Pedro was gone." Disney can be mean. The only other thing of note was that the last segment really just served as an introduction to one of the main characters in Three Caballeros (which is our next film on the list). It's hard to rank the next 5 because I think they're all mostly terrible but I think this one might be the worst. Pedro was the only redeeming quality of the film to me and that was iffy at best. So I guess it's 5/5 (over the next 5 movies). All uphill from here then, right?
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