Cute or What?

So, what do you think? I thought it looks so cute.

Ok, I cheated. Only the presentation fits the big project description. Considering this is my third attempt at baking bread, taking the dough out of the breadmaker and transferring it to another pan in so many parts, that took some guts. I really "killed two birds with one stone" with this. It is actually yogurt bread and for convenience, I followed the recipe on sweet-tooth haven's blog.

I think her idea of setting the machine to dough function for 10 minutes, add butter, and then continue with white bread function really rocks. I was amazed to see the machine "knocking" and "slamming" the dough about! When I added the butter, I had a shock. The butter was all over the pan BUT on/in the dough. I kept scraping the butter and trying to make it stick to the dough. After a while, the butter was incorporated in the dough. What followed was pure estimation and checking back and forth -- breadmaker manual, recipe collection and my one and only book on breadmaking :P

When do I take the dough out? How should I punch the dough? How to cut the dough? How long to bake it? Omg, so many things to figure out. But I just went ahead based on instinct anyway. When my girl saw me having fun, she came to join in as well. We both thought it was very cute and she said she wished to eat it then. Already during that stage, the fragrance of the yogurt was in the air. I highly recommend Swiss Premium yogurt, it is not overly sweet and it works well with all recipe. The other brands of yogurt tend to have a strong smell.

Needles to say, while it was baking it was simply aromatic. Of course, I was worried about the temperature, baking time, and what have you. I decided to add another 5 minutes as the top was not brown enough. And then, the moment of truth, taste test! It was still too hot to hold, but boy, was the bread soft, and tasty too. I think I may just use the machine (if I get one of my own eventually) ro knead the dough and I will bake it in the oven. That way, I won't end up with a hole at on some part of the loaf, hard crust (even though I chose Light) and best of all, no cutting required. Of course, I need to learn/experiment a little more then.

I was so encouraged, I decided to make ANOTHER loaf using the same recipe. I used swiss premium berry flavoured yogurt with raisins for the first loaf and Marigold low-fat peach flavoured yogurt with raisins and apicot for the second loaf. I may try kwf's orange bread next. About the size of the second loaf, it's my girl's request, she wanted the buns to be bigger. I thought the small ones are so easy to eat, actually it can get out of control quite easily.