Thinking about cupcakes

Today the kids and I walked out to see if we could find flowers for our vase. We sang A Hunting We Will Go. It was very cute. My favorite rose bush in the apartment complex is in bloom, and I got a couple nice buds. So very thorny, though.

The baby's birthday is this weekend. She'll turn 1, which is like the biggest letdown of a birthday ever. She's still a baby. She doesn't understand birthdays yet. So I'm going to make cupcakes and take them to our family dinner on Easter Sunday.

My hubby asked for these particular cupcakes that are chocolate with cream cheese and chocolate chips in the middle. They're called something like Chocolate Cheese Cups. They're a bit fiddly to make, but you don't even have to ice them. They're that delicious.

I'm also doing Patrice's Farmhouse Chats, because this blog post is feeling awfully short.


What was the first sign of spring that you saw this year?

Around here, all the ornamental pear trees bloom first. I don't know if they're everywhere in the country. They're like generic shade trees that get little inedible berry things on them. In the spring they get great big white blossom clusters that smell exactly like cat urine. They're pretty, but hold your breath as you walk downwind.

The other day I was sitting outside with the munchkins, and a mockingbird flew into our tree. He was singing, but my cockatiel was shrieking. The mockingbird's song trailed off as he listened to the cockatiel, and I heard him mimicking, very softly. First he made a similar sound, then he varied it until he dialed in the sound of the cockatiel's shriek. It was really interesting. I've never heard a mockingbird actually learning a call before.

What was the last package you received in the mail?

A box from my husband's folks of Easter candy for the kids. It's stashed in a mysterious box on top of the fridge, and only Mommy knows of the wonders that await within.

Do you have any Easter, or spring traditions in your home?

We're still working on that. So far the munchkins are still thrashing out this whole Easter basket thing, and they know it's about Jesus coming back to life. We do a fun activity with my extended family where we have twelve plastic eggs, each with things inside that pertain to the Crucifixion and Resurrection, like nails or rope.

Do you hand wash dishes or machine was them?


Both. I can't put my big pots and pans through the dishwasher. I use the dishwasher for cups, plates and silverware.

If I had an extra hour each day, I'd ______________.

Write and draw more. That's why I stay up late, actually. So I have time to write and draw. It's amazing how much I can get done in that extra hour every day, although sometimes I'm ready to fall asleep sitting up.

Breakfast cookies

Today was baking day. I wanted to make a cookie that would offer a bit more energy than just a sugar rush. I had some extra bacon that I needed to use up, and I remembered Breakfast Cookies. Fortunately Taste of Home had a recipe. Here's theirs:

Breakfast cookies:

1/2 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 egg
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
10 bacon strips, cooked and crumbled
2 cups cornflakes
1/2 cup raisins

Directions

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in egg. Combine flour and baking soda; gradually add to creamed mixture. Stir in bacon, cornflakes and raisins.
Drop by rounded tablespoonfuls 2 in. apart onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake at 350° for 15-18 minutes or until lightly browned. Cool for 2 minutes before removing to wire racks. Store in the refrigerator. Yield: 2 dozen.

I didn't have any cornflakes, and the comments on the recipe complained that they made it too crunchy anyway. So I used 2 cups of oatmeal. Essentially these are oatmeal raisin cookies with crumbled bacon.

It makes for sweet cookies with curiously tasty and crunchy salty bits. The bacon flavor is a bit weird at first bite, but then it tastes really good. I don't think I'd dispense them as breakfast, but as an afternoon snack, they can't be beat.

Adventures with unleavened bread

Today I ran out of bread. So I went to make some more and discovered that I had also run out of yeast.

I've been reading about the Israelites in the desert, and the Passover, so I've had unleavened bread on the brain. I wondered what might happen if I just made my regular bread recipe and omitted the yeast. Since that's what traditional recipes seem to be, anyway. (I did research traditional Jewish breads, and they're more or less a regular bread recipe with no yeast.)

Here's the second batch.

Nice and flat and really chewy. I think it'll be good with peanut butter on it. The kids have been snacking on it.

My first batch, I forgot to poke with a fork, so they blimped out like popovers.

Undeterred, I cut holes in them and stuck them full of jam. I served them at dinner and they vanished.

So that's been my unleavened bread adventure. We'll see how well they do in the toaster tomorrow at breakfast. :-)

My recipe was something like:

2 cups water
1 egg
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp honey
2 Tbsp flaxseed meal (I've been sneaking it into baked goods lately just to use it up)
5 cups flour

Mix the wet ingredients then add flour until dough is firm enough to handle. Roll out on a greased cookie sheet and prick with fork before baking. Bake at 400 for 15-20 minutes, depending on how crunchy you want your breads.

No Stroganoff

A couple people asked how my stroganoff turned out last night.

Except, er, it turned out that I made something else.

I made THESE bad boys!

Ground Beef and Bisciuts from Taste of Home.

I didn't have the mushrooms and consumme that you need to make stroganoff, which I didn't realize until 5 minutes before I started cooking. So I typed "ground beef" into the search on Taste of Home and picked the first thing that looked tasty.

It kind of tasted like the Sloppy Joes in a Pan that we used to make off the Bisquick box. The recipe calls for canned biscuits, but I just whipped up a batch of baking powder biscuits. It was delicious. Even the munchkins ate it, which is a change from the norm. :-)

Wheat-free

Alex has been coughing and coughing since Easter. Over the ensuing months, I've experimented on him, trying one thing after another to get rid of the cough.

We've moved his bed. We've loaded him up on probiotics. We've limited his sugar, and lately, we've limited his wheat.

Sugar and wheat limitation have had the most dramatic effect on his coughing. He's been off wheat for about three days, and his cough is limited to a little bit right before bed, and a little bit when he gets up. Before, he was coughing all night, usually making himself throw up.

I was afraid he had whooping cough or something, but he has no other symptoms besides the cough. It's made him hard to pin down.

Anyway, I think he has a bit of a wheat allergy. Then my mom found this book:


Wheat Belly, by William Davis.

He's a cardiologist who observed huge, dramatic turnarounds in thousands of patients who came to him for treatment, and all he had them do was stop eating wheat. No other diet or exercise changes. And he's seen cures in diabetes, arthritis, dementia, and all kinds of other things. It has to do with our modern wheat being so genetically modified that it's more or less unsafe for human consumption. There is no such thing as "healthy whole grains".

I'll post some excerpts from it later on. Right now, the order of business is trying to figure out what to feed picky children when you're pretty much going gluten-free. When peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were a food staple, it's hard to change. So tonight I'm looking at some kind of pizza with a cornmeal crust.

(I tried grinding some flaxseed, then found out that there are two kinds of flaxseed--dark and golden. Dark flaxseed is extremely bitter. Guess which one I have!)

I have some rice flour, but it tends to make really goopy dough. I'm experimenting with adding it to cornflour to make the cornflour a little less grainy. I'm considering picking up some other kind of flour, like amaranth or gram (which is chickpea), but I'm afraid of paying something like 4 bucks a pound.

Summer salsa

Here is Claire, sitting in Daddy's lap and drooling all over his arm.

Ryan has been asking me to make him some salsa all week, and today I determined that I would make him some if it killed me.

At Mom's last week, I had picked about ten tomatoes, large and small, to make into salsa. So i sliced those up, chucked them on the jelly roll pan that I don't care about, and cooked them at 475 for about 30 minutes, until they started to get black. I turned them halfway through, and chucked on a sliced jalapeno, too, to get that roasted. Turns out it wasn't a very hot jalapeno, and I should have used more. Alas. Anyway, here's the recipe:

Modeled after Baja Fresh's salsa:

7 tomatoes, sliced
1 jalapeno, seeded
1 garlic clove
2 tablespoons diced onion
juice from 1 lime
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup water

Roast the tomatoes on a grill (or in the oven) until black, turning halfway through. At the halfway point, add the jalapeno.

Do not roast the onion or garlic. When the jalapeno and tomatoes are blackened, combine all ingredients in blender and puree until the desired consistency. (I ran it about 4 seconds on low.) Chop 1 last raw tomato and stir into salsa. (I forgot to leave a tomato. Oops.)

It was HEAVEN on a CHIP. I forgot how good fresh roasted tomatoes are. It's just a bright, sparkling flavor. It's like in the cartoon Ratatouille, when he eats the food and the fireworks go off. I'd show you a picture, but my picture just looks like red sauce. Not very appetizing.

Grandma's Strawberry Pie

It's strawberry season, and no summer is complete without a strawberry pie.

It doesn't look as appetizing with half of it missing, but it was delicious.

Here's the recipe:

Grandma Joyce's Strawberry Pie

3 cups fresh strawberries
1 cup water
1 cup sugar
2 Tbsp cornstarch
2 drops red food coloring
1 tsp strawberry extract
baked pie crust of your choice

Bake pie crust, set aside. Pour 2 cups chopped strawberries into crust. Mash remaining 1 cup, set aside.

In medium saucepan, bring water, sugar and cornstarch to a boil. Add food coloring, extract and mashed strawberries. Pour into pie crust. Refrigerate several hours.


I don't have any strawberry extract on hand, and it still tasted wonderful. I also put a layer of cream cheese on the bottom of my pie crust, before I added the chopped strawberries. Heaven on a plate!

Holly's 2nd birthday

Thursday was Holly's second birthday party (her birthday's actually Saturday). Remember that rose cake I wanted to mimic? Here's how the cupcakes turned out:

Here's Holly, opening presents from Gramma. She got a bunch of paint with water books.

Aunt Meg played with baby Claire.

Holly liked the whole "happy birthday" thing and sang along. Then her boy cousins and brother helped her blow out her candles.

And then everybody ate cupcakes like they were going out of style. It was the icing flowers. I sneaked some cream cheese into my buttercream icing, and oh man, it was tasty.

Pondering cake

Pondering using this tutorial ...

...to make rose-topped cupcakes for my daughter's birthday next week. I know I have some tips like that. I Am Baker makes it look like a snap.

Question: can I accomplish this with a screaming baby in the background? Hmm ...

Easter frosting fail

Pioneer Woman has a tasty-sounding hot cross buns recipe. I've been snooping around for something "traditional" to cook this Easter. I looked at a lot of Matzah bread recipes, because I'd really like to try to do the whole feast of unleavened bread and Passover thing. Because, hey, Jesus fulfilled all that when he died, and it's really awesome and all that. And I really like Matzah bread.

But I just never got around to it, and I couldn't think of what to serve with it. (Soup? Hummus? Guacamole?) Whereas hot cross buns are just basically a sweet roll with frosting on it. The opposite of yeast-and-sugar-free Matzah bread, but ah well. At least I'm not baking a ham, right?

So I used a general dinner roll recipe, and did PW's technique of folding cinnamon, sugar, and raisins into the dough. You can add more spices than that, but after all that peach butter last summer, I can't stomach the thought of nutmeg.

The rolls turned out so good that we devoured them hot. I was concerned that we wouldn't have any left for me to make crosses on.

Anyway, the rolls finally cooled, and I whipped up a little vanilla buttercream frosting. I dug out the last little Ziploc bag, put frosting in it, cut off the tip, and squeezed.

Frosting emerged from the end, and also from two extra holes I didn't know were in the bag, sprouting extra little frosting-tendrils across my fingers.

Never one to say die, I managed to frost two buns before the bag shredded. So I ditched it and went, "They're just crosses. I can smear that on with my fingers!"

Fortunately I had washed my hands before this farce began.

So my hot cross buns look like this.

Big, fat, smeary crosses an inch thick in icing.

Not shown: the one that I messed up on, so I slathered the remainder of the icing in the bowl on top of it. It made a good snack.

Happy Easter, everyone!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

Another meme for me! I find that filling out memes is easier than thinking, what with mommy-brain and not having anything more interesting to say than, "Got up. Fed people. Nursed the baby. Fed people. Changed diapers. Fed the baby. etc. etc. etc."

So today I'm trying out {pretty, happy, funny, real} from Like Mother, Like Daughter. It looked fun, and it only requires four photos. I can cough up four photos!

{pretty}

Pretty chocolate chip cookies! With some diced peanuts in them for extra nom.

{happy}

His smile disturbs me slightly.

{funny}

"I'll make you a diaper you can't refuse."

{real}

My living room this morning. Sigh. The baby really does sleep the best when she's in the midst of chaos.

Blueberry cobbler

Last week when the kids were so sick, Mom gave me some frozen blueberries to feed them.

The kids decided that they didn't like blueberries, so I've been slowly eating them all myself, on yogurt and mixed with cereal. I noticed we were getting low and felt bad about it, so I decided to make something that everybody would enjoy: a cobbler!

I was going to make a pie, but it looked like too much work. So I started researching cobblers.

There's a hundred bazillion types of cobblers, so I just went with my favorite tried and true recipe, and added a bit of seasoning to the blueberries to make them more like pie filling.

Blueberry cobbler recipe

Filling:
3 cups blueberries, frozen or fresh
1 Tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Juice of half a lemon, about 1 Tablespoon

Topping:
1 cup flour
1 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
Half a stick of butter
Juice from other half of lemon, about 1 Tablespoon

Butter 9x9 baking pan. Heat oven to 350. Toss all filling ingredients together in a bowl. Pour into baking pan.

In separate bowl, mix flour, sugar and baking powder with fork. Lightly beat egg, toss in flour mixture until it looks like flaky crumbs. Scatter over berries. Melt butter, mix with lemon juice. Drizzle over top of flour mixture until mostly covered. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until browned.

It turned out wonderfully, and we ate most of the pan directly after dinner. Nobody complained about eating blueberries when they were in a cobbler, that's for sure.

Morning adventures

Tis the last day of March. It's going out like a lamb today: nice and sunny and forecast to be about 80 degrees. I've got myself and Holly in shorts, but Alex refused shorts and dressed in long sleeves.

Here's Holly with a flashlight.

Alex picking out a movie.

I happened to glance at the window, and was startled to see this through the blinds.

Closer examination revealed this.

That's not something you see every day.

Anyway, this morning I made blueberry/banana muffins to tempt the munchkins, who are still suffering from sick tummies after their flu.

Blueberry-banana muffins

3/4ths cup milk
1/4th cup oil
1 egg
1 overripe mashed banana
1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup blueberries

Whisk together milk, oil, and egg. Beat in banana. Add flour, sugar, salt and baking powder, stir just until blended. Fold in blueberries. Bake in greased or papered muffin tins for 20-25 minutes at 400 degrees.

The recipe didn't call for a banana, but I had a stinky black one sitting on the counter, and I was determined to use it in SOMETHING. The muffins came out very flavorful and sweet. Unfortunately the munchkins disdained the blueberries in them on principle. We're in that picky stage where neither of them wants to eat, and they don't feel good, so they don't want to eat because of that, either.

I've been trying to make crockpot yogurt like Little Bit of Life did, but when I got to the stage where you add plain yogurt as a starter, I didn't really have enough plain yogurt. I added it anyway and let it sit overnight. This morning it's still the consistency of milk, but the longer it stands, the more it's starting to taste like yogurt.

I turned the crockpot back on for 20 minutes, then turned it off, just to keep it a little bit warm. Making yogurt is like a giant petri dish, anyway, and petri dishes have to stay at about body temperature.

It's certainly growing some kind of culture, because this morning at 6:30, it still tasted like milk, whereas at 8:30 it tasted like yogurt and has more and more thick chunks in it. I'm just going to leave it covered and check it periodically. If nothing else, I can use it to fortify smoothies.

Later: Finally made it into a vanilla smoothie at 10, so this was after 14 hours of sitting covered. I ladled two cups into the blender, added half a cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Best. Vanilla. Yogurt. Drink. Ever.

The rest has been relegated to the fridge, because I don't want it to start separating, which is what I read happens eventually.

Note from later: Turns out my yogurt stayed runny because my crockpot didn't stay hot enough for long enough. Found this out after a lot of research.

Special chicken pockets

I wanted to make chicken pockets for dinner tonight.

Chicken pockets (or packets, depending on your recipe) usually involve some cooked shredded chicken, mixed with cream cheese and something like onion or garlic salt, then folded into the middle of some kind of bread, usually canned crescent roll dough.

I've made them a few times, and my husband has complained that they're too bland.

So I was trying to think of a way to jazz them up. I decided to make one of his favorite recipes, chicken and stuffing, and turn that into a chicken pocket filling.

Recipe as it turned out:

A pound or so of cooked, shredded chicken
1 half can of cream of chicken soup (or more depending on your amount of chicken)
1 box of Stove Top stuffing
Dough of your choice, canned or homemade

If you're making homemade dough, make it ahead of time and let it rise. I just used a general Dinner Rolls recipe, doubled, because I was making orange rolls, too.

Cook your chicken and shred it up. Mix it with your cream of chicken soup. Prepare stuffing according to package directions and toss it with the chicken and soup mixture. Mix it just enough to distribute the stuffing throughout the mixture, but not enough to turn it into mush.

Drop a large spoonful of filling into flattened triangle of dough. Pull corners of dough up and seal together at the top, forming a funky little ball. Place on greased jelly roll pan and bake at 350 for 20 minutes.

My husband pronounced them a success. I thought they would have been nice with some kind of dipping sauce, maybe a chicken gravy. They were a bit dry, I thought.

Then I also made orange rolls, using orange marmalade instead of juice and zest on the inside.

Seeing as this was blood orange marmalade and blood orange juice in the glaze, they were this pleasant fruity, citrusy sweet roll.

Lemon marmalade bread

Photo from Taste of Home

I was trying to think of something to make with some of that lemon marmalade I have sitting in the fridge. Then I wondered ... could I made lemon bread with it?

I whipped out my Glazed Lemon Bread recipe, which isn't exactly like this one, but is very close:

Taste of Home's Lemon Bread

* 1/2 cup butter, softened
* 1 cup sugar
* 2 eggs
* 2 tablespoons lemon juice
* 1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
* 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 1 teaspoon baking powder
* 1/8 teaspoon salt
* 1/2 cup 2% milk

GLAZE:
* 2 tablespoons lemon juice
* 1/2 cup confectioners' sugar

Directions

* In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs, lemon juice and peel. Combine the flour, baking powder and salt; gradually stir into creamed mixture alternately with milk, beating well after each addition.
* Pour into a greased 8-in. x 4-in. loaf pan. Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out clean.
* Combine glaze ingredients. Remove bread from pan; immediately drizzle with glaze. Cool on a wire rack. Serve warm. Yield: 1 loaf (16 slices).

The only thing I changed was instead of lemon juice and zest in the bread, I just gouged out three large teaspoonfuls of lemon marmalade and dolloped them into the batter.

Instead of glaze on top of the hot bread, I warmed up some marmalade and spread that over the top. It was good, but a little bit of overkill, especially when you hit a chunk of lemon peel. I think it would have been better had I just stuck to the glaze.

I'd have posted a pic of my lemon bread, but I left it in the oven a bit long and it got a wee bit dark. So instead of black bread with a yellow center, I'm throwing in Taste of Home's, which is much prettier (and what mine should have looked like).

I'm loving marmalade more and more. It'll be especially wonderful in the summertime.

Sinful cranberry muffins

I was cleaning out my fridge, and found about a cup of cooked cranberries I had saved to make into muffins.

I looked at them dubiously. No mold or otherwise fuzzy lifeforms had come to inhabit them.

My first attempt at cranberry muffins were disgusting. I used the Blueberry Muffins recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook, and they were just revolting. Not enough sugar. I only halfway-salvaged them by adding that crumbly sugar topping stuff to them, and then only the top half was edible.

So I whipped out good ol' Pioneer Woman's cookbook to see what kind of muffins she makes.

She has a recipe for Marmalade Muffins, which you can see here. I modified it a bit to make them cranberry.

* 2 sticks Salted Butter, Softened
* 1 cup White Sugar
* 2 cups Flour
* 2 whole Eggs
* 1 cup water
* 1 teaspoon Baking Soda
* 1 cup of cooked cranberries
* 1/2 cup cranberry juice
* 1 cup Brown Sugar (lightly Packed)

Cream together butter and white sugar in a mixing bowl. Add eggs, beat well, and mix in flour. Dissolve baking soda into water, then add to the rest of the batter along with the cranberries. Mix well, but don't overmix!

Grease muffin tins and cram with as much batter as you can, making each one 2/3rds to 3/4ths full.

Bake at 375ºF for 20 to 25 minutes or until lightly browned.

In a separate bowl, combine brown sugar and cranberry juice. Drizzle this glaze over the warm muffins. Remove muffins from the pan while still warm.

I was going to combine this with the Betty Crocker recipe, but that one uses no butter and almost no sugar. Talk about one joyless muffin.

These, on the other hand ...

Yum.

Easily influenced

First, my sister in law posted this ridiculous recipe for cinnamon rolls. I drooled over them for days. But the weather remained at 100 degrees, and who wants cinnamon rolls when it's that hot out?

Then, things changed.

The temperature dropped to 70.

We finally bought groceries.

And now these are rising on my stove top.

I am easily influenced by pretty pictures of sweet desserts. I want so bad to bake these up now and have them as a late lunch.

I didn't put brown sugar in the filling, though. Just couldn't bring myself to do it. Sorry, Meg. :-)

Edit: When I got to the glaze stage, I discovered that eating powdered sugar on pancakes had reduced my powdered sugar supplies to about half a cup.

Thinking quickly of a Good Eats episode where Alton Brown made caramel sauce, I threw a cup of white sugar, 1/3rd cup of water, and a tablespoon of butter into a saucepan. I let it come to a nice rolling boil, and babysat it, stirring only occasionally to keep it from crystallizing.

Once it tasted caramelly enough (I think somewhere in the 200 degree range), I dumped it over my cinnamon rolls.

Once they cooled enough to eat, we fell upon them and devoured half the pan. Oh man. Oh man. You can't imagine how good it tasted.

Spelt bread

Well, it's not technically spelt bread. It's spelt mixed with white flour.

Spelt is a nice grain that is related to wheat, but it has a nuttier taste. (Ever notice that brown rice, whole wheat flour, and any kind of other grain all taste "nutty"? It's like the grain version of "Tastes like chicken".)

Personally, I think spelt tastes like popcorn.

My mom had a big jar of whole spelt in the back of her pantry, and she generously gave me some. I've been grinding it in my blender and adding it to my bread in place of whole wheat flour. It contains gluten, but it's more delicate than wheat gluten, so everybody says not to knead it longer than 4 minutes or it will collapse.

I made mine half spelt half white wheat, kneaded it about ten minutes and had no problems.

The trouble is, the bread has such a nice popcorn overtone that the kids are eating it up. Alex has about 5 pieces of toast with his eggs every morning (slathered in butter and jam, so that might have something to do with it).

I guess I'll just have to make some more. :-)

The recipe is just a general bread recipe from Betty Crocker. You can find millions of bread recipes, and the only thing I changed was altering my usual half white half whole wheat to half white half spelt flour.

The story of bread

I'm making bread today, so I figured I'd show you how it's done.

I'm using a Bosch mixer, which looks like this. (Only not this clean anymore.)


But you can also make this with a Sunbeam mixer, which looks like this.


I'm using the Betty Crocker Rich Egg Bread recipe, which is thus:

3 to 3 1/4 cups all-purpose or bread flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 package regular or quick active dry yeast (2 1/4 teaspoons)
1 cup very warm water (120° to 130°)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large egg

Except I'm making a double batch. Prepare yourself. Also I'm changing the directions up a bit, because it makes bread faster. And when it comes to bread, which already takes all day, any shortcuts are good.

Take your warm water and mix together your sugar and your yeast. Let it sit and come to life like the monster it is.

Toss all the other ingredients into the mixer, but don't mix them up until your yeast has sat for at least five minutes.

Check the yeast. Yikes!

Pot pot, stop stop! I dump it hurriedly into my mixer before it can escape the cup, and turn it on. It makes a nice floury soup.

Now dump in the rest of the flour fairly slowly. Or if you're impatient and know your recipe, dump the whole shebang in there and watch your mixer go crazy.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Still kind of gooey, though. See how it's all stuck to the sides? Keep adding flour!

Better. See how it's starting to form a ball, and it's taken the dough off the sides of the bowl? But it's still sticking to the dough hooks pretty well, plus it's wrapped around the center spindle. I like it to rip all the dough off the spindle and make a nice ball. More flour! About half a cup should do it.

There we go. I've taken the dough hook out. This is after it's been kneading for a while, and I've stood there and held down the mixer to keep it from walking off the counter, or destroying the crock pot beside it. See how the dough is now a nice ball? At this point you're supposed to take the dough out, put it in a greased bowl, turn it to grease all sides, cover and let rise for an hour. But I'm lazy, so I just leave it in the mixing bowl and put the lid on.

After an hour ...

It's escaping! Quick, poke it!

If you poke the dough, and the hole doesn't close up again after a few seconds, then it's done rising. Gather it up into a ball and slap it onto some greased wax paper.

Like so. Put another sheet of greased wax paper on top of that, mash it down flat, and roll it out with a rolling pin.

Then roll it up like you're making cinnamon rolls.

Pinch the seam to seal it, then fold up the ends and pinch those to seal them. My seal job wasn't very good. It makes big holes in the bread later.

Toss it into the glass baking pan of your choice (greased, of course), and cover it up to let it rise again.

This is why baking bread takes so long, because you have to let it rise twice. Be glad it's not French bread, because you have to punch it down and let it rise even more often.

Anyway, after an hour or so ...

...it's starting to lift the wax paper off the dish. Time to crank up the oven to 350 and bake it for 20-30 minutes, depending on your oven and how dark you like your bread.

Tada! A gorgeous fat golden-brown loaf! I like them in the 9x9 pan because I get long, skinny pieces of bread, perfect for sandwiches.