Christmas Bread Pt. 1

So, as requested by Peter, I have decided to try to live-blog my Christmas bread baking experience this year.

So far things are not off to a particularly good start. Firstly, though I was expecting to start this project with my mother she was nowhere to be found when I awoke. It turns out that she is at work and likely won't be back for some indeterminate period of time. Yay.

Secondly, when I finally did get around to assembling the required ingredients I found that there was less butter milk than I expected. Instead of there being enough buttermilk for about 10-12 loaves of bread there was only enough for about 6 loaves. Bummer.

The second problem was 'solved' by Kirsten running to the nearby grocery store to pick up some more buttermilk (a product which I wasn't sure they were still going to have in stock).

When Kirsten eventually returned with the new buttermilk she started to pour it into the bowl with some melted butter and the old buttermilk. Almost immediately we realized that the buttermilk had a few more solid bits than it was supposed to and that it was likely off (even though the expiry date was a week away).

After a quick consultation with my mother at work we decided to send Kirsten back to the store to return the newly acquired buttermilk and how we would go about rectifying the problem of volume - we decided to use soured regular milk.

Anyway, as it stands now we have a big bowl of warm milk and melting butter. Once all of the butter melts we will have to let it cool before adding the yeast and sugar and flour.

Hopefully things will pick up because from how they are looking right now they really aren't looking very good.

(Oh, and I am not using my computer as I am using that computer to make some time-lapse videos, a contribution to the internet that I am sure you are all eagerly awaiting.)