Kneading with Love

I saved this weekend to attack formula #1, knowing that my husband was going out of town I thought it would be a nice treat for him when he got home. These formulas actually make baking with children feasible, because of the multiple quick steps. Let's see - in between I played Jenga and colored some pumpkins with my daughter and did some Starfall with my little guy. Although these formulas do may it conducive to bake with little one's, next time I might wait till they're in school so I can truly put my apprentice hat on and blast some tunes.

As for the recipe, here is my soaker the night before. Ahh - clean counter (pre-flour).

As I was pouring the 6T of molasses into the initial soaker/flour mixture, my nose was not very thrilled. Although it's truly just a form of sugar, I could not get the terrible childhood memory of being forced to drink prune juice daily. Ick! Only my bionic nose could associate sweet molasses with prune juice.

My window pane wasn't as lovely as the books, actually not even close. I kept kneading and kneading, but had little success with such an elegant looking pane. But as I was kneading and getting a great upper arm workout, I started thinking about the history of Anadama bread and the sailor making it. Opposite of my new friend Joelle, I'm a go by the book gal with baking. In cooking I can be adventurous, but something happens when I'm baking and I have to follow the book precisely or hives will soon appear. So knowing this, I'm thinking to myself, who just decided to put a few ingredients together and start punching it and then decided to bake it. A genius - that's who! It's quite a bizarre process and I'll have to do some research for a future post.

I was a bit nervous as my dough looked almost as dark as pumpkin, however I remembered that I struggled at Whole Foods since they only had 2 kinds of Molasses and neither were on the light side.

And then I had to leave for Awana's so my little guys actually proofed for over 4 hours...yikes - an extended secondary fermentation. Here they are before, but I was rushed when I got home so forgot to take the picture. They were up to the rim of the pans. I did make one error in this step. I set the pans on top of the oven to proof and then set the timer of the oven for 7PM so when I arrived at home around 7:30, it would be at 350 ready for baking. However I didn't take into account that the little guys would be on the oven and receiving the early heat from the oven as it pre-heated. I tried to accommodate with baking time since this happened and I relied on temperature readouts. (with my meat thermometer)

But as I'm enjoying my first bite as I write this post, I think it was actually OK to proof for that long. I have some beautiful air holes within the bread and I truly and enjoying my first enriched, standard dough via indirect method with EXTENDED secondary fermentation. How's that for my first lesson!