Breadventures: A total loss and a partial save

Full of confidence after the success of my first loaf of bread, I tried setting up the machine to cook a loaf overnight. The result: complete failure.

Baked flour with yeast on top. Mmm mmm.

Toward the bottom was something vaguely resembling bread.

It's possible that the machine was to blame, but I suspect it was just that the recipe was too big. Next time I want to cook a loaf overnight, I'll try to make sure that it's a recipe that I've successfully used before.

Not to be put off, I tried another recipe: maple walnut bread. However, I still hadn't learned my lesson about the recipes being too large. I'd thought that maybe because this was a machine-kneaded, oven-cooked recipe, that the machine could deal with it. Silly me. This recipe had twice as much dough as a regular recipe of bread, so of course the machine couldn't deal with it.

After resetting the machine 2 or 3 times and poking the mix with a spatula, I finally got a mostly mixed dough. In a flash of smarts, I took out the dough and threw out half of it. I returned it to the machine for one last mix and its first rise, adding walnuts midway through the mixing.

The recipe had called for adding a cup of walnuts and perhaps a half cup of raisins. Since we'd already chopped the walnuts, I added all of them and left out the raisins. At this point, the dough had been kneaded so much, it was impossible to incorporate the walnuts, so they mostly ended up on the outside.

So there I was, with a weird, nut-covered dough. I punched it down and put it in a pan to rise again. And then I baked it.

The result? Delicious! It looked terrible (sadly, I took no pictures), but it had a wonderful, crunchy crust and excellent flavor.

I've since gone through the book and written, in pencil, the half-amounts for every ingredient of every recipe that I'd like to try.