Not Crying Uncle

I baked bread as I planned.  It didn't quite work out however.  

It is a very very long time since I baked in the bread maker.  Very long.  In fact, recalling it is a pain getting the paddles out of the bread is the only reason that I know that baked in it before.  When I make dough, I make the large recipes because the bread maker is listed to make up to a three pound loaf.   As a dough maker, it delivers two of the nice long loaf pans just perfectly filled with finished bread.

What I found out though, is that being able to make a large dough batch and baking said large dough batch are two different things.  The dough rose to touch the window on the top of the unit and stopped the vital flow of hot air over the loaf.  At ten minutes left, I lifted the lid just a wee bit and the entire top, which should have been set and almost baked, caved in as if it had just been over proofed.  I could tell there was heat there, but I had no idea what I would end up with.  

I guess my bread maker is really only good at three pounds of dough.  It will probably be better with a small loaf if I bake it in the machine.  I ought to also say that it took four hours, so bread maker bread is not the quick way.

I knew the problem immediately.  That didn't require any thought, but I sure did wonder how it would all go.  Still, I wasn't ready to cry uncle yet.  In the end, the top half was cut off and tossed into the garbage and the bottom is actually some pretty good bread.  I did think about making shoe soles out of the top, which is deep fried dough covered with icing sugar, but there was no way to separate the partially baked bits from the gooey utterly unbaked centre.  That idea does give me another way to have bread without baking.  

So, today's work is to try baking in the slow cooker to see if I can come up with a decent loaf.  The plan is the big batch of dough, with half the dough going into the oval slow cooker and half into the small slow cooker as pull apart sticky buns. Because once I got the idea of sticky buns into my head, I couldn't get it out.

Knitting continues apace.  There is a lot of knitting time when a batch of something takes 4 hours.