Beautiful Bread: Daring Bakers’ February 2014 Challenge

It's Daring Bakers' posting day again - I remembered in the nick of time. It would have been a shame to be late with this one, since I'm more than a little bit proud of what I baked!

Blog-checking lines:
Beauty surrounded the Daring Bakers this month as our host, Sawsan, of chef in disguise, challenged us to make beautiful, filled breads. Who knew breads could look as great as they taste?

Bread. My Dad makes awesome bread. I have tried to make various breads over the years, and they have, at best, been mediocre. Clearly I've not got the family bread making magic. However, this is definitely, undoubtedly, my best bread to date. It had the right texture - cooked all the way through, and pretty into the bargain!

I'm not going to post the recipe here, but instead point you to the Daring Kitchen website, where you can find the very good instructions that made creating this bread beauty so easy. They're here.

Of course, as usual I didn't quite follow the recipe!

I used the Cinnamon Sweet Bread recipe, but instead of spreading cinnamon, sugar and butter between the layers, I spread a garlicky carrot puree. So it was instead a slightly sweet savoury bread, and we had it along with soup - delicious.

I baked on a cold miserable day, and my dough took about 3 hours to double during the rise - the joys of Scotland! But on the plus side I was able to go out for a run (in the rain), come back, have a shower, drink a cuppa and read 3 chapters of my book before it was ready. I should point out that I made this on an impromptu flexi day-off from work. My days don't normally work out like that - there's generally a lot more getting up at 6am and going to work in the semi dark, and needing 3 cups of coffee to wake myself up, zero running and no bread making. Before anyone gets the wrong impression!

Not burnt - honest! Well, the bread wasn't - the outer layer of the carrot puree got a little bit crispy, that's all

Thanks for an lovely challenge. I didn't have time to try the other shaping method in the instructions, but it also makes another very pretty round. One to remember for another day.

Thanks for such a satisfying challenge - it's great to make something that turns out better than you'd been expecting.