Bread Baking and the Garage

Well, you may be thinking, that is a strange title, where is he going with this? Actually, it is a strange title but an apt description to the events of my day. While the following events are not the only ones from my Labor Day they were the couple that I could capture with the camera to share visually.

I woke up this morning and after a delicious french toast breakfast from my beautiful wife decided to get my butt back in the kitchen to keep trying to perfect my sticky bun (loaf) recipe. This is a quest that I think I will be hard pressed to actually achieve without dumping ungodly amounts of butter and sugar into. But the day before I made a loaf of cinnamon raisin, hence the french toast, that actually was decent but lacked the gooey stickiness that I was looking for. So today I tried something new with more sugar and butter and honey, mmmm. When getting the loaf ready for proofing I remembered that I forgot to put in the butter during the first knead. I tried to work it in before proofing the loaves, which seemed to go well. I worked up a nice sweet gooey glaze and decided to do one loaf and one batch of rolls. So far so good.

That is well it all went downhill. I became sidetracked during the baking and having not set a timer, overcooked the rolls. The glaze burnt creating a crisp charred bottom to the rolls. The loaf still had a chance. I think forgetting the butter came back to haunt me as the loaf lacked the usual softly firm chew. Oh well, every day is a learning experience.

The burnt roll bottoms

The Loaf

That done I moved on to trying to tackle the garage. This has been an ongoing battle for about five years I believe. I clean I mess it up, I throw things out I accumulate more junk. I wanted to fit a car in the garage again. So I collected items for goodwill, the hazardous waste disposal, and garbage made piles and plans for disposal. I cut out existing shelves and re-arranged. Benen even got into the act, he loves cleaning but ends up playing with most of what I am trying to throw out. By the end I accepted that the car still was not going to fit, not tonight. However, I am not giving up. I am just going to think it over, like a slow moving game of Tetris and try to figure out how to make it all fit.

First phase in the garage.