bread

Bread is my favorite food. I really do think it's its own thing and not just a vessel for delivering meats and spreads. The world as we know it would not exist today if it wasn't for bread. Eating bread is great but I like making and touching and smelling and looking at it too.

Baking

I first learned how to bake bread when I was 14 or so when my aunt taught me our family's caramel roll recipe that has now been passed down four generations. I'm pretty certain it originally came from a cookbook but if my family says its ours then it is. I liked baking the standard box cakes with my mother on occassion before that, but afterwards, bread became most enjoyable for me to bake.

I've experimented with the recipe a lot since then. I'm not one to care much for presentation when it comes to food and bread is cutest when it's lumpy! My favorite part is kneading, it's a great way to relieve stress and uncooked dough is just really fun to play with. Unless you're making enough bread to feed a whole village, stand mixers are overrated! Just use your hands!

Sometimes bread recipes that are kind of like cake, like banana bread and zucchini bread, will recommend using applesauce to make them more moist. But dragonfruit puree (or dragonfruitsauce?) is a good alternative! White dragonfruit doesn't really taste like anything (though if I were really pressed to describe the taste I would say it's bad), but the seeds add a really pleasant texture to the bread. Kind of like multigrain bread but not hard on your teeth at all. I highly recommend it!

I don't do sourdough. One of these days I will try making croissants!