Tasty at home

In my weekly quest for domestic coziness, I've begun making my own bread. I say that as if it were a permanent decision to always bake my own bread, but it's not really. In fact, I've only made two batches so far but it was so gratifying, I thought to myself, "I really should do this more often." So I'm going to try.

I've never been much of a bread baker because I just naturally lack the proper temperament to do it well. Which is to say that I'm impatient as hell, want to get things done NOW, and bread just doesn't work that way. The other day I used a whole wheat loaf bread recipe that explained the first rise would take about an hour and a half. Actually, it took six and that was just the first rise. But I just tried to forget about it and let it do its thing and everything came out well. See?

Two beautiful loaves, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.

But my original motivation--lest you begin believing that I'm motivated by just sweet domestic coziness and a back-to-the-land, homemade whole grain thing--was a trip to a local chocolate shop with Bean while Sister was having her piano class. The adorable European owner informed me that the big bag of real, dark chocolate sprinkles on the shelf next to me were what European children have sprinkled on their toast in the mornings to get them to eat their bread. He himself, he said, had this for breakfast til he was 15 years old, after which he was presumably too old for such a childish breakfast and switched to espresso and cigarettes, I guess. I'm a sucker. I bought the sprinkles. And needed to make fresh bread to put them on.

Bean with toast, originally uploaded by Secretsugar.