just hangin with the bread baking babes

my quest for better bread baking skills led me to follow the babes this month (as a buddy of course) in their bread challenge and bake sukkar bi tahin, beirut tahini swirls. i try to play along with the bread baking babes and with the bread baking day (two separate groups) each month and sometimes, i am successful. kind of, mostly successful depending on how you look at things.

sukkar bi tahin

i realize that the soccermom label i put on myself makes me sound like every other stay at home mom with at least one kid on a team. but the truth is, i work for a living and currently i am writing another cookbook as well as working full time outside of the house. so how could i have time to do all this? i don't always have it and often i am playing catch up and other times, i sit out a round. this month, i made the cut and managed to get the babes bread challenge done on time.

my last attempt at joining the babes was a disaster; it will be a while before i attempt injera again. so, when i saw this months challenge and the book it came from, i panicked. the same two people, who had written the recipe for my injera mishap, had written this one too. after panicking for a few minutes, i got to work and made a batch of dough. when it was time to shape it, i broke into a sweat. a strange sense of deja vu took over. things did not go well; the dough was too elastic and sticky and shaping it was impossible. i made a second batch of dough using cheap store brand all purpose flour, not the good stuff and cut back on the kneading. this batch worked like a charm.

as i mentioned, i also made a loaf of bread for the bread baking day, cinnamon swirl raisin bread and i had left over cinnamon filling. it's notreally a filling but the topping for mexican conchas which i like to use as a filling in sweet breads. with this in hand, i did without the trip to the store for tahini and just used the cinnamon filling. it worked out nicely and i didn't have to leave the house again.

my thanks to natashya of living in the kitchen with puppies, this was worth the effort and it has boosted my bread baking ego!