Look, We Made Bread Too!

I bet you thought all I could talk about was cake, huh? For anyone without a sweet tooth, I'm going to discuss the fluffy, delicious bread that always gave me such a hard time.

(Image credit: me!)

The above image is some loaves of egg twist bread that I (well, all of us) made for the open house that year. They were supposed to be about 12 inches long, but I have no idea if I managed to do that. They each consisted of either three or four strands of bread dough that we would 'braid' together to form an appealing design. The trick was to braid it halfway, then flip it over to braid the remaining half. I've never been good at braiding, and as you can probably see in the image, I kind of messed up the braiding on some of them. Whoops!

I feel I should mention that the way to achieve that shiny texture is to egg wash (brush the dough with a mixture made from beaten eggs) the bread twice during the preparation, once halfway through its proof time (which is the sequence when the dough is left to rise in a hot, humid space) and then again immediately after it's done proofing. This is why it's called egg twist bread.

(Really wish I could've taken a better picture...)

This type of bread is called Chala, which I unfortunately can't remember a whole lot about other than that it was delicious. I think we made this for the open house too, and I remember being really proud of mine. Forming the dough into this design was nowhere near the hardest thing we were asked to do that year, but it was far from the easiest either. We had to make sure that all the strands were the appropriate length and thickness, as well as being careful not to rip them as we worked.

I wish I could remember what I did with mine. I mean, if it wasn't stale by the end of the day I probably would have eaten it. It's a bit of a regretful thought, as it almost seems too pretty to eat, but I suppose that's better than just throwing it away.

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you learned something!