Confessions: I Do Make Mistakes

I don’t have a new recipe today, but I thought everyone would get a kick out of seeing that I do make radical errors in the kitchen from time to time.  Last week is the perfect example.

I got it in my head to make a batch of Challah, only I didn’t have near enough honey as called for in the recipe.  No worries, because in my book, next to the Challah recipe, I have my notation that 1 cup of honey is equal to 1 1/2 cups of sugar plus 1/4 cup water.  Easy enough to trade out- right?  So I did that, added my 1 1/2 cups of sugar and my 1/4 cup of water and proceeded with the recipe.  As I was kneading my dough though, I thought that my dough felt awfully sticky.  Not sticky as in wet dough stick, but sticky like someone left a lollipop sitting on the counter and I kept rubbing my hands in it.  All the sudden, the light went on and I went back to my book.

My recipe called for 1/2 a cup of honey, not a full cup. I used double the amount of sugar called for.  I looked at the mound of dough I was kneading- this was enough dough to make three standard loaves of bread, I simply couldn’t justify throwing it out.  I continued kneading while I thought my options over- my first thought was to turn my loaves into cinnamon rolls and cinnamon bread, and I was okay with that.  Except for the part where I doubled the sugar in an already sweet dough.  No one would be able to eat those… my only option was to double the rest of the recipe.

So I set my dough ball aside and went back to the very beginning of the recipe.  I followed the directions, again, except I left out the sugar and extra water.  After I’d kneaded that dough for a few minutes, I layered the two dough balls and began kneading them together.  This was probably the biggest dough ball I’d ever worked with.  In a short while, the stickiness was gone, and I was happy with the texture, so I divided my dough and made six loaves of bread. My oven holds three at one time, so I had to bake in shifts, but in the end, I was very happy that I salvaged a terrible mistake.   The very next day I went and bought a container of honey, simply so that it wouldn’t happen again. And with that, I’m going to bake up another batch of Farmhouse White.