Snow Day Baking

Friday school was cancelled due to the impending weather.

I'd had my eye on this recipe for a long time. I convinced Peanut to help me make it. What would be more perfect than a sandwich on homemade bread on a cold day?

I think the last time I attempted bread was when we had a bread machine. We got rid of that after Pumpkin was born. The smell of the bread during my pregnancy was enough to put me over the edge. Anyway, we braved the yeast, gluten, and whole wheat flour to forge ahead.

Here is the first little rest of the bread.

Peanut painted the oil on the pans.

I love watching the kids bake. I have to keep telling myself that the mess doesn't matter! Cooking is so good for math skills, organization skills, and patience. The only change we made to the recipe was to use lime juice instead of lemon. I did not have any lemon juice on hand.

Here is the bread - just about ready to pull away from the sides of the bowl.

Wa La! We had two loaves of whole wheat bread! The bread stuck a bit to the pan on the right. But, it did not stop any of us from eating our lunch a bit early. The boys enjoyed the bread. We had it toasted with butter and jelly this morning with our breakfast. Wow! It was wonderful. I think we will be making more. I am even contemplating another bread machine.

When Pumpkin finally woke up on Friday morning, he wanted to bake something too. He decided to make a cake. My dad worked for Procter & Gamble for many years. Cake in our family came out of a Duncan Hines box. Believe it or not, I did not have any cake mixes on hand. Pumpkin searched through the pantry and decided on the recipe on the back of the Hershey's Special Dark cocoa. If you don't want a cake, definitely use it for icing. It is the best chocolate icing.

Here he is sampling the icing. I know this picture was taken after he iced the cake.

There he is finishing up the icing. I did not go into the trick of using waxed paper strips under the cake to clean up the extra icing.

It was good! We all enjoyed dessert. There just might be something to a cake baked from scratch. I don't think my dad would mind as P&G sold Duncan Hines years ago!