Tales of Baking

Repost from old myspace blog: but ha-larious none the less:
I wanted to be all Martha Stewart like and make cranberry bread (it's the holiday season, why not). First step: find recipe, but not an actual Martha Stewart one. I wasn't about do something crazy perfect as hers, because that's just loony. Not to mention I would probably have to harvest my own cranberries to make it truly Martha-Stewart-like and a Cape Cod trip isn't in the cards right now.

I digress. So I went to my faithful source for all things food: footnetwork.com. The cranberry-orange/apricot/apple combinations, the cranberry bread pudding…were all highly appealing. I may even try a few of those one day. But to my chagrin, most of the recipes were rated "medium," and considering I'm afraid to attempt a Martha, anything above an "easy" rating is not so much. So I tried allrecipes.com and found a recipe for cranberry nut bread, the closest thing I would find to plain cranberry I assumed (and rightly so too). So with the recipe found, I divided and conquered, or gathered ingredients and baked.

The end result: not bad, but tart as hell (it's cranberries though what did I expect?). And I made a small mistake: I used the wrong flour. Instead of all-purpose, I used self-rising flour, making the dough extra risey (is that a word? I'm using it anyway), and it overflowed the loaf pan a lot. Wrong flower? You might be asking. Yeah, we have two kinds of flour in our house. My Asian mommy uses the self-rise stuff for Chinese dumpling dough. It didn't even cross my mind to check what type of flour I was using, because really, who has two types of flour? Two kinds! Moral of the story: Sarah is afraid of Martha Stewart.

Bread update: Baking success! Have found recipe that works! Still quite scared of Martha Stewart.