ChrisH's blog

Well, it's been a while since I've gotten on here, and I've had plenty of time to mess up my kitchen with my experiments and ideas. For the holidays, however, I made something everyone likes: Pumpkin Bread and Triple Chocolate Fudge Cookies.

I've done the cookies before, but this was my first time doing pumpkin bread, but it still turned out FANTASTIC. It was tastey in a spice way, warm, just a little bit crispy on the outside, and a little moist on the inside.

I have a pan which makes 8 mini bread loafs and a small sized loaf pan I used to make these. The iciing is a store-bought white icing.

For holiday desert, I also baked a double-dozen batch of triple chocolate and fudge chunk cookies, which were a pain while I figured out how to inorporate everything in amounts decent to keep them as cookies and not chocoltae lumps and leave them nice and thick with chocolate.

All in all, it was a very tastey Christmas!

Well, I have officially baked my first loaf of bread.

I used the recipe in Lesson two here on TFL, substituting a cup of whole wheat flour for the bread flour. It was a thick-crusted, brown bread with holes about the size found in store-bought sandwhich bread. I would post a picture, but, uh, we kinda ate it all before I could take one!

Now, I guess I could use some advice. The bread tasted great, loked and smelled amazing, and I feel like I did well on this loaf. I've been looking at different recipes on here, and I've found some things which fit what I'm looking to do next, but the recipes are all too big for me. I want to do a honey or honey-nut bread, but a small one, about the same size as the loaves in the lessons for beginners.

I'm also still quite new to using this site, and I'm nto sure if I should request for a recipe or some help here, or if I should take it somewhere else. So, I guess I'll statr here. Anyone have a good, small, honey and wheat loaf recipe to share? Or know someone who already has? In the meantime, I'm going to go experiment with a few things I can put into my mix.

Well, I'm new - if you can't tell. I just found this page and was absolutely impressed at how much it helped me start expanding my cooking abilities into baking - which has always been a favorite of mine. I'm a 20 year old college junior studying historical interpretation - which has nothing to do with cooking - but I've always enjoyed throwing random things in a pan or pot and seeing what happens when put to heat and stirred.

My big thing has always been cookies, though I wanted ot learn how to make brads and such for a long time. So, when i stumbled across this, I was immensley pleased. All i have to say is I more than welcome any advice on...well....everything to do with baking bread! I'm off now to use the lessons here to make my first loaf! Wish me luck!