On Sunday I baked seven loaves of bread, most of which we plan to sell at a church bake sale next week.

A while ago I cut some letters out of cardstock to spell the word 'hope', and I've used them as a stencil many times. (My wife and I put on an annual fundraiser called Georgia's Journey of Hope [1]. I've been using the stencil on bread that I give as thank-yous to the volunteers for the fundraiser.)

So I decided to reuse the stencil for the church bake sale. I really like the way it turned out. (Note it's like a reverse stencil, i.e. it's just a bunch of letters, so on the bread the word is the part that doesn't have flour. This is easier to cut out, and I like the look better.) Due to lack of proofing space, one loaf ended up round and didn't have room for the stencil, but no problem, I just scored a cross.

Of course, one loaf we cut into because we couldn't resist, leaving six to be frozen for next week's bake sale.

The recipe is Susan's Norwich Sourdough [2], altered slightly and doubled (thank you IKEA for the giant stainless bowl I got this summer -- I could probably triple Susan's recipe if I wanted to, although that'd be 3kg of flour to mix and my arms would probably give out). The alteration was to use about 3.5% kamut flour and 3.5% rye flour instead of 12% rye, making up the missing 5% with AP flour.

Cheers & happy baking,
Mike

Submitted to yeastspotting [3] (Dec 6 2010).