Amish White Bread

Jon picked up some honey on one of his farmers' market expeditions a couple of weeks ago, and had asked me to bake up some bread to eat with it.

First of all, it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to find a recipe that does not require a bread machine.   People.  I have an OVEN.  Aside from a fireplace or something, wouldn't that be the original bread machine?  Anyway.  I digress.

The dough, ready to rise.

I found a recipe on my go-to cooking website for Amish White Bread that seemed easy enough, and I had all the ingredients on hand.  For the record, I have no idea what was particularly Amish about this recipe.  Seems to me that if you're going to throw a qualifier on like that, you need to have some kind of an explanation for it.

This bread was really easy to throw together.  It took awhile to make, just because you had to wait for the yeast to proof, and then for the dough to rise.  But the actual labor time wasn't long at all.

Yum.

The recipe yielded two loaves of golden delicious carb-a-licious goodness.  The bread has a bit of a sweetness to it, almost like a Hawaiian bread.

When she tried it warm out of the oven with a little butter, Ella declared it to be "big yummy!', and I agree with her.  I'd definitely make this recipe again.  It was easy and delicious.

Chocolate Muffins.

More muffins!  Even though Jon had requested me to make lemon poppyseed muffins next, I went for the chocolate muffins.  I already had the recipe and all the ingredients, and frankly, I'm not entirely sure where to get poppyseeds.  Will research that later.

Anyway, I think that technically, these should be called chocolate-chocolate chip muffins, since that's what they really are.   They were tasty, but Jon and I found them to be a little bit drier than I would have liked -- I guess that's due to the cocoa powder.   I'm not sure how to combat that, though, and make them a bit more moist.

I bought a disher at Sur La Table's recent sale, and that made distributing the batter a good deal easier than previously, and the muffins actually came out roughly all the same size -- success!

Recipe forthcoming!