Our daughter's first bread
I should preface this by saying that our daughter has been very interested in bread lately, to the point that in her bath, she pours water into various containers and tells us she's "feeding her sourdough starter". (I guess Mom has been a little sourdough obsessed lately?) Anyway, on Saturday, I was making the polenta bread from ABAA and my daughter was getting into the flour and making a mess, so I got the brilliant idea of letting her "make her own bread" by putting some flour and water in bowl and letting her go at it with a whisk. I intended to leave it at that, but when she had finished playing, I thought "hmm...what if I add some yeast and a little salt?". Well, I added some lukewarm water, more flour, yeast and a little salt, and since I had no idea how much "kneading" she'd been doing, I turned it 3 times over the course of an hour (as I was making dinner). I put it in the oven, and presto! - we ended up with this:
It doesn't have a great crust, but it did have irregular holes and tasted yummy as French toast. She is very excited to do it again soon...
She could not be more adorable! Look at that face! I almost missed the bread, she's such a darling.
You are doing a very great thing for her. She will have memories of this to treasure forever.
Sharing any activity with children is terribly rewarding but we don't have a clue how much of an impact you may have until they have grown up. I too "helped" my mother bake bread as a child. She encouraged me even to the point of buying a tiny bread pan to make MY bread. (same as mom's but I didn't know that ;)
Those times as a child are what made me seek out this site. My rekindling of the desire to bake something more wholesome than can be purchaced is my bond and among my strongest feelings of loss and love for my dear departed mother.
She isn't here with me physically but she's forever in my heart and in my mind ever enouraging me to "put a little more whole wheat flour in there....it's good for you!"
When I started baking, I often thought, I would like to do this with my future children, or at least have them grow up with homemade bread.
It's so exciting to see your daughter take an interest in baking.
It's great to see them start young; when my son was 7, he read all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books and decided, because of one of them, that he just had to try grinding his own wheat flour. All we have is a hand crank mill, but he ran the wheat berries through it about 6 times (refusing all offers of help...), then decided he had to know what their bread tasted like.
He'd produced a couple of cups of flour so I gave him the appropriate amounts of yeast, salt, and water (no sourdough in the house back then) and left him to it. I got distracted by work, and forgot to check on him for quite a while. When I did, he'd been kneading that dough for I don't know how long, but it produced the lightest sandwich loaf I've ever seen!
Now he wants to know how to make sourdough, so we'll be setting that up to ferment this evening...
Enjoy the messes; that's when you know it's getting good!
edh