Dumbo the Accidental Baker - #3: The Rock, the Mushy, and the Dense

Following my first two near-successes, I became very - even overly - enthusiastic about bread-making, and in the few days that followed, I made several more attempts (sometimes, twice a day). Listed below, in order of "occurrence", are attempt #3 ("The Rock"), attempt #4 ("The Mushy"), and attempt #5 ("The Dense").

***

A few bananas hanging on the kitchen wall were getting over-ripe, so I decided to puree them and throw them into the dough. My first - and I'm sure not the last - attempt at banana bread (most of the times, "banana breads" are actually a kind of quick bread; here, what I was attempting was an ordinary sort of bread, since I did not know - and do not intend to learn yet - how to make quick breads).

I had wanted to make a half-size bread using only 1 and a half cups of flour, but I forgot that banana puree contains moisture - and lots of it - on top of the half cup of water I put in, so I found myself kept adding flour to the mixture, and it ended up a full-size one, with about 3 cups of flour in it. =.=


I tried to shape them into "rolls", like cinnamon rolls, but it ended up looking more like comic depiction of you-know-what. But I prefer to think of it as "clouds". Banana clouds. Not bad, I thought.


Well, so much for calling it banana "clouds". They ended up having none of the fluffiness of clouds, but plenty of hardness as when you have not gone a few days. :-p At least the color looks healthy, if you know what I mean. And I'm sure it will float. :-D


But, to be fair to myself, it was quite good, when dunked in hot chocolate or spread with peanut butter. O, it had only a very faint smell of banana, and did not taste like banana at all. It was kind of bland. Hence the need for dunking in hot chocolate or spreading with peanut butter. =.=


***

Then I tried to use butter instead of cooking oil in the recipe. And I used two tablespoons of butter (mistake, which I was to realize later) for the 1-and-a-half-cup-flour dough, which was twice the amount of oil required by the recipe. I was hoping that butter would be the key to the thus-far elusive fluffiness...


I rolled in some honeyed sunflower seed kernels, and dusted the top with oat powder...


Baked the bunch...


And got some impressive-looking buns!




And it tasted soft... and fragrant... it was a success!


... or so I thought. I realized in my second bite that the buns were too mushy. The softness is not fluffiness, but rather cake-like in texture, and kind of oily. The description that came to mind was "mushy". =.=

And it only tasted good when hot. After it cooled... well, "not nice" is an understatement. :-p

***

Then Thomas, our master-baker, advised me that I should sift my flour, and put in a couple of eggs, as emulsifier.

Eggs. Hmm.

I sifted my flour, and I ignored the egg part. :-D Sorry, Thomas... Because most of the bread recipes I found do not use eggs, therefore I wasn't really convinced. But I listened to your advice about sifting the flour. :-)

I tried to make a couple of loaves of wholemeal bread with nuts and seeds (particularly, walnuts and almonds and sunflower seeds and poppy seeds).




They looked OK... but a bit flatter than I had hoped.

I brought them to our Saturday evening worship service to be shared with the brothers and sisters after the service, and they said they liked the taste. But the honest opinion? "Too err... how do you say?... Dense. The texture is too dense." And I totally agreed.

But they bravely stomached them all. You've gotta love them for that. :-)

Well, that's what brothers and sisters are for, right? ;-p