Adventures with Bread

Joel and I made cheese broccoli soup a while back and froze some of it. I decided that we would have that for dinner the other night and also thought it would be really cool to make a bread bowl with it. Since, I am home I decided to try to attempt to make bread bowls. I found a recipe online that looked pretty straightforward. Therefore, I set out to do it.

I figured out how much yeast to use (we didn't have packets, instead I had a package from Aren and Leah from Honduras). I also cut the recipe in fourths, since I wanted to make just two bread bowls and the original was for 8--way too much for us. The sweet thing is that the recipe I found allowed me to type in how many servings it wanted and it did all the conversions for me.

Well, the first attempt failed. Here are the bread discs I made: (They tasted alright, just were flat and a little too dense.)
I needed to go to the post office, so I decided that I would also stop by the store and get more yeast. Our package from Aren and Leah is close to gone, so it was on our list anyway. I also wondered if I did put enough yeast in the first batch, so I thought with a pre-measured packet it may work out. (Plus, pizza is on the menu this week--we make our own crust.) Well, it was 4:30 and I wasn't sure Joel was going to be home soon, so I decided to attempt again. This time I made enough dough for 4 servings and I could use one yeast package and not question that aspect. Well, after waiting 1 hour and 10 minutes this batch also did not rise. However, I had more dough, so I was able to bake them like balls. We were able to make bread bowls with this batch, but you really didn't want to eat the inside--doughy and dense. But as you can see it at least looked cool and the outside of the bowls were good, so we dipped that into the soup.

(It actually was probably healthier for us that it failed--then we didn't eat all the carbs since we threw the majority of the bowl away after having our soup.)