It’s raining. And it was just +13 ‘C on Sunday, popopopo, is this summer? Hm…The weather is just perfect for lazily reorganising your recipe archive and occasional over-baking =) Well, yes, and still searching for a job.

So here we are with a new recipe of a lovely loaf of bread. And it’s amazingly huge so don’t be ashamed to eat a lot, haha, you will still have enough to feed the others! The recipe is this one:

Dan Lepard’s Sour Cream Sandwich Bread from www.guardian.co.uk (Do you remember Dan Lepard’s Sour Cream Chocolate Cake I made for my Father’s b-day? It’s the same source).

It’s GIANT so I’m sure you can make it into two breads if you wish.

What I did change was to add some  rye bran and wheat germ to the flour, as I just couldn’t leave it like that, without making it less white, perhaps =) But actually the colour was quite vivid white, with specks of bran in it. Here:

And the crust was also remarkable, well, the whole loaf was certainly going to be remarkable already at the stage when it was overflowing the bowl =)

I omitted using baking paper, just placing it in a regular loaf pan, greased of course. But I then figured out why this paper was suggested – as there were these large ‘ears’ hanging over the rim of the pan, and it was quite a job to get the loaf out of the pan.

I also dusted the top with some rye bran, which eventually fell off but we didn’t mind. The thing that happened in the oven during the first several minutes of baking was that the dough was rising a way toooooo faaaaast and…

…In this photo you can see it got burnt because the dough started rising in the oven and bumped straight into the upper heating element! Poor bread, I had to release it from the grip and lower the rack! So not only was it growing over the rim of the pan, it was also aiming at getting tall =) I slashed the top before baking and scattered some rye bran. As the top was getting brown too fast (or so I thought), I baked it covered with aluminium foil and then I removed it and also turned the loaf out of the pan and left for some minutes in the already switched off oven to get this lovely crust.

The result – very soft, nicely crusty and large, haha, the last quality being very advantageous cause it’s so delicious, you want more and more slices!

Speaking about sour cream-based white bread, I’ve also tried this recipe of Sour Cream Yeast Rolls from realmomkitchen.com. My results were not great, though, the dough just wouldn’t rise and so my buns were more like heavy marble balls =)) I guess the active dry yeast I was using had just gone off as it showed no activity at all but I didn’t mind it at that time, thinking it will all come out nicely in the end. But I’m sure if you have fresh – even though dry it is – active yeast, everything will work fine. This bread is sweeter, cause it has honey in it. In the end, as the buns were tiny, they were soon eaten and forgotten =)  Ah, this is the destiny of all of you, breads!

Wow, now that I’m at the end of my post, the rain has ceased, incredible! And they are predicting a storm with heavy rains for tomorrow…

G.