Bake 52 Rewind Week 6 Challah

So I had planned to make the Bake 52 recipes in order.  But I failed to look at the week 2 recipe (Bran muffins) before I went grocery shopping for the week.  So when I pulled out my book to bake I was annoyed to realize that I didn't have all the ingredients I needed and I couldn't think of a good substitute for what I was missing. 

So I started looking through the recipes until I came to one that I had all the ingredients for - Challah.  You can find the complete recipe at Jen's blog. 

This is a pretty straight forward bread recipe.  The fancy stuff all comes from how you put the loaf together.  First step whisk the liquids (water, butter, eggs and an egg yolk) together. 

Second step mix the dry ingredients together. 

Then I dumped in the wet ingredients while the mixer ran.  The dough came together nicely and fell right off the dough hook after I'd run the mixer for a while to knead it. 

I used the mixer bowl to let the dough rise. 

After about 2 hours I dumped it out onto my pastry cloth to start putting the loaf together. 

I split the dough into two pieces.  One piece is supposed to be twice as big as the other.  I don't know if my pieces are the right sizes...

Then I divided each of those pieces into three equal (or about) size pieces. 

The next part was the hardest part for me.  I don't know if I lack some dough rolling gene or if I jus don't have the patience for it.  I never did get the pieces as long as they were supposed to be.  I couldn't get them to uniform thickness either, and you can see that my pieces weren't very even to begin with. 

When I had given up on rolling out dough I braided the dough.  I found that you wanted to "braid" it tightly to make it look like the pictures in the book.  I had a hard time getting the dough to stick together.  You can see how the ends on my top braid are separated.  I think that might be because I used too much flour in rolling out the dough. 

I also realized at this point that I was supposed to save the egg white from the egg yolk that I used in making the dough.  I almost skipped the egg white glaze, but decided that eggs were cheap enough to crack another one. 

I think I cooked it longer than I should have.  The bottom and the edges were really dark.  It wasn't a big deal when the bread was warm but the next day it was pretty tough and overcooked tasting.  My top braid also tipped to the side as it bake. 

I had just moved it to a cooling rack to cool down when Jonathan walked by, ripped the whole top braid off and then took half of it to eat.  He liked it warm (he likes any warm bread product!) but wasn't too impressed with it the second day. 

I didn't think the bread was anything special and the braiding was kind of a pain.  But if you want a bread that looks really impressive but doesn't take a lot of time or work (if you have the skills to roll dough into a snake) this is a great recipe for you.