French Bread - February Challenge.

It has been a really tough month to find enough time to fit in the February challenge especially knowing that it took many of the DBs a whole day to put together. I did not want to give it a miss so yesterday, I decided to give it a go. Of course it did not help with my husband deciding to make gallons on marmalade and wanted help with the chopping squeezing and pithing the oranges (and he tells everybody it is his marmalade). But he did allow me in the kitchen.

I started at 6.00 am and followed the recipe exactly. The first rising was great even though it took 4 hours. Not a problem. The second rising took another 4 hours and by then I started to lose it. Not a problem, I plodded on thinking that I would be able to put the batards in the oven by 7.00 pm as we were going out to celebrate my husband's birthday. Well at 6.30 the dough was still not risen enough so we decided to go out and bake the bread when we come back.

We returned home at 11.30 and the poor dough was still a very poor sight, not plump as it should be. But I decided to bake the loaves irrespective. Thirty minutes later, the batards came out looking very sorry for themselves.

I did not enjoy making the bread at all. Perhaps because it was a very long long process from beginning to end. I cannot image making the bread again. Thank goodness for the bread machine which gives me a very good loaf of bread in 4 hours.

The length of the recipe instructions(13 pages) did put me off but I followed the instructions and read it about 3 times throughout the month. I was so looking forward to making the bread considering the success of other DBs.

I'm not going to post the recipe here, but if you want to view it you can visit Breadchick's blog (who was also one of the hosts for this month's challenge).

Well at least I have tried despite not suceeding.