Sometimes it’s good to go back to your roots. I started with more decorative breads some years ago and was asked to make a nice gift bread so I put together a cardamom braided bread. It uses my basic white sandwich bread recipe (you can use this one with 500g of white flour and no whole wheat), but the butter is doubled and the milk reduced a bit to handle the extra liquid. I added ¼ teaspoon of fresh ground cardamom seeds. The dough came out extremely soft and silky and I used an all-purpose and not bread flour. For the color and shine I made a wash with egg yolk and a little milk. It might be hard to tell from the picture but this bread is actually fifteen feet long and the basket is the size of a delivery truck. Well…it’s not actually that big. It measured in at just under 20 inches and would barely fit in the oven. No report on the taste but it smelled good in the oven!
PS – If you think I’m forgetting what day it is, you are sorely mistaken. There will be a full report tomorrow on the Halloween festivities, if I can manage to type with my chubby chocolate-smeared fingers.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
Since that fabulous looking bread is so gigantor, how about shipping half of it north! Yum! I’m going to try that! How much is 500 g please :-).
500g is about 3 1/4 cups. Usually a cup weighs about 150g. If you accidentally shift a decimal and up with 5000 g you WILL have a gigantor braid!
Hope it tastes as good as it looks!
This looks delicious! Did it turn out like challah? Or was it thicker?
It wasn’t as eggy and buttery as challah, but more like a soft white bread with spice. Or so I think, so I didn’t get to taste it! [curses]