Scrumptious Soft Whole Wheat Bread

Really, scrumptious is the only word I can possibly come up with for this bread. I made the Soft Whole Wheat Sandwich Bread from the HBin5 Book and it was incredibly soft, nicely sweet, and just plain yummy. I made the bread on a Saturday and ended up having to make two loaves because the first was gone within no time, and we just had to have some with dinner.

My husband did point out that he was unsure he would use this bread for sandwiches as it is so soft (yes, seriously, soft wheat bread) and he didn't know if the bread would hold up to what he would want on a sandwich. I tended to agree with him, some. Although a PB&J would probably go well with the bread since there is not much weight to it, but there would probably be some crumbs in your peanut butter as you swipe your knife across the bread.


You can see the beautifully browned crust and honey colored crumb. This is truly a favorite bread that will be made repeatedly (in between the other breads I'm doing). The lovely thing is that this book has the recipe to make this dough into hot dog and hamburger buns. I did not make those this time, but as summer gets here and we start using the grill I plan to make those buns and post them here, along with whatever screw-up I happen to make along the way!

Another use for the Chocolate Espresso Bread

The next step in this cooking adventure, was to take the Chocolate Espresso Bread Dough that I made (that turned out too bitter to eat) and convert it into Chocolate Tangerine Bars. It was my hope to fix the lack of sweetness by adding more milk chocolate chips (the recipe called for more bitter sweet) and hoping that the tangerine helped tone down the bitterness. Of course, as is my fashion to do these things, I discovered that the recipe called for dried cranberries, which I did not have. So I embarked, cranberry-less on with the bars.

I took the rather wet dough (this dough is wetter and stickier than most of the bread recipes in the book) and worked in the chocolate chips and tangerine zest. Again, it looked and smelled pretty good, and my hopes were high again. So I cooked the bars and set them out to cool. After cutting them into the bar shapes my family hesitantly took a bar each and ate.


The result of the bar was mixed. It was definitely better with the sweeter milk chocolate chips and tangerine zest, but there was still an underlying bitterness to the bar that couldn't be masked. This bar has great potential, since the fact that it is not a sweet bread makes this bar have a nice amount of sweetness without feeling like you are eating a dessert. With the correct type of chocolate in the dough originally, this could very well become a nice Saturday afternoon treat that I would feel comfortable letting my family have, in lieu of some sweet treat that will hype up the kids for a while. Despite all this, my young son ate a couple of bars, despite everyone else having one, and was even caught trying to sneak one off the counter a couple of hours later. So it was definitely not a total loss as quite a bit was eaten, but I should divulge that my son is a huge bread addict (like his parents) and is not very picky when it comes to his bread.