Since I was little, I had always dreamed of baking; breads especially. My mother enjoys baking and used to bake quite often. Anyway she stopped baking for years because she was afraid that we might go into the kitchen and burn our hands by touching the hot oven.
And I would always read my mother’s recipe books, dreaming of baking them and imagining how good they will taste and what an excellent baker I’ll be.
Now that we are old and sensible enough to not rush in the kitchen and touch the oven to see what’s baking in the oven, my mother resumed baking and we had a lot of fun. I usually help my mother to prepare the ingredients and after that I would watched how my mother knead the dough.
One fine day, my mother allowed me and my sister to bake bread! How excited I was; specially when my mother let us do everything by ourselves. After all since now that my mother bakes our own breads almost everyday, I did not think that it is too hard to bake my own bread.
Preparing the ingredients was easy and so was the mixing. But bread making needs kneading; and when I reached that stage, I was afraid that I might not be able to knead the dough the way it should be done and the dough will not rise. And when my mother came to check the dough after ten minutes of kneading, she told me that the dough was not soft enough because I didn’t knead it well; and so I had to knead again.
Next I put the dough in a bowl, covered it with a damp cloth and let it rose. When the dough had risen to twice of it’s original size, I knocked it down and shaped them into nine small buns, two rolls and a heart before letting them to rise again. When I lifted the cloth, I was thrilled to see that the dough had risen and was looking good.
Now the time had come for the buns to go into the oven. When the buns were ready, I opened the oven door and the hot air rushed out as the delicious smell of bread swifts together.
I carefully took the buns out of the oven and carried them onto the dinning table. While the buns were cooling down on the wire rack, I rushed to grab the camera and took some photos of my first bread.
That night, we had the buns that my sister and I baked for dinner. They were surprisingly tasty, although mine was a little hard to chew as I didn’t knead the dough properly.
At last I had achieved my dream of baking a bread; and I’m now dreaming to bake even fancier breads and pastries like the ones my mother bakes. Home made bread are far more tastier from the ones from the bakery and bread making is so much fun.
