Monday, January 3, 2011

Sweet New Year

2010 was quite a year for me. I had some unbelievably wonderful highs and some not so great lows. Luckily, the lows aren't worth focusing on and the highs were so amazing that I am still smiling from them. In 2010 I finished my masters degree from a college I love, bought a house in a dream area, GOT MARRIED to the perfect man for me, and took a job that is better every day than the day before. As optimistic as I want to be, it is very hard to think that 2011 is going to be another great year, because it is hard to imagine any year ever being better than 2010. But I'm willing to try!

In an effort to make a sweet new year, and because New Years was on Shabbat, Josh and I thought it was the perfect time to finally break out our brand new bread maker and make some delicious, home made Challah.


Although our cousin has the most amazing Challah recipe on the planet, we decided to use a combo of 2 recipes we found in our recipe books. For our first try at making Challah I'm glad we had a book to follow, but next time we are 100% using Margaret's recipe. 


Using the bread maker recipe for challah made using the bread maker easier for our first try.
Supplementing it with the  300 Best Bread Machine Recipes cookbook was great too!

Using the bread machine was very easy in general.
All we had to was take all of these ingredients...

Throw them in the machine, choose the 'sweet bread' setting...

And sit back to let the magic happen.

It was pretty cool to watch the dough be made.
Really, the bread maker did it's own thing and at the end of 90 minutes we had perfect challah dough.

We took the mostly risen dough out and let it continue rising...

Before I cut it into 3 pieces in order to braid the challah. 

After letting the dough rise for a another hour,
Josh put the egg wash on and we let the whole thing cook for another hour.

Just in time for Shabbat, we had our very first, super yummy, homemade challah. 

Homemade challah. Truly a sweet way to start a sweet new year! Here's to a happy and healthy 2011 to you and yours.

8 comments:

  1. Chullah is one of my favorite breads and I'm not even jewish! I do live in a jewish community so of course the good chullah is plentiful. Yours turned out beautiful! I bet it would make great french toast. Happy new year!

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  2. It looks wonderful. I also have a bread machine. They are evil! They make you want to make bread and eat it and get fat! Have fun with the cookbook!

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  3. @annie, the french toast was a million times better than the challah itself! Happy New Year to you.

    @Veronica, you are so right. I am not addicted to making bread. So easy, so yummy, and the smell...delish!

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  4. What a pretty loaf of bread...looks great :)

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  5. What a beautiful loaf--and a great way to ring in the new year! We miss you! xo

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  6. @margaret, we miss you too! And as always, when it comes to most of the food stuff, you are our inspiration. Hope to see you very soon!

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  7. That looks great. Am I missing seeing the recipe? I'd love to try this in my breadmaker.

    Thanks!
    Tonia

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