who will help me bake my bread?

Okay...this may not seem very "blog worthy" to any of you, but don't judge. For some reason I got really into a certain bread making situation. Maybe because I'm a fatty and love any kind of bread on this planet, or maybe I have no life outside of school and get a little over zealous about things I can devote some time to. Tyson and I went to Arkansas over Labor Day weekend (if you are keeping up with my blog and studying your notes, you should already know that). While we were visiting Eliz, she gave us a ziploc bag that I believe came straight from Jesus...

 In this bag was the "starter" for making Amish Friendship Bread. Tyson's Grandmother makes it a lot and he loves it, so I decided to see what all the fuss was about. With the ziploc bag, came some pretty intense instructions. As in, you had to tend to this bag for 10 days until the actual baking starts. Well, I took this care-taking role pretty seriously. As in, when I went to Mississippi for the weekend, I put the bag in the front seat and we made the 3 hour trip together. T poked fun of me the entire weekend because I kept going back to the bread and "mushing" it. I mean, I'm sorry...thats what the instructions said. I like to follow the rules. I marked off each day as I followed the instructions and Tuesday, September 14th was the day the actual baking would be begin. I put out all of my ingredients and utensils before I left for school on Tuesday morning and I commenced to baking as soon as I got home. The process wasn't hard at all, aaannnndd because I'm that girl, I helped myself to a good bit of the batter before I put it in the loaf pans. I realize that on most cooking blogs, people have these nice, organized, step-by-step pictures of the process, but I like to keep it real. Here's what my kitchen looked like while I was measuring, dumping, pouring, and mixing...



 After making myself sick with all the batter (it wasn't even that good, I don't know what my problem is), I finally made myself empty the bowl...

 Please notice the spatula in the above picture. It may look like a normal, regular, every day spatula, but indeed it is NOT! This precious kitchen tool of mine is called a mix and scrape and it's amazing. You can literally get every bit of batter out of the bowl. This is good when you have just one more cupcake to fill OR if you just want one more taste of that liquid goodness before it becomes bread, or cake, or whatever it is you happen to be concocting.

After an hour of baking and much anticipation, I finally pulled these puppies out of the oven...

yumm-o! It's like a mix between cake, cinnamon toast, and those school yeast rolls. Halleluiah and Thank You Jesus.

Remember, I baked these on Tuesday. Here's what's left of the first loaf today (Friday, September 17th)...

No...I did not have a party.