BAKE 9 – MAY 5, 2020 

Yeast Utilized: 2 1/4 teaspoons

I decided to give the Hawaiian Sweet Rolls another go. So, I can now say, with great confidence, eff that recipe.

To be fair, I was antagonistic to it from the start this time. I only chose to try it again because I still had a small amount of pineapple juice, but that juice also had some pineapple chunks in it. I used rice flour because that’s all I had, and almond milk for the same reason. So… this bread and I have both wronged one another. This is a story of mutual betrayal.

Kneading it felt weird. Perhaps that was the rice flour, but it felt more like grainy cookie dough than bread dough. Right off the bat, we’re not lookin’ good.

That ain’t right.

But I left it to rise for an hour anyway, with fingers crossed.

*insert Tyra Banks’ “I was rooting for you!” gif*

No rise after an hour, so I left it for another hour. Then, I said, “Whatever,” and put it in the fridge overnight because eggs and I just…I needed time to decide what to do with this. There was, perhaps, the distant hope it might rise, if given more time. T’was but a fool’s hope…

In the morning, I removed the unchanged Hawaiian Bread Boulder from my fridge. I figured I could at least correct the other mistake I made last time, and I put the “rolls” in the proper-size dish. But what even are these??

I baked them anyway, and…

I just…

Bread Forensics! Everything. I did everything wrong. They’re crumbly, and dry, and sweet. They don’t taste terrible, but they’re definitely not, you know, bread.

Adapt, overcome, yadda-yadda. I figured these could be decent candidates for another bread pudding, and I wasn’t really right there either. It is the densest bread pudding the world has ever known.

Perhaps the medieval peasants would rejoice, but I doubt it.

Tastes all right, though, so I shall have bread-pudding breakfast for weeks. Huzzah!

Addendum – May 8, 2020

Okay. So, it was terrible bread pudding. It was glue-y in a way that made me think of that Shel Silverstein poem about the kid whose mouth got stuck together with peanut butter. It just wasn’t a great “mouth feel.”

Bread Forensics! So, the important lesson here is that the “chunk” quality of the bread is important for bread pudding. The original rolls were so dry, cutting them turned them to crumbs, which means—when combined with the egg and milk mixture of bread pudding—it just became a dense, unpleasant wannabe cake sponge.

However, I hate wasting food. A friend suggested that I feed it to the birds, but it was too dense and unpleasant even for that. I kept imagining a bird taking a bite and then falling from the sky due to the weight.

So, adapt, overcome. I put what remained of the failed-Sweet-Hawaiian-Rolls-turned-terrible-bread-pudding in the oven at a low temperature for about six hours to dehydrate it.

“Feed the birds…bread chunks today.”

And I scattered it across my lawn. Maybe this will help me in my quest to befriend the crows in my neighborhood…

Addendum – May 10, 2020

The birds devoured it.

To the next bake—–>