It’s a rainy day here today, and one of the things I love on a rainy day is fresh baked bread hot out of the oven. Not that I bake very often, and usually I cheat with a frozen, ready to thaw loaf of bread. But it’s hard to get bread to rise here, we keep the house cool, and on rainy days it’s damp feeling…..just not conducive to rising bread.
Of course this is when I regret not getting the gas stove and keeping an electric. That pilot light in the gas oven would be just perfect for getting bread to rise. My neighbor uses a heating pad underneath her bread pans to get them to rise, but I don’t have a heating pad either.
This morning, as I was lamenting the difficulties of being able to get bread to rise, my dear husband came up with an idea, which I’m trying out today. Something you would think I could have come up with on my own, but alas, I didn’t. My only excuse is that I didn’t grow up with a fireplace like he did as a child in England. I’m not trained to think about using the “fire” as a prep area. He on the other hand thought this was extremely logical to do:
The jury is still out, if it doesn’t rise much more than that pretty soon, I’m going to bake the bread anyways and call it an attempt. At least I’ll still have the smell of fresh baked bread and I’ve got a warm living room out of the procedure!!!
