That being said, while the Obama family may have secured a victory on Tuesday, the First Lady's recipe for sweet potato bread was not so victorious. I will take the credit for part of this recipe's semi-epic failure, as I am still slightly domestically challenged. This blog is not just about posting delicious recipes for all to try. In pursuing such adventures in baking, I am bound to make some chuckle-worthy mistakes for all to learn from. Since this recipe did not get my seal of delicious approval, we'll focus on how to avoid baking blunders.
Baking Blunder #1: If something calls for this much ginger, you should probably use less ginger!
On the bright side, during the baking of this recipe, I learned a lot about ginger. Pictured is crystallized ginger (which is kind of like ginger flavored gummy bears without the delightful bear shape), fresh grated ginger, and ground ginger. I remember looking at this bowl full of ginger and thinking to myself: Hey, this seems like a lot of ginger. That was a good instinct, and instead of dumping it all into the mix, I probably should have added a little at a time to make sure the ginger was not overwhelming the delicious sweet potato puree I had just made. This leads me to baking blunder #2.
Baking Blunder #2: Taste as you go! Sometimes, following a recipe to a tee is not such a great idea. Firstly, we all have our own palettes, so while the author of a particular cookbook might prefer a sweeter muffin or saltier salted chocolate chip cookie, you may not. In this instance, the First Lady has some sort of strange ginger obsession that I am betting the rest of America does not share.
Baking Blunder #3: When a recipe says it will take a half-an-hour to an hour to prep, unless you are Martha Stewart, it probably won't. This particular recipe took me about two and a half hours to prep and bake, and I was rushing. By the time the bread made it out of the oven, it was almost one in the morning, and I was ready for bed. This leads me to blunder number four...
Baking Blunder #4: Do not take your bread out of the oven even a minute earlier than you are supposed to! This will lead to your bread tasting doughy and sad. There was nothing light and fluffy about this "great" American bread. In my haste, I made epic baking blunder number five. This one is embarrassing...
Baking Blunder #5: If a recipe says to let the baked good cool for an hour...let it cool for an hour. Feeling sleepy and unwilling to leave the bread sitting out on my counter all night long, my husband (yes, I will blame him), and I decided that it was a perfectly reasonable idea to wrap some aluminum foil over the bread while it was sitting on the wire rack.
When I awoke the next morning, I was still obliviously optimistic about my final product.
Look at how happy I am!
Then I took a bite. Not only was the ginger incredibly overwhelming, but leaving the bread in an aluminum foil camping tent all night made it dense, moist, and very non-delicious. I was hesitant to blog about this baking disaster, but when one goes on adventures in baking, one is bound to make a few wrong turns. Here's to hoping that you learned from, or at least got a good laugh at, this particular failure in baking.
On a final note, let's play the blame game! Here is where I place the blame.
Michelle Obama (great first lady/ possesses a strange ginger obsession): 65%
Me (too tired to bake/hopelessly optimistic): 30%
My Husband (came up with the aluminum tent idea): 5%
