Let me start off with this caveat: I am no baker.
The sentence, “I feel like baking a loaf of bread today,” has never escaped my mouth.
Yeah, sure, I’ve whipped up several batches of apple crumble and chocolate cake over the years that have scored me some praise among friends (apple crumble recipe coming soon!), but that hardly qualifies me as a “baker.” Breads, cakes, pastries and the like – I certainly enjoy eating and critiquing other people’s attempts, but I’m rarely moved enough to actually make any attempts of my own.
That said, when a friend showed me this recipe from Rachel’s Blog, the instructions for an assortment of adorable mini loafs seemed so fool proof that I began to feel like a Dominique Ansel or something – except without that whole “I’ve won a James Beard Award” thing.
I decided to try out her lemon and thyme bread recipe because, A) I like lemons and thyme, B) I had lemons and thyme, and C) you’ll find thyme in almost every Nigerian recipe/household.
As you can see in my pictures, my bread didn’t turn out too bad. If I can do it, you can do it, too! I’d say there were a few minor mishaps in my replication, the most obvious being that mine turned out much browner. Again, I’m no Dominique Ansel, but I think it’s safe to assume that had I used the same sized pan that she described and made batches of mini breads and not one large loaf, mine would have turned out a bit less brown and a tad more moist. That or I could try altering the time and temperature (hers baked in 45 minutes. Mine took an hour), but that just sounds like math, which, ew.
All in all, it was a tasty bread. So go on. Try it out for yourself here – keeping my mistakes in mind of course. I’ll get it right with some practice.
