Trying different bread

I usually bake two small loaves of bread a week for breakfast and weekend lunches. My normal recipe is the traditional white bread recipe from my breadmaker book. It uses 3 & 1/4 cups of flour with yeast, sugar, salt, water and a little margarine. Just put all ingredients in breadmaker, let it knead and rise once (around 2 hours). Divid dough in two and let them rise for another 1/2 hour (more if cold) in tins (they don't shape well otherwise). Bake in 200C oven for 1/2 hour and voila it's ready!

I tried some new recipes in the last few weeks. Firstly, the 'soft American-style white bread' (pg 204 from 'Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day'). In addition to the usual ingredients, it had 100g of unsalted butter. This bread requied no kneading and it was baked in 180C oven for 45 minutes. The resulting bread had softer crust. I also tried the Challah dough (pg 180 from the same book) with 4 eggs and 1/2 cup of honey(for 4 loaves) in addition to the usual ingredients.



With the leftover Challah dough, I made spinach and marinated fetta bread for lunch- details here. I didn't add pine nuts and used flake almond instead of black sesame (improvised based on what I had in the pantry). The braiding was easy, it came out of the oven looking nice and tasted delicious. Nice cold too. I'm keen to try again following the recipe properly and also try other fillings. Time to make another batch of dough!