Success with yeast!

My favorite website for recipes is http://smittenkitchen.com/. I discovered it a few months ago, and it's a blog written by a woman in New York City who somehow has time to juggle a husband, a baby, and making several gourmet recipes a week. She gets the recipes from other places -- cookbooks, magazines, newspapers -- but always adds her own twist and advice. And she takes gorgeous pictures of every step of the process. I've made a few recipes from the site, including the absolutely heavenly Best Cocoa Brownies, which will be my go-to brownie recipe for life. A few days ago, a recipe was posted for Braided Lemon Bread, a project that just looked so delectable I had to go ahead and make it this weekend, even though I know there's no way I can eat an entire loaf on my own (since Jarrod is not here to share it with me) and the neighbor with whom I usually share treats just had weight-loss surgery. I think I'll put a few slices in the freezer to take out and have with a cup of coffee here and there.



Anyway, I was a bit intimidated, since the bread looked gorgeous and complicated, and also I don't have much experience working with yeast. But I decided to give it my best shot. I had no trouble making the lemon curd (and for the first time ever, I didn't zest the skin on my knuckles along with the lemon peel!), the cream cheese filling, and the bread dough. Luckily I had an entire afternoon at my disposal, because it was quite time-consuming. Of course, I had to sample the cream cheese filling and lemon curd as I was assembling the bread (and Conan and I enjoyed licking the beaters and spatula!) and they were amazing, especially the lemon curd. (Why is it called curd? That's such a gross-sounding word. I'd rather call it lemon pudding.) The finished product came out beautifully (even if my braid did come a bit undone at the end) and I couldn't wait to sample it!



I was a bit disappointed, unfortunately. As I expected, the filling was delectable. But there was just too much bread! I know the recipe is supposed to showcase the yeasty, slightly-sweet bread, but I felt like it was weighing down the light, fluffy, sweet-tangy, lemony filling. I almost wanted to scrape all the filling off and just eat that (talk about nutritious!), but I spent so much time making the bread that I forced myself to eat every last bite (ok, except the pieces I fed to Conan). I even made more filling (almost twice as much) than the recipe called for. Maybe I would like the bread more if it were sweeter? I'm sure plenty of people thought there was a perfect ratio of bread to filling and that the bread was a perfect flavor. But I have realized over time that I'm much more of a filling person than a crust (or bread) person. Sometimes I would rather just do without crust altogether. I'm not sure I would be disappointed if I never ate another graham cracker crust. I'll happily take all the filling, though!



Overall, I'm glad I attempted this recipe. For one thing, it gave me confidence to work with yeast. I've only used yeast once before when I made a disastrous recipe from a book I bought this winter called "Kneadlessly Simple." My loaf of bread turned out to be brick-like with a scorced bottom. I was so disillusioned that I've been avoiding trying another yeast recipe for months now. But in the future when I'm craving something lemon-flavored, I think I'll stick with my trusty recipe for lemon bars: tons of mouthwatering lemon filling, only slightly interrupted by the mandatory crust.