The Art of Baking Bread that Rises :)

I am on a quest to make the perfect loaf of bread. At this point I’d settle for a loaf of bread that rises even half way. For the past couple of years, I’ve been unable to bake bread that rises. At least once a month, I try once again to make a loaf of bread that actually looks the way a loaf of bread should and not something halfway between Irish soda bread and a flattened pancake. It seems that somewhere along the way during the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to make the perfect loaf of bread.

I measure out the floor, heat the milk and butter in the pan to very warm as advised in mom’s yellow Pillsbury recipe book with the yellowed pages held in somewhat tenuously by the metal binder. I mix the milk and butter into the flour mixture and stir until the lumps disappear. I add enough flour to make a stiff dough, turning it out to knead the dough on a floured surface. As I knead the dough, I think maybe this time will be the charm. I’m going to knead it as long as I can until I get tired of kneading.

I never thought of myself as a very good cook, but I was always a pretty good baker. My mother taught us all how to bake at a young age. We learned how to bake pies, bread, cookies and other fun treats like no-bake chocolate peanutbutter cookies. I used to make Swedish tea rings that actually looked like the pictures in the recipe books, lemon meringue pies, and, of course, cinnamon bread with cinnamon swirls and some raisins if I was feeling generous.

I hear that my Grandmother on my mother’s side was a very good cook. She was a professional cook before she met and married my Grandfather, a minister from Switzerland; so I believe cooking might be in my genes.

In my mind, my inability to bake a loaf of bread that rises coincides with events that happened almost three years ago when I lost my beloved cats, Snowball and Bambi, in an apartment fire, and, after 17 years of living on my own, came home to help my mother take care of my father who was in the end stages of Alzheimer’s.

So I’ve decided that if I can learn to make the perfect loaf of bread again, or at least one that rises, I will somehow recapture what I’ve lost—that spirit of joie de vivre, or that sense that life is full of possibility and that I am somehow lucky and that things will eventually work out for me.

After the fire, I questioned my choices. Why I had continued to freelance and lead a somewhat financially precarious existence? It seemed that I prided myself on getting a project just in time to pay the rent and the utilities and I felt lucky that my landlord barely raised the rent in the 13 years I lived there. What I chose to ignore at the time was that in the last few years I kept myself in a state of perpetual anxiety about my finances.

Maybe this was somewhat familiar to me after all the moving around we did as children. It seemed that stability was a foreign notion to me. Yes I’d lived in the same apartment for 13 years, but I somehow managed to recreate the sense of uncertainty that lingered from a childhood of never knowing how long we were going to stay somewhere, or when we would have to say goodbye to our friends yet again. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t feel deprived. I remember thinking it was somewhat exciting to always be moving on and starting over yet again.

Back to choices. After I came home that early Spring day and found my apartment a smoke filled place that looked as though a bomb had hit it and with the fireman’s help, found Snowball curled up in the corner of my bedroom in a lifeless ball of fur (I couldn’t even bear to even look at Bambi), life seemed to change forever to before and after—before the fire and after the fire.

I wonder now—if I had led a more stable existence, maybe I would have been able to buy a condo and live somewhere that was perhaps safer, or where a fire was less likely to sweep through a building from the basement to the third floor in the space of fifteen minutes, as the fire captain told me later. It took firemen from three stations to control the fire. By the time I returned home after running errands, my life was irrevocably changed.

The time has gone off. My bread has risen and is ready to be shaped into loaves. Maybe this time will be the charm.