Split Top Honey Bread

My girls love honey topped bread that you can get at the grocery. I do not love how fast they go through it or the long list of heaven knows what they include in the ingredients. So, I use this instead. They love it and I do too. It makes delicious toast and such good peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. You know, the staff of life.

To get started you are going to have to make some yeast bread. Or buy some of those frozen loaves of bread. I haven't checked on those, but I suspect that they have a few undesirable ingredients as well. Anyway, why would you buy it when you can make it yourself? It's easy!

This is the bread recipe that I use. I always make the 2 loaf recipe and if I'm not making 2 loaves of the honey bread, I make the spare loaf into cinnamon swirl bread, dinner rolls, bread sticks, cinnamon rolls...you get the idea. If you're already making one loaf you may as well make them both, it's no more work!

Mix the water, yeast, sugar and salt in a bowl and let sit 5 minutes.

Add in 3 cups of flour and mix until it's mostly combined. Then you just start adding flour until it makes a nice, un-sticky ball.

Take it out and knead it until in comes together in a smooth ball. You may have to add flour to the counter top here so that it doesn't stick. That's ok, you shouldn't worry about adding too much. It will only absorb so much flour into the dough, the rest will dust off.

Put the dough back into the bowl, which you will have greased, cover and let rise until double or about 1 hour.

Punch down the dough and shape into a loaf. Put the dough into a sprayed bread pan and cover with a towel. Let rise until double, approximately 1 hour.

Cut a 1/2 inch deep slice into the entire top of the loaf. Do not be scared, it's fine I promise. Put the loaf into a 350 degree oven and bake until the bread is set and just starting to turn brown in a couple of spots, about 25-30 minutes.

Next, you take a really over-exposed photo that is supposed to represent a loaf of bread that is approximately halfway done.

You adjust you camera settings and take a picture of the honey. You just generously slather on some honey. Maybe 1/4 of a cups worth.

Pop the loaf back into the oven and finish cooking until it's a deep, golden color. About 25 minutes more.

Mmmmmm, delicious.

Now let it cool a couple of minutes and take it out of the pan. There are 2 reasons for this:

1) you don't want the bottom of the bread to steam in the pan and lose it's crispy bottom.

and

2) The honey will harden and you will never get the loaf out of the pan if you wait very long. You'll be chipping it out for days. No fun.

Now, I know that this wasn't a very comprehensive how-to on bread making, but I will do one of those soon. This was more of a look at what you can do if you learn a very valuable basic skill kind of post.

 Once you know how to make a yeast dough, the possibilities are endless.