Tuesday, June 6, 2006
We've rented a beach house in North Carolina next week, for a family reunion. Staying at the beach in the summer generally entails wearing a bathing suit, and, the older I get, the more it seems that a bathing suit is exactly what I should not be wearing. At least, I thought, I could try to lose a few pounds before I get there. What does this have to do with chocolate chocolate-chip bread, you ask? Just that this is another bread that I took into work, where it's likely to be devoured quickly enough that it won't be able to do much damage to my hips.
A quick bread is a pleasant diversion after baking only yeast breads for a few weeks. The pleasure that you lose in not seeing the bread rise and not smelling the yeasty baking aroma is made up for by the ease of turning it out, and, in this case, the smell of chocolate in the air.
The dough for this bread was soft, almost souffle-like. When the bread came out of the oven, it unmolded nicely but left a few bits of chocolate and chocolate chips stuck to the pan. Although I had told myself that I wasn't going to eat any of this bread, I thought I'd just eat a crumb to try it out. Then I scraped off every crumb, every morsel, from the pan and gobbled it greedily. I was glad no one was around to see me.
I took it into work on the same day that Ben brought in a plate of chocolate cupcakes, so we agreed that Ben's cupcakes would be eaten in the morning, and my bread would be the afternoon's offering. I wasn't going to eat any bread--because of the bathing suit situation--but then told myself that I couldn't do an honest blog description if I didn't taste it. My verdict: an excellent, very versatile bread. It could pass as a cake and make a very respectable dessert, served with fruit and whipped cream, or a tea bread, or a morning coffee cake, or a midnight snack. I brought one piece home for Jim, who's out of town this week, and put it in the freezer. Of course, if I were to eat it as a midnight snack tonight, he'd never know.
1 comment:
i just KNEW this 1 comment would be from jim!!! did you really think you could get away with it? what self-control. i know just how you feel about the bathing suit. and about the crumbs. and about just about everything else. are we the same person?
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