Family Bread Class
[This is one in a series of blog posts written by Charlotte the Intern. Tune in daily to find out about what she’s been up to, what she has been learning about, and all of the crazy things she does as part of the Manna from Devon team.]
Well, we certainly don’t waste any time around here. Just two days after the end of the food festival and I’ve already completed my next project: running the family bread class! Having just learned how to make bread a couple of months ago, I was a bit intimidated by the prospect of teaching a class on my own, but I was also excited by the idea of teaching families about how fun and easy it can be to bake bread together.
Because it’s so close to Halloween, I had decided that I wanted to use that theme to plan a bread course that would really engage the kids and make them excited about making bread. On the docket was: blood red bread plaits, “earwax” korvapuusti, witch’s fingers, spider web pizza, and spooky fougasse. These were all essentially adaptations of breads that I have learned to make with David over the course of these two months. By planning the lesson as such, I hoped to show that there is an enormous amount of creative freedom possible when it comes to baking bread, and that neither kids nor parents need to feel like they are bound to a recipe or specific set of instructions. Even more, I hoped to show that making bread is something easy and fun that parents and kids can do together, and is a simple way to ensure that families know exactly what is going into their own food.
We grated beetroot into basic white dough to make this crazy bright colored reddish pink bread, and then we plaited the loaves so that they’d look extra cool.
Witch’s finger breadsticks with olive fingernails, currant warts, and poppyseed dirt. Yum!
Witch’s fingers out of the oven!
Spooky Scream mask fougasse
Teaching the class and getting to work with such a great group of kids was such a good time. Reflecting on how it went afterwards, I think that I achieved my goal of showing both parents and kids that baking bread together is easy and fun. And, with all of the ways that you can play with each type of dough, it’s easy to create some fun and crazy Halloween goodies that don’t pack a ton of sugar and fat like your average trick-or-treating basket!
Oh, and big thanks to Poppy for writing my blog post last night! It’s always nice to get another perspective on the blog, especially a canine one!