Bulbous Bread

My oldest daughter has a sesame allergy, but it's an odd one.  She doesn't react to an intact seed, only to the oil of the seed (apparently it has to do with the fact that sesame seeds do not digest and remain whole throughout our systems, so the oi doesn't release.  Apparently the oil is extracted through a cold press process when the make the oil that leaves the proteins intact and therefore is an incredibly concentrated form of her allergen).  This had led us as a family with 3 very young kids to play what I like to call the almost safe Russian roulette method with our bread.  Before her allergy diagnosis, we were using 2 commercially produced breads that "may contain" sesame.  That is because they are packaged on the same lines as products like hamburger buns with sesame garnish. 

Well, I've always meant to try making bread, but I grabbed a recipe this past weekend and went at it.  I still have yet to figure out if the yeast proofed enough before I used it in the recipe, but the results were encouraging, both loaves turned out nicely (one had a nice bulge because I'm apparently unfamiliar with what "shape into a loaf" means).  The result were two gorgeous moist golden brown loaves of bread, though one had a beautiful bulge in it.  A tad dense, but that's probably because either it didn't rise enough or the yeast hadn't quite finished proofing.

It's something I definitely will try again, the bread was somewhat sweet and toasted well, went very well with breakfast jam!  I also learned that i'd love to get one of those stand mixers with the dough hook, because kneeding dough is hard on the arms!

I'm going to try to post again later this week with stories of all my previous cakes.  Hope whoever tried the vanilla cake found it super tasty! More later from my allergic (and messy) kitchen!