Communion Bread

Recently the woman at our church who has selflessly made the communion bread for our weekly communion service nearly 52 weeks a year for several years announced that she was tired and requested volunteers to share the burden. Bread being kind of my thing, I volunteered, and got the honor (?) of being the first in the rotation to\’c3\’82\’c2\~attempt to duplicate this most special bread recipe. It’s not every day you get to make a new-to-you recipe for practically everyone you know to try, is it? Yes, you might say I’m a little nervous.\par
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Well, naturally I thought\’c3\’82\’c2\~I’d better try a dry run to get some practice\’c3\’82\’c2\~to make sure that I could do it at all! Not wasting any time I tried it on Monday (the day after I learned that I was making it this Sunday!). I think it’s going to be OK.\’c3\’82\’c2\~My first loaf turned out rather unevenly (it’s a braided round loaf, and getting it even all the way around will be quite a trick), which made part of it more done than the other part, although I think I over did even the fatter part. I used my thermometer. The first time I checked it, it was 160 degrees inside the fatter part, so I added 8 minutes to the time. When I checked it after 8 minutes it was over 200 – and I was shooting for 180-185! So yes, it was more dry and crumbly than it should be, and I will have to be careful when I do it again tomorrow(!!).\par
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However, in terms of the ratios of ingredients I think I approximated pretty well. Sharon (the original maker) got the recipe from a bread and breakfast – the recipe originally called for 16 cups of flour!!! She cut it in half, for ease of use, but only uses a little over half of the dough for communion bread, keeping the rest for sweet rolls or an extra loaf of bread. Well, my mixer will not handle 8 cups of flour. I tried to use this as a reason we needed to buy a Bosch mixer, but my husband was unconvinced – so I cut the recipe down to 6 cups of flour and adjusted the other ingredients accordingly. The only problem is that 3/4s of 3/8ths of a cup of shortening is 0.28 cups. And how do you exactly measure 1/4 Tablespoon of salt? Well, fortunately, bread is pretty forgiving, and my last-resort method of “eyeballing it” didn’t seem to negatively impact the taste. Talking to Sharon about it, she also explained that she rolls the ropes in flour before braiding them to keep them from merging together too much during baking, and other helpful hints. So I think that my first non-test attempt tomorrow should go pretty well. But, I’ll start early so that if I have to do it twice, I’ll have time!\par
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(I’ll post a picture if I remember to take one!)