Baking Apple Cider Donut Bread
I’m not much of a baker. I just don’t have the patience for it. It was really bad before I got a scale, measuring everything out in annoying cups and teaspoons. Being able to weight my ingredients is so much easier because you can just keep everything in one bowl and tare out the weight. There are fewer dishes, too.
Even still, baking has never much tickled my fancy. I’m more of a cook. Rarely do I follow a recipe when cooking, instead developing a vague idea of what I want to make and eyeballing the ingredients. That’s a skill I’ve developed over years of cooking, and trying out a ton of recipes from around the world. I can make char siu, pizza, Japanese-style curry, ox tail, carbonara, pho, ramen, or fried chicken and okra with my eyes closed. The results are never exactly the same since I don’t measure anything, but it always turns out good.
You just can’t do that with baking, it’s more of a science than an art. Ask me to make a loaf of bread and I go into panic mode. Ask me to bake a cake and I will run away, screaming. I was never good in science class.
I bring this up because I decided to bake today. I don’t know what’s come over me, I’d go to the doctor if I didn’t live in the US. I was doing some shopping and there was a big display of apple cider, and I impulsively picked some up, thinking of all the things I could cook and bake with it. The next day (today), I baked some apple cider donut bread. It’s this recipe from Buns in My Oven, specifically.
It’s in the oven right now, I’ll update this when it’s done. I will say it was a very wet dough when I put it in the oven. I thought about adding more flour, but I followed the recipe exactly. This is why I hate baking so much. Is that right? Did I do something wrong somehow? Is the recipe flawed? I don’t know, and I still have over half an hour to find out if it’ll turn out any good or not. The anticipation is killing me.
Update 1: Catastrophe has strucketh. The prescribed fifty minutes has elapsed and I just checked on it. It’s nice and brown on the outside, but looking at the top of it reveals a wet cavern inside. Sure enough, it’s almost completely raw on the inside. I knew this was going to happen. I’m putting it back in for another ten minutes, I don’t think that’s going to be enough but we’ll see. If its still not done I’m going to have to wrap the top in aluminum foil (don’t tell RFK, this’ll be out little secret) and chuck it in a volcano.
Update 2: Okay, everything seems fine now. After another ten minutes it was mostly cooked through, but still a little too damp in the middle. The outer edges were getting pretty dark though, so an aluminum foil top and another five minutes saved the day. It’s cooling now and it smells incredible. I think it’s going to be sweeter than I would have liked, it is called “donut” bread after all, but all the recipes I could find were similar. Maybe I’ll make this again and cut the sugar in half? I should taste it first before making any decision, and before that it needs a glaze. Okay, yeah, this is going to be sweeter than I wanted, but oh well, I won’t say no to sweets.
Update 3: I hate baking. I let it cool for fifteen minutes before taking it out of the pan, as instructed. The sides came out okay, but the bottom, she stuck. A medium-sized piece of the bread stuck to the bottom of the loaf pan. I used a spatula to scrape it off and stick it back on. Worse, there is clearly a big burned spot on the bottom, on the piece that broke off.
Update 4: After letting it cool, I made the simple drizzle. Powdered sugar, melted butter, and instead of cinnamon I used a little more apple cider. And… it’s okay. As I suspected, it’s overdone on the outside and slightly too moist on the inside. The flavor is good, very sweet, and I wish there was more of an apple flavor, though I think a lot of that is down to the cider itself. With homemade cider it will no doubt have a stronger flavor. But overall, it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. That’s usually how it goes when I bake something.
