Thursday, January 7, 2010

Bunny Bread: The cute and the ugly

Easter, 2007. My mission: to make a cute, bunny-shaped bread for the dinner table. Sounds easy enough, until the dough starts to rise and the bunnies get evil in the oven.



Cute litte fella, isn't he? This one is almost done rising and is about ready to leap into the oven. Problem here is that his head was expanding faster than his body, proportionaly. And when it came of out the oven, the proportions were worse.



The top view of this one isn't so great. His head was supposed to be resting on the front paws, but his head slid forward in the oven, the back legs got a little wonky, and his ears rose unevenly, compared to how they looked when I first made them.



This is the same bunny as the one above. From this angle, he's not too bad. The face is nice, unlike some where the eyes and nose did strange things.



This bunny's body rose more than the head, and the back legs look like flippers at this point. Did I mention that I went through a lot of dough before I finally got this right?


This one's not so bad...yet. This is right after forming, when they all look halfway decent. There's some odd marks under his nose, but I think at this point I was just trying to perfect the overall shape. I tried several versions with the overly-long ears, but abandoned that design for bunnies with shorter ears.



This was a promising version, and I thought I was onto something with the sculpted ears.



What I learned, though, was that the ears tend to separate from the head and migrate backward if the head and ears aren't made from a single piece of dough. Here, the lovely sculpted ears look like strange wings after baking.

Likewise, I did better with front paws and tail attached to the body dough, and a single rope under the body that I formed into the back legs. But even with the same batch of dough and the same techniques, the results were unpredictable. I could put three identical bunnies in the oven and get different results because of the way each one rose as it baked.

But yeah, it was fun. And tasty.
Yum

3 comments:

oneordinaryday said...

So creative and fun!

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Demesmaeker said...

Fantastic! Nice one! :)

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