Bread Making

Last week, Joshua and Andrea took a school field trip to the Ukrainian Cultural Village, east of Edmonton.  One of the activities was to make Paska bread.  Unfortunately, some kids didn't have the opportunity to try the bread and so being quite experienced in the kitchen, I told my kids that we would have our own bread making lesson at home.  I dug up my Oma's original recipe (which happened to be in my Mom's handwriting) and tried to figure out how I was going to bake bread without the luxury of my bread machine!

And so we began with the basics... how they did it in the "olden days" as my kids say.  Heated the milk on the stove, used traditional yeast, and waited the full 1.5 hours for the first rise.

{we were so excited to see the water and yeast chemistry "work", since that meant I did something right}

We moved on to the next steps of mixing the flour and letting it rise.  Delighted faces were around after the first rise.

SUCCESS!!

I kept half the dough for traditional buns and let the kids created their own.  

When I was growing up, my Oma always ensured that there were fresh buns ready to eat every time we came to visit.  Now being as Dutch as we are, there was (is) only one way to eat fresh, hot buns and that is with butter and sugar... lots of each.  As I baked today, the memories came flooding back as the sweet smell of bread filled my house.  I took a bite and was brought back to my childhood days of visiting my grandparent's house in Neerlandia.  I hope I can provide some of those same memories for my children and grandchildren in the years to come.