Buttercup Yeast Bread

Click on the pic for the recipe

Doesn't this look good?! It was so attractive when I saw it in a Taste of Home magazine from last year. This weekend I came across some ripe Butternut squashes, and I just had to make this recipe. I had never worked with squash before. Imagine my surprise when it was so difficult to cut. When I finally got it cut up and seeded, I got to work trying to peel it. It was terribly hard. Then I cooked it in the microwave until it was soft-that was the easy part. I started to combine all the ingredients as it said. Then I got to the flour part. 13 cups! Who keeps enough flour for that?! I added what I had, and then added cake flour... all of it. Then I managed to come up with some bread flour. "This is never going to turn out", I thought to myself. But I had gotten that far I couldn't just throw it out. I didn't have a vehicle to drive to the store, and even if I did I didn't have any money. A good tip for baking is first to read through a recipe before starting to make sure you have everything you need, and second know when to quit. I turned it out on to my counter, and tried to kneed it. I kept adding more and more bread flour, trying to make it not sticky. Oh, what a mess I made. That dough stuck to everything but itself. Finally I managed to form it into a ball. It rose the first time. Then I divided some of it into the two pans I had and left it to rise again as the recipe instructed. Not long after my husband came home from work and he had some things to do. I was so fed up with that stuff, but I wanted to finish it. I decided that it would be fine while we were gone. We ended up staying out most of the afternoon and eating out. When we got home........... you experienced bakers can probably imagine what I found............. it was everywhere. It had risen out of the pans and dripped all over the place. The dough that I had left in the bowl had risen to about 4 times its size and it looked like a balloon. The worst part was the smell. It was a fermented stomach turning smell. I could smell it outside. I thought, "I bet the neighbors think we're making our own beer or something". I cleaned it up enough that I could rest easy. But, the dishes met me this morning with a grim foreboding. Unfortunately, they are still there. I just couldn't think of how I was going to even start to fix that mess this morning. Thus far, it is the worst kitchen disaster of my culinary career, and I've had many. Oh, all that precious flour- wasted. Live and Learn.