Christmas Bread

Um, I'm beginning to think that my annual Christmas tradition of making almond poppyseed bread for friends is one of the reasons I'm starting to not like Christmas so much. It's such a huge pain in the butt. But oh so yummy.

Dylan begged me to let him play with the bread pans before I started baking. He kind of dented them all up, but oh well:

He's making a really weird face in that picture!

This year's experience, as far as the cooking, was better than last year's. Last year, I put like thirty loaves in my oven, and it took ten thousand years to bake them all. And they turned out too dark brown on the top. This year, I just did one batch at a time in the oven, and they turned out to be nicely golden-brown.

Here are my munchkins, pre-delivery. We decided to make it a family affair:

As far as delivering the bread, it was much worse of an experience this year. The kids just whined and complained the whole time. And when I say "the kids," I'm including Ben. He is, after all, my "fourth child." We couldn't find Dylan's friend, Marcus's house, because Marcus and his mom moved, and she gave me the worst directions in the history of the world. So we were driving around, late at night, in some strange neighborhood, knocking on random doors, trying to find them. And we were set to leave at the buttcrack of dawn the next day to drive up to Washington. Ben was extremely grumpy with me. And we wanted to go to game night that night with our friends, but because I hadn't gotten the bread done in time, we were delivering bread instead. I just can't ever seem to get my act together.

Next year, I'm delivering by myself.