A Beautiful Present!

Easter! Now history for 2013 but boy, the events of this weekend and our Easter Celebration came together in a way that brought me the nicest present I could ever have asked for!

It was a bit wicked -work involved -here Friday and Saturday as I spent both days doing a whole lot of baking.

Friday, I baked Swedish Limpa Rye -took a fresh loaf of it out to a dear friend of mine who is no longer able to bake breads and things along those lines but it doesn't stop her from enjoying the fruits of others labors. She very much likes the Limpa Rye and since I have gotten fair-to-middling good at producing that type of bread and I know she likes it so much, it brings me a lot of happiness to share a loaf of this bread with her any time I bake it!

Seeing the smile on her face Friday night when I dropped off a loaf of this bread at her house, very much made my day.

Saturday, I baked a batch of the sweet rolls that I also like to make -the recipe for these rolls is very good and normally, turns out 4 dozen sweet rolls that I make with various flavors of fillings.

Because my older grandson, Alex, was going to be here with us this weekend, and because I know he likes these rolls -in particular is a big fan of them filled either with lemon curd or apricot/pineapple filling, I set out to make the rolls and make half the batch with lemon and the other half with apricot/pineapple.

But I screwed up!

When I baked the first two pans (2 dozen rolls), I did something I will never ever do again when making something like this!

I had tried to give myself a "short cut" by putting both 13x9 pans of the rolls in the oven at the same time. Not a wise move on my part!

When I took the first two pans out of the oven they looked fine -a couple rolls were a little browner than need be, but otherwise, they looked very good.

That is until I turned the pans upside down to empty the rolls out on the county and to my surprise, the rolls were sticking to the pans. Hmmm. Never had that happen before!

So I had to get a spatula to get them to release from the pans and when I did that, boy, what a shock to my eyes!

The rolls on the bottom were pretty much very dark -actually, they were black! Charred!

And what really sickened me after I saw that mess I had on my hands, was to see how the bread inside was just beautiful -nice and soft texture and if you didn't see the black bottom, you'd have thought this was perfection!

Well, it wasn't and I paid the price then for trying to do things faster. One pan in the 13x9 inch side will bake the bread fine and dandy in my oven but two pans that size, side-by-side -no dice as the oven then doesn't heat evenly I guess!

So the other two pans -the apricot/pineapple rolls -went in the oven and got baked, one pan at a time!

Live and learn, huh?

Because our church was having an "Easter Breakfast" after our church service, I had planned to make an egg casserole plus taking two loaves of the Limpa rye bread along with some of both flavors of the sweet rolls to put on the buffet table there. Well, the egg casserole was fine and all the Rye bread from those two loaves disappeared too as did the 15 sweet rolls of the apricot/pineapple too!

But the gift I got that is something so special to me came from my grandson, Kurtis.

As those who attended the breakfast began to file through the buffet line, my daughter and all 3 of my grandchildren were among the first ones to get their plates filled and seated to begin eating. Three of the ladies from church and I were standing in the doorway, watching those diners go through till all those attending had been served and we would then be able to go through and get our food too.

As we stood there watching the progression, my little grandson, Kurtis, left his seat at the table and came running up to me, all excited and grabbed my hand to tell me something.

I bent down a bit to listen to what he wanted to say to me and this was so sweet to hear!

"Gram! You make the most delicious bread!"

Now there was a compliment that I will cherish for the rest of my days!