Challah, revisited

I've made Challah before:
I am a big fan of this light, eggy bread.

My challah recipe starts a little differently than some bread formulas - instead of whisking together the dry ingredients and adding in the wet directly, both the wet and dry ingredients are incorporated before they are mixed together. To the left of the usual flour, yeast and salt is a mixture of eggs, oil and water:

I added the wet mixture to the dry and a few minutes later I was ready to knead:

Ten minutes of kneading and two hours of rising later, I decided to have some fun with my challah and make a celebration loaf - basically a smaller braided loaf set on top of a larger one. I sectioned the dough into six boules to rest before further shaping:

Here are the braids of dough...

and here they are on the parchment lined baking sheet:

After another hour of rising and an egg wash the loaf is ready to bake:

I really enjoyed slicing into this bread and being able to see the texture of the six individual pieces of dough that I had shaped:

Even if the ends of the loaf were not quite as pretty as I had hoped - this is a shape the practice!