Cranberry Celebration Bread

After my last run-in with a braided loaf of bread, I wanted to make another, hopefully more beautiful than the last. I decided to try the Cranberry-Walnut Celebration Loaf from "The Breadbaker's Apprentice:"

I was a little low on cranberries and am not a huge walnut fan, so after checking my stores of fruits and nuts, I decided to use cranberries, apricots and pecans:

The dough for this loaf is very similar to challah - it is enriched with eggs and a bit of sugar. You can see that I spread plenty of flour on my counter as the dough looked a bit sticky to me before I even started kneading:

Once the dough was kneaded it took a bit more work to distribute all of the chopped nuts and fruit:

I worked it all in and let it rise, and then split the dough for the two braids:

Here are the two braids before I combined them into one loaf and let them rise for baking:

And fresh out of the oven! 

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!