Hi, everyone!
This week was my big baking adventure at Grandma and Grandpa’s church! Grandma and I have been collecting all the ingredients for weeks. The other thing we did to get ready was to bake, package and freeze the gluten-free scones. Grandma says there’s no way we could keep them from getting wheat flour on them if we tried to bake them at church while all the other bread is being made! I helped put the labels on the packages.
On Halloween, Joe-san and Nancy-san brought Moose-san and Tilly over to load the baking supplies into Nancy-san’s truck. This is Tilly’s first bake sale, so Moose-san and I had to show her the big storage box. There were 300 pounds of flour in it! We all helped to get the flour into the truck, twenty pounds at a time. Then we put all the other ingredients in. Tilly and Moose-san and I pushed a bag of dry milk into the truck all by ourselves! When we were done, we were all VERY tired! By Sunday, though, Moose-san and I had rested enough to help set up the ingredients at church.
Monday morning always starts with everybody making dough, because nothing else can happen until the dough rises! By mid-morning, some of the bakers began shaping dough, and after the shapes rose they got baked. Joe-san and Nancy-san are in charge of the oven. Cinnamon rolls and tea rings were the first things done! Meanwhile, some of my baking friends kept making dough. Moose-san and I like to help, especially with the chocolate dough!
By Monday afternoon, there are lots of rolls and loaves and tea rings cooling next door to the kitchen! The set-up crew has to put them in plastic bags and move them off the tables so there is room for more things coming out of the oven. On Monday evening, some of my apple-picking friends came to make scone kits. They put the dry ingredients together to be mixed on Tuesday morning. I helped Grandma Sue make a big batch of orange frosting for the orange rolls, then I helped Katie-san make cinnamon rolls. The chocolate dough got made into sixteen pans of chocolate bread by Sean-san and his mom. Moose-san and I showed Reverend Greg-san everything we helped make. It was VERY late when we finished on Monday night! In fact, it was really Tuesday morning!
Grandma got Moose-san and me up after a very short night to start baking on Tuesday. My scone-making friend Ann-san was already at work! We got busy right away helping her divide the scone dough evenly. Later in the day, we helped our baking friends make another two batches of chocolate bread, because the batches from last night were already sold out! There were lots and lots of orange rolls and cinnamon rolls made, too!
The last goodie out of the oven was a tea ring. Tea rings sometimes break when they are taken off their baking sheets, and Joe-san and Nancy-san found a way to fix that! They showed Moose-san and me how they flip the tea ring twice in between two cooling racks. It works really well!
When the baking was over, Grandma took me on an inspection tour of the cooling baked goods and the sales table upstairs. I thought the chocolate bread samples were really yummy! I was tired after two days of baking, but not as tired as Moose-san!
Grandma and I waited until Wednesday to finish putting away all the baking pans. We have to be really sure the pans are dry before they are stacked and put away! I helped Grandma make our air-dry stack in the sun. All the pans got dry and none of them fell off the stack! Today, I helped Grandma finish the ingredient spreadsheet for this year by recording how much of everything was really used and how much was left over. Now that that’s done, my baking adventure is finished for this year!
Love,
Lion-san
It was a fine adventure. Moose-san slept for a couple of days. Tilly was really impressed how well the truck got packed.