bread bread bread

I am now 25 years old.

Twenty-five feels round and comfortable.  No sharp edges, just five by five, neat and orderly.

I keep waiting around for milestones that may never come.  Birthdays lose their charm fairly quickly as we transition to adulthood.  The rabid, drooling anticipation from childhood is gone.

I made a cheesecake on Saturday.  I'm not sure how "real" it was, in the authoritative rankings of authentic cheesecake recipes, but I made a cheesecake.  I acquired a springform pan - a fancy one, a nine-inch pan with a tempered glass bottom and a red silicone ring around the outside that seals like a dream.

The recipe didn't use anything earth-shattering.  A lot of cream cheese and a few eggs, some sugar and some vanilla.  I boiled down some frozen strawberries into a syrup with some water, a little more sugar and some cornstarch, and ended up with a surprisingly purple result.  Swirled it into the cheesecake batter with a knife until I was afraid the purple and the white would bleed together, then popped it in the oven.

It tastes like cheesecake, anyway.  And like strawberries.  Onwards and upwards.

Laura got me a loaf pan for my birthday, and it arrived a couple of days before.  I opened it on my birthday-proper after returning from having tostadas at a Mexican place with most of the research group, and before I had a Skype call with Mom and Dad.

I got around to making bread on Sunday, breaking up the recipe that Mom left me on an earlier blog post, reducing from three loaves to two loaves and splitting those into separate bowls, using honey as the sweetener in one and molasses in the other.

The dough, turned out onto the counter on a bed of flour, was sticky and coated my hands, so I added more flour to it until I could just get it to pull away from my hands.  I kneaded it on the counter in a rhythm that was calming, and then draped wet paper towels over each bowl, one rounded ball of dough slightly paler than the other.  I played Mario Kart while it rose.

An hour later, I punched one of them - the darker one - down, watching the dough deflate (but only slightly).  I had to look up how to roll dough into a loaf.  I had always sort of assumed that you just dumped it right into the pan.  I rolled it, I draped, I left it there to rise, and I moved the other dough to the refrigerator to wait for the loaf pan to become free again.

The bread baked up perfectly in the oven, and I touched it when it came out, the crust satisfyingly stiff, the loaf a very bread-like color.  I turned it out of the pan.  I rolled the other dough out - the honey dough - and put it into the pan to rise.  I came back to the loaf I had removed from the oven and cut a thick slice of bread from it; I set the end piece aside to cap the loaf with.  The inside of the bread was intensely satisfying to me.  It had a deep caramel color to it, a not-quite-brown.

Raspberry jam is one of my great loves, I suppose.  I found a jar of seedless jam (my one complaint about raspberry jam is that I always get seeds stuck in my teeth) that had survived my move to Boston and spread it over the butter that was already melting into the slice.

It doesn't taste as yeasty as homemade white bread, and I think part of that is the whole wheat flour I used and part of it might be the natural sweetener.  There's something perfect about homemade bread, something that makes the crusts just as lovely as the insides.

I'm still waiting for some kind of birthday landmark, because all of my birthdays have felt sort of rote since probably 21.  Not in a bad way.  If my car insurance rates would drop, I'd definitely settle for that.  But otherwise, I celebrated with Mexican food, with cheesecake, with freshly baked bread.  The comfort in that kind of a celebration is quiet and soothing.

I'll probably make a cake, too, one of these days.  In the meantime, I'm happy to carefully work my way through the ingredients in the kitchen and the pantry.