A Word to the Wise

I haven't been baking bread for very long, but I have at the game long enough to begin learning from my mistakes. I now know approximately how much grease a metal pan will require as opposed to a glass or silicone pan. I've gotten fairly good at judging how much batter or dough needs to be poured into what size pan for optimal results. What I have not mastered completely is trusting cookbooks. I've been disaster-free for just long enough to convince myself that I know better than the published, award-winning authors of such cookbooks as "The Bread Bible."

You'd think I'd pay attention to someone with enough experience to pen the Bible of bread, right? Wrong. While preparing to bake the samples I intended to bring to class, I looked over the recipe for "Vanilla Sour Cream Coffee Cake." Yum, right?! Luckily, I have everything I need... except the right sized pan. The recipe makes one 10 inch round cake, or two 9x5 in. loaves. I have no round cake pans, and only two 9.25x5.5 in. silicone loaf pans. So I go with the silicone. I grease 'em both up and begin layering the first loaf; batter, crumb filling, batter crumb filling. I realize that I can easily fit all of the batter into one silicone pan. Why on earth would they call for two? So I throw the recipe's advice to the wind and layer away until all the batter and filling are nestled into one pan. Then I pop it in the oven and await the delicious cinnamon-y results.

45 minutes later, the timer goes off. I throw open the oven door expecting to find a perfectly browned, beautiful coffee cake. Instead, I am confronted with a bloated mass standing at least a four good inches above the edge of the pan and pushing the sides of the flexible silicone into a rather round shape. Turns out I did have a 10 in. cake pan after all...

Luckily, the cake came out alright. It required an additional half hour of baking time, but it did bake nonetheless. While I don't consider this a "disaster," after all the results are edible, it did teach me a valuable lesson: until I understand perfectly how specific breads will react while in the oven, listen to the nice lady who wrote the recipe. :)