Ice cream and honey wheat bread

I know it's been awhile. Life has been kind of nutty lately. Anyway, I made a batch of Honey Whole Wheat Bread and, although it tastes wonderful and in every way a whole wheat bread should taste, it is about 2 inches tall. It's weird, and I am not sure what happened. I came down after letting it rise for the first time, and oh my blessed it had risen! Praise the Lord. Or something. Anyway, I punched it down a bit (gently), formed into loaves, and then let it rise again, for longer this time. It rose, but not a whole helluva lot. Still, it was bigger and filling out the pans so I thought "meh" and went ahead and baked it. I guess it fell during baking or something, because the loaves came out a lot smaller than they went in. Ah well. I'll have to try it again after I do some pondering and pontificating as to the source of the flatness.

Also...

I made ice cream this 4th of July, and I'm happy to report that it was NOT a disaster. In fact, I have created some of the yummiest ice cream I have ever tasted. First to go into the freeze was the dark chocolate. Mmmmm, chocolate. It was a really simple recipe, and it tastes ALMOST as good as a good lay, if you know what I mean. The second flavor to be put forth into creation was vanilla cake batter. Now, this recipe was a lot fancier, and called for a real vanilla bean. What with being poor and all, I decided to go for the genuine vanilla extract and honestly I don't think it would have tasted much better had I used the bean. Basically it came out awesome. The only criticism is that I think I left it in the maker too long and it came out a little harder than I would have liked. More the consistency of really hard scoop ice cream. The dark chocolate (my dream, my treasure) came out somewhere between soft serve and hard scoop, which is how I likes it.

I also finished knitting a hat, but as I have no photos and this post is long enough, I'll save that story for another day.

Toodles.

CraftyHobbit