Tuesday's lab made me realize that I can never take up basket weaving as a hobby. Here's why. We made a decorative bread platter. What this really means is you use bread to make a fancy looking platter to hold food. My instructor explained that this is what chef's do to show off! We made a basic brad dough and a similar dough with cocoa powder. We divided each dough into many equal sized portions and rolled them as far as we could. After letting these rest for a little, we rolled them again seeing as this will stop the dough from reverting back to its original shape. Rolling out all these pieces of dough took a very long time. A VERY long time. It may have felt longer than it actually was since it was all repetition and boring. When all the pieces were ready, we weaved the chocolate dough and the plain dough together in a very intricate pattern. This was also a very long process and a little boring as well. Once the weaving was done though, it looked very good and impressive! We then rolled out three very large ropes of chocolate dough, and braided them. This was the border for the platter. We were supposed to make flowers out of the dough, but seeing as the instructor didn't show us how, I kind of made it up. The entire platter then baked until golden. It looked very cool in the end, and possibly worth the five hours it took to make it. Yep, five hours of rolling and weaving dough. I'm not sure what I will use it for, so I froze it hoping that an occasion worthy of this fancy bread platter will arise.
Voila!