Failbread

I like recipes. Generally, they yield successful and tasty results that are enjoyable to eat. That said, I'm the type of person who loves creative pursuits of the crafty nature, and my creative side often begs to be set free in the kitchen. After a nearly sleepless night spent alternately freaking out about grad school applications, pretending I was a character in a novel that's been percolating in my head for some time, and thinking about inventing a recipe for apple bread, I woke up the next morning determined to try said recipe.

Well.

There may be a reason fresh - not dried - apples aren't generally used in bread-based baked goods. I have a feeling that the inclusion of a large, locally-grown Macintosh apple - cut up into cubes and doused with a cinnamon-sugar mixture - did something weird to my bread; y'know, something to do with the moisture level or, um, something. Maybe. Cough.

Either that or my recipe was really terrible. Cough, cough. I mean, I thought I was being smart by kind of looking at a few different bread and muffin recipes and going from there. I thought I'd included some of every ingredient generally used in similar recipes. I thought it would work out. I thought that since I'd freehanded a rather delicious recipe for a sort of cross between scones and oatmeal cookies when I was studying in Ireland and needed to use up excess food before heading back to the States, I could do the same thing with this bread. I also thought the batter seemed slightly, well, sticky, but I figured that wouldn't actually matter too much.

I guess I thought wrong, however, because the result wasn't really a bread; it was a sort of sticky, dense, glutinous - yet pleasantly spiced - bread-shaped loaf that was rather chewier than any bread I've ever tasted and had a strangely tough crust. At least the apples were juicy and nicely spiced. Overall, it wasn't terrible; I just would never make it again in that exact way. Hah. I wish I knew exactly what led to the bready breakdown, but I think it might've been a combination of many factors that combined to create this failure. I didn't include eggs or oil, so maybe the "substitutions" I used didn't create the correct chemical mixture to produce a breadlike substance. Perhaps if I'd let it bake longer, it would've been slightly less sticky. Maybe the apples screwed with the liquid content. At least it tasted decent; my sister actually liked it, and the other day I sort of crumbled it up and heated it with a little Smart Balance, and it was like a weird kind of breadish pudding. At least it didn't go to waste, right? Right?

Ah well. Apple bread for the fail!



P.S. I'm not sharing a picture of the innards because the photos didn't really do its strangeness justice... hah.