Romy's Baking and Cake Decorating

A few days ago R mentioned that he'd like some Cinnamon Raisin Bread with breakfast.  I happened to have some leftover raisins in the pantry, and some time on my hands today. I found  this recipe  on the King Arthur Baking website. It was the easiest dough recipe I've made yet!  I didn't even have to knead it by hand because the dough is soft enough that the machine can take care of kneading it for 5 minutes. Based on reviews on the website, I decided to leave out the oats, double the cinnamon from 1 to 2 teaspoons, and use 1.5 the amount of raisins the recipe called for. The amount of water should be 1/4 cup on a humid day and 1/3 cup in a dry day. Well, we're in the middle of a heat wave but I got mixed up and used 1/3. The dough still behaved great. Something's off with our oven, so it took 48-50 minutes instead of 40-45.  I forgot to brush it with milk before baking, so I brushed the warm loaf with a bit of butter when it came out of the oven. The bread did...

Today I made Hot Cross Buns to freeze for Easter morning. We're visiting Grandpa, so I needed to make these ahead of time. I used  this recipe  from Sally's Bake Blog. I've made them before but I can't remember how it went. This time, however, I had a lot of trouble with the dough sticking to the sides of the mixer no matter how much extra flour I added. I have a feeling it could have been because I didn't follow the recipe to the letter. It calls for 3.5 cups of flour, but somehow I skipped looking at the amount in the ingredients, only looked at the directions, and started beating 2 cups of flour with a dough hook instead of with the paddle attachment. By the time I came to my senses, switched attachments, and put in all the flour needed, perhaps the die was cast.  I was late to a French lesson, to boot.  So I dumped the mess out on the counter, added a lot of bench flour, and somehow made a dough.  They baked up fine and I tried one after dinner and it was d...