It’s mine.

This was the cracked wheat bread I am / was / we’ll see what happens making. And since I believe in being honest, I will tell you that I messed up four ways from Sunday on this.

The key to the recipe is “Whole wheat flour (as needed),” and my not paying attention and thinking it was just what was needed on the surface to knead the bread.

No.

[Added after first writing to try to redeem myself. When I bake bread from scratch, I am able to incorporate just about all the recipe’s flour into the dough using my Kitchen Aid. So kneading is just to get the right texture–smooth and elastic. Didn’t even think to consider that most recipes do not assume you can get all of the flour in during the initial mixing.]

I carefully convert the quantities of the ingredients such that it will make a 1 1/2 pound loaf in the bread maker. Put everything in the pan, top it off with yeast, adjust settings, and we’re off. (I had my doubts about the cracked wheat to flour ratio but…)

Or not. Look at it after two minutes to adjust flour/liquid as needed and what a sloppy mess. Look at recipe more carefully. Ah. By hand it would have probably needed at least another cup of whole wheat flour. Well. I’ll see what we can do.

“No whole wheat flour?” you ask. Can’t believe it but no. Not to worry, I’ve got rye flour. So I start spooning in rye flour and things aren’t looking too good. Dough isn’t even moving and we’re already about 5 or more minutes into the knead. Stop machine. Scrape down sides. Reset. Start over. Hum.

At this point, I reasoned that the little motor was going to have an awfully hard time trying to power through. We’ll regroup and do it by hand. Switch to AP flour. Knead it. Put it in a bowl that goes into a barely warm oven and walk away for 45 minutes.

Oven had cooled by this time, and there wasn’t a huge increase in volume, so I turned oven on for what I thought would be less than five minutes. Loaded the dishwasher. Let the dogs out. Worked on some stuff. Oops. Never turned off the oven.

This is where we currently stand. The yeast is probably deader than dead. The dough is approximately the weight of a mortar that could get shot out of a cannon and take out a good sized building. I dumped it on the table after another 1/2 hour in a not hot oven and tried to punch it down. It as like hitting a wet sandbag. But! I dutifully greased two loaf pans, wadded together what resemble two loaves and returned it to a warm oven to rise again.

I seriously doubt that it will be edible. If worse comes to worst I’ll run it through the food processor for bread crumbs.

How about that? All these years and I’d never created a “failure” tag.