Don’t mind me. The following photo is gonna disgust you. .. but I have to show it bcos not everything in life works out the way you plan it to be.
I made coffee bread for the 1st time in my life & this is what it looked like.
I’ve been working OT quite often lately, & one evening last week, I was like, “I’m gonna make coffee bread”. So I literally Googled & used the 1st recipe on the search result list haha
& like you know, I don’t like baking, I don’t have the talent for it, & most importantly, I really don’t like following recipes all that much =/ even knowing that baking is an art of precision, I decided to deviate from the recipe, & just followed the basics. I don’t recall what amounts of what I used but somehow, despite the failed appearance, the texture & flavour was quite good!
Here’s the cross-section of the circular one (the oval one was the same bcos I baked them at the same time in my toaster oven). The crust was slightly crispy.. . it had a cookie-texture to it. The inside was soft; it wasn’t too dense, nor dry, nor felt-underbaked. The texture turned out well; I thought it was all over based on the appearance lol.
The flavour was veeeeery coffee-y. I decreased the amount of sugar & up’d the amount of instant coffee. I also added dark chocolate, which isn’t very sweet. .. so yeah, it was kinda bitter, but had a minute sweetness. Ppl will likely find it gross but I personally liked it!
I experimented with diff ways of eating it after eating it regularly as is. I tried putting a small piece of chocolate on top, & then microwaving it so that the chocolate would melt into a sauce, coating the top of the bread. That was not bad. I tried drizzling some maple syrup. That was ok too, but I’m not huge on maple syrup. I recently purchased honey powder; so I melted the honey powder in a small amount of water (to get like a light honey sauce going), poured that on top of a slice of bread sideways, & then heating that up in the microwave. This was my fav out of the 3. The bread soaked up some of the honey sauce; thereby making the texture of the bread softer & more cake-like.
Altogether, I deemed the coffee bread a success. I did worry that it didn’t rise for the longest time... like 20mins in, it barely rose a centimeter. But after 40mins, it did form a dome. A cracked dome lol. Anyway, until next time! :D