Baking adventures!

One of Lance's co-teachers wants to open a bakery so she bakes on a regular basis and Lance is one of the lucky testers of her treats. Recently she organized a class at a local bakery and I jumped at the opportunity to go...I love to bake and it fit perfectly with my goal of trying new things. Taking a class with people I didn't know at a place I'd never been puts me slightly out of my comfort zone but I need more of that in my life so Monday night I headed off to the Bread Basket Bakery.

There was 6 of us in the class and they were all super nice. The Bread Basket is a family business that  was started by one woman in the basement of the family's home...how cool is that? Now it's pretty much run by her two sons. Our teacher was Chad who does the baking end.

You guys we made SO MUCH FOOD. It was amazing. The bakery has the biggest mixers I've ever seen.

The one on the left was a 40 gallon mixer! Huge. And I thought my kitchen aid mixer was cool. Anyway we learned how to make 3 different types of dough. One that was the base for all different kinds of pastries, one that made baguettes and ciabatta bread and the third was for cinnamon rolls or sticky buns. 

The first is the pastry dough. Once it's mixed you have to let it rest. We did make this dough but Chad had actually premade a batch the night before for us to use. The dough we made went into the fridge so it could rest over night to be used today and we worked with the dough he made. The pastery dough goes through this huge rolling machine

It was really cool. This place deals with such large amounts and pastery dough has to be turned 4 times so this prevents them from having to roll it all by hand. Once all this dough was turned we had to let it rest again. There's a lot of resting in dough making. That was something Chad stressed...you can't rush dough or it won't come out correctly. There was a lot of jumping back and forth between projects so that all of our dough could rest. 

We made a ton of different things. We made bear claws

Our dough was so soft...not enough resting...and we made them so big that they fell over but they still looked yummy! We also made fruit filled pastries

We made cinnamon rolls which look pretty similar to the bear claws but with no nuts, maple twists, and sticky buns

 Finally we made ciabatta bread and baguettes. 

Everything got baked and frosted 

And we ended up with a huge tray of pastries! 

At the end we each got to take a box home!

It was so fun and I learned a lot of good tips. I actually have not tried any of the pastries, but Lance ate some and I took a bunch to work and they were gobbled up. I have eaten two huge pieces of ciabatta bread and it was so yummy!  Now there's talk of another class soon...fingers crossed!