The finished products of today's efforts

Here are some pictures of the finished products. The sourdough chocolate cake was good. I only had a few bites so far and I took some to my mom. It is a little bit dry. Next time I make this I am going to substitute buttermilk for the water I think that would make it taste better and a lot of other recipes are using milk instead of water. Even though it is still good and I like the taste and ease of making it.

My bread did rise. Then I sparely sprinkled flour on the counter and started the kneading process. I read the comments on the recipe and some where trying to knead in more flour, you don't need to do this just keep the counter lightly sprinkled so the dough won't stick and rub some flour between your hands to keep them from sticking. My dough was very easy to work with and was not overly sticky so I think I did it right at this point. I knead by overlapping the dough towards me and pushing it away from me with my lower palm of my hand. Then fold one side in and knead, fold the other side and knead. Sometimes I used my fist but over all it worked out OK. I didn't want to make bread loaves in bread pans so I used a knife to cut the bread in the middle, rounded it gently and put it on a lightly floured baking sheet to rise again.

And the verdict is the bread was too dense. It tasted OK but was just too dense. Several things happened that I think I did wrong. One is I rushed the rising, two is I did not knead long enough and probably didn't let it rise enough again. I did a bit of research and it said that dense bread is caused by too much flour and not enough kneading to put the air into the dough. I will give it another try this week sometime and see how it works out. We had lasagna with our dense bread and the chocolate cake. Yummy.