I love to cook and bake, especially if I’m hosting a dinner party and friends will be joining me. I love trying new recipes and subjecting my friends to these experiments – it’s good to have guinea pigs. 😉 But with all my cooking and baking successes, there’s one thing I’m not very good at making: homemade bread.

I’ve tried several times but always, always kill the yeast and I’m left with dough that doesn’t rise, a loaf that is dense and not the airy, pillowy bread I’m looking for. Because of these glorious failures, I’ve avoided baking bread for years.

My mother is an excellent baker – a terrible cook, but an excellent baker. I grew up waking to the smell of her homemade bread on Saturday mornings. Yet this talent wasn’t passed on to me.

I don’t eat a ton of bread, preferring to get my carbs in the form of vegetables and quinoa but occasionally, the idea of my house smelling like baking bread overtakes me and I try – and fail – to bake bread.

Last weekend friends were coming over for dinner and I was making spaghetti. I make the sauce from scratch so it takes several hours and several pounds of tomatoes. This time, I decided I would also bake bread. I’d been eyeing a recipe for a while and was determined to give it a go – after all, Pull-Apart Garlic Butter Bread is the perfect companion to homemade spaghetti.

I mixed up the dough, following the instructions precisely…or so I thought. The dough looked good and it sat on my counter, rising.

Bread dough

I looked over the recipe…and realized I’d used the wrong kind of yeast. The recipe called for instant yeast and I’d used active yeast. I did some googling and found they are mostly interchangeable, though you’re supposed to dissolve active yeast in water before adding it to the recipe. I didn’t do this but it was too late, all I could do was cross my fingers and wait.

An hour later the dough had doubled in size and so I was hopeful my yeast mistake wasn’t completely detrimental to the recipe. I set about completing the steps, cutting and buttering the dough and arranging it in the pan. Then it sat for another hour and rose some more.

Dough in pan

Before I popped it into the oven I admired it – even if it didn’t taste good it certainly looked good in the pan.

Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled out of the oven the most gorgeous bread I’ve ever baked.

Baked to perfection!

I let it cool, and then popped it out of the pan and onto a plate.

Gorgeous, hot Pull-Apart Garlic Butter Bread

And then of course, the real test – the taste. I pulled out a piece and popped the still-warm bread into my mouth. It was AMAZING. Warm and garlicky and buttery and soft and pillowy and everything bread is supposed to be. And I MADE IT! I was ecstatic at my success.

I’ve written several poems about bread, about my inability to bake homemade bread. Here’s one of them: