No, these are not new sweet potato brioche. They are, in fact, the sweet potato brioche I made one night at the Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow. We had sweet potatoes left over at dinner one night; I had a recipe for pumpkin brioche that suggested using sweet potato as an alternative; the rest, as they say, was accompaniment to dinner the next night, and sandwich fodder the day after that, and bread pudding the day after that.
I'm trotting them out tonight, though, because after a six-month hiatus largely brought about by my own self-pity and brooding about the future, the weekend bread bake is back. I had stopped, not consciously, but stopped nonetheless, mostly because I couldn't make a loaf of bread without missing the bread bakery I had planned to open, but couldn't, due to a lack of startup money. Baking a loaf of bread, even a simple white sandwich loaf, was in my mind the equivalent of listening to the music that reminds you of your ex-lover, the one who got away. I didn't need that kind of grief in my life.
Except that I do. Like writers who quit writing in frustration, only to discover that they have no outlet for that deep wild feeling inside unless they write, I turned my back on bread, immersing myself into desserts, cakes and biscuits and pie after pie after glorious pie, and while there's still a place in my kitchen for all of this stuff, I can't deny that bread gives me something that is entirely singular. It gives me faith and confidence in my own fingers and nose. It makes me feel soulful and well-placed in the universe.
Earlier this week I received a care package from the kind and wondrous 'mouse (who, again, I would be linking to if only he weren't so stubborn on this refusing-to-blog issue of his; dear friends, you really want to check out my June and July 2004 archives, read all of 'mouse's guestblog posts, and then flood his in-box with e-mails until he agrees to blog just to shut us all up) that included a pint of homemade blackberry jam. Be sure to eat the jam within a month after you open it, quoth the 'mouse, or it will turn into blackberry wine. While I love blackberry wine just fine, I know that Lloyd would appreciate the jam better, so I shared 'mouse's advisory with him.
"I'll eat it on toast," he said. "I can easily eat it all if it's on warm, scrummy toast. Will there be toast?"
There will be toast, the basic white sandwich loaf that is nearly impossible to find in bakeries, and of which the horrible white sandwich loaves sold in supermarkets are but a pale imitation. Although you can mix the dough on Friday night and bake it on Saturday morning, it benefits greatly from a long slow cold rise in the fridge, so I will be baking our bread on Sunday morning. I will be making our toast late Sunday morning, as Lloyd calls out, "Is it toast yet?" And I will remember the lesson that I learned in one of my pro baking classes in Vermont: bread has a memory, and every step you take, from the mixing of flour and water to the brushing of the loaf tops with egg wash, every step makes itself manifest in that final, finished, perfectly lovely little loaf of bread.