Amish Friendship Bread

Great idea! I had a friend from work give me a starter for making this bread. A really great thing happened. I went through the first bag of starter as directed---knead the bag daily, day 5 add 3 ingredients and knead bag well, knead bag daily and let out the air....cause after you add those ingredients (better known as 'feeding' your starter), the stuff begins to 'work' in the fermentation process and produces gasses. Then on day 10 you 'feed' it again-mixing well and separate out 1 cup increments into 4 separate ziploc gallon bags. The remaining cup of starter from the original bag is then poured into a bowl and using the recipe ingredients prepared to make 2 loaves of bread...which is actually a cake. You are supposed to give away 3 of the 4 bags of newly created starter...I gave away 1--what could I have been thinking? The other 3 bags I kept and worked as directed...oh, other than missing the first feeding for a few days (which is ok if you know a bit about this process), but that worked out to be the best thing I could have done! By the time I did feed it the first time it was nearly time for our first youth bake sale--to help our youth with going to camp this year. As it turned out, those 3 bags of starter produced 15 bags of starter of which we used all but 4 to create 67 mini loaves of amish friendship bread. YES, 67 and the goal was to actually use all but 1 bag (so I could have a bag of starter again)...this would have created 84 mini loaves of bread---we ran out of eggs after going through a package of 2.5 dozen!

Not only did we create 67 loaves...they were of various flavors. The internet is an awesome tool! When I received my first bag of starter, I could not imagine always creating the same recipe for this bread so in an internet search I found a compilation of MANY recipes for using the starter to create tons of variations on the little jewel. From those 18 pages of recipes I picked 15...but could only prepare 10 as my local Walmart doesn't carry some of the flavors of puddings (a main ingredient for the finished product). They are as follows:

Chocolate Covered Cherry
White Chocolate Macadamia
Chocolate Chocolate Chip
Pineapple upside down
Strawberry Pecan
Cherry Cheesecake
Pistachio White Chocolate Chip
Butterscotch
Cranberry Pecan
Banana Cream Pie-Pecan

I managed to keep 1 loaf of each for myself--how else will I know which breads are worth baking again??? hehehee...

At any rate, I had to work so I could not attend the bake sale..but there were only about 5 loaves left by the end and those will be at church this morning with anything else that was left and offered for sale to anyone who may not have made it to our sale. The bottom line: the bread was a hit and so far the feedback from those who I know bought it and ate it, well, it has been incredible! I can't wait for church this morning to see if there is more feedback!

Charlie's favorite? Surprisingly, Choc. Covered Cherry....mmm...was it divine! It was funny though, the recipe called for mini choco chips so I used them...by the time we flipped it out the pan when done cooking we all thought it looked like a watermelon! The color is that lucious watermelon pink and those mini chips looked just like the seeds! Of course, that got me thinking...instead of cherry jello...maybe I will try the watermelon next time and have a taste test!

I hope to find the other flavors of puddings before the next batch is ready to bake. I may have to resort to online purchase of those. I need cappucino and caramel. I can't think of the other couple of flavors. Plus the flavors that I was able to find were of the sugar free variety and those contain aspartame...something I try to steer clear of and I know several people have allergies to that ingredient. I think I also have to begin scarfing up every mini loaf pan I can find between now and next time. Maybe our youth can simply start their fundraisers for next years camp around the holidays! I bet those mini loaves would sell like hotcakes then AND we could dress up the packaging accordingly! Hmmm.......

HOLY COW! We may have a business in our midst...ehheheehe!