Bread website and more bread baking

Ooh! I noticed that I got a referral from a baking site--that means, when I look at my stats, how people are finding my blog, that's where they clicked on a link to my blog. Anyway, I checked out this other site--they'd linked the recipe I posted yesterday. It's a cool site! I'll go ahead and link them right back. It's The Fresh Loaf.

In other bread baking news.....it was ironic that just before I went to bake yesterday, I posted that recipe on my blog. For I turned out with a mess. I have only botched just a couple of batches of bread in the whole....let's see....I've probably been baking bread every week for at least 9 years. But this is botched! It seemed to do fine until it was rising in the pan. Then it just sagged. Hibi also made a loaf of bread, since what I was making wasn't vegan. And hers turned out the same way! Paul made vasilopita, and it *finally* rose enough to bake, and actually turned out very beautiful. He wonders if it's barometric changes that's doing this. I couldn't come up with any better explanation than the yeast being bad, as I did open a new pouch of it yesterday. But most of the yeast for my batch came from the old pouch.

Paul made two loaves of vasilopita and we brought one to a meeting last night. We actually had to finish baking it there because it wasn't done yet! But it was delicious and when we got home I looked at the one he'd put in the fridge. Hey, you didn't cover it! I said. So I took it out and covered it. I got in bed and then thought, I didn't put it back in the fridge.....but I was too tired to get up again. When I got up this morning Paul had it in the oven. It hadn't risen all over the place, so I'm thinking the yeast has to not be very good. It's actually just beautiful now. Very slow acting yeast, I guess. But I'm just mystified at all our results.