Now that the knitting thing is well underway (though I’m not marking it done until I finish a sweater), I’m ready to really start this one.

That I got a stand mixer as a gift from husband helps a lot.

More than making a new recipe once a month, I’d like to really perfect them. I really want to focus on baking, since that seems to be my kryptonite any more. I want to get our staples down. For this month I’m doing soft pretzels. Probably a weird thing to start out with, but I sometimes live on the frozen supermarket ones, and I’d much rather have something home baked and organic, and, eventually, more nutritious as I try to get the whole grain ratio right.

I gave it a first shot last night, and I accidentally put the egg into the batter when I was dumping in all my ingredients. Oops. And I put on the salt right after the egg wash, instead of letting it cook a bit, first To be honest, the salt thing wasn’t a problem. However, next time my plan is to opt for butter rather than egg wash and see how that goes. And I so need a brush. Finger brushing the second coat of wash meant a bit of toasting of the fingers. Two coats of butter are going to be the same problem.

They still taste good (really good, actually), but they weren’t very pretzel-y. More like a roll dough, thanks to the egg. If switching egg wash to butter and not dumping the egg in… time to look for a different recipe.

I did get the shaping down once I got to the last one, which is a bonus, since after the first two I despaired ever making them look less like elephants and little old men than pretzels!

I’m planning for a second try on Saturday in case I run out of flour and need to send Shawn out for some. Maybe I’ll start making half batches for all this testing… save some money and whatnot. Though I’m enjoying eating the final results. ;)