Fail. Times Two.

I love to bake.  Even though I don’t usually eat more than a taste of most of the sweet things I make for my husband, there’s something that therapeutic for me about the whole process of spending time in the kitchen measuring and mixing. When it comes to cakes, cookies, and quick breads, I am pretty confident in my ability to make modifications to recipes on the fly and still end up with a decent end result.  It’s only over the last couple of years that I have become comfortable baking bread with yeast. I have always stuck very close to whatever recipe I’m using, and all of the recipes that I have considered successes have been made with white flour.  One of my favorite bread recipes is for pumpkin knots; yesterday I decided I wanted to make them but replace the bread flour with a mixture of white whole wheat flour and oat flour.  I did a minimal amount of online research, and it seemed like it should be relatively simple.  Um, turns out I was wrong.  This is what came out of my oven. 

It tastes worse than it looks, as hard as that might be to believe. I think my lunch break today is going to include a trip to Barnes & Noble to buy this book on baking healthy bread.
And the second failure of my day was an even bigger disappointment than the inedible pumpkin bread.  I have been dying to see The Campaign with Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis, and last night my husband and I finally both got off work in time to go.  It’s not funny.  I think I may have laughed three or four times during the entire movie.  The highlight of the movie was breaking into this new-to-me Quest Bar Apple Pie protein bar that I snuck into the movie.  It was delicious.  It actually had chunks of real apples, and it only has 170 calories for 20g of protein.  I will definitely be ordering more of these.


Thankfully, today has started off on a more positive note.  My workout was awesome – a tempo run that went better than expected after running repeats yesterday and a leg workout that included another new PR for me, this time on squats.  I’ve been following The Shortcut to Size program from bodybuilding.com for the last month, and I will have completed Phase 1 at the end of this week. I will post a more in-depth review after wrapping this phase up, but I will say that I have definitely noticed gains in strength over the last four weeks. Very exciting!