Baking for a Beginner: Bagels

I have mentioned many a time about my fear of baking. Yet, the more I have been writing this blog and trying new techniques, my confidence has improved to the point I am making brownies from scratch. Now with winter having finally arrived, I get even more motivated to bake and to look for recipes that take me out of my comfort zone. This now brings me to my fear of working with yeast. Interestingly enough I had a conversation with my mother a few days ago about how she won't work with yeast because she has never had any success at it. Great, so now there is a childhood embedded fear of yeast I have to overcome!

No matter because when I saw Cooking Light's recipe for "real bagels" I completely ignored the yeast component for two reasons 1) I love bagels 2) I am determined to try and make more things instead of buying from the store. My husband, however, thinks I am insane (well in this case more insane than usual) because he is of the opinion that they are readily available and he is also aware of the trauma I undergo when baking. I clearly ignored him and off to work I went.

My Kitchen-aid mixer was very happy to get some use.

Now here is the step I stink at EVERY SINGLE TIME. The rising. Oh, the rising, or lack thereof. I can't decide if it's impatience on my part in preparing the yeast and water, the water temperature or if I can blame it on my husband and his insistence to keep the house at 67 degrees. That's Fahrenheit folks. I am sure that the part of the recipe that says keep dough in a warm place (85 degrees) assumes that you can achieve that temperature without having to turn an oven (or a space-heater) on.

So having failed to achieve adequate rising, I soldiered on and made my little bagels.

The boiling part I was very good at:

Being that I DID NOT plan to make bagels on this particular day, the only add-ons I had were sesame seeds so I made some sesame...

And some plain. They actually looked very nice coming out of the oven. They were just...small. 

Actually they reminded me of those Lender's bagels I used to scoff at in the grocery store when I had a Bodo's Bagels so close that I was spoiled with authentic fabulous bagels and could not imagine why a grocery store in my immediate area would even carry them! My little bagels did have a nice flavor and I know where I went wrong so I will try it again...guess I will just have to turn the oven on in order to get the rise I need!