BBA #27: Portuguese Sweet Bread

I've been away...in a couple of senses. I'm in the travel-heavy part of my work year, so had fallen behind on posting and somewhat on baking. Then...my computer drive failed. Or maybe it was a problem with the system software, but no matter what I had a business trip, came back and almost immediately had the computer failure, took it off to the shop for a new drive (bless you, AppleCare), and left on another trip before the repair was done. Once the computer was back up and the drive restored from Time Machine, I discovered that iPhoto had longer-standing problems than the drive failure, and I have lost the originals of all of my photos back to May or earlier. On some of those I still have the thumbnail version iPhoto produces, on others I just had an album thumbnail which I never could dig out of the iPhoto file structure that was visible in the damaged iPhoto library--just enough to remind me that I had various sets of photos that are now lost. Since all that there have been 2 more business trips, further delaying blogging and baking.

Moral: save and backup digital photos multiple ways. They cannot be replaced. On a few of these sets I made Flickr uploads, just not enough of 'em.


So anyway, last bread post was July 4. I baked the Portuguese Sweet Bread July 16, which tells you how behind I am between computer messes and not-baking due to travel. And since I didn't blog these as I baked them and didn't always make notes, things may be....brief, this one in particular. I have very little memory of this bread, but as I'm not fond of Hawaiian/Portuguese sweet bread that's perhaps not completely due to the several months' lag in the writeup. It's an egg bread with enough sugar to make it taste sweet but not to put it in the sweet-roll category, and is flavored with lemon, orange, and vanilla extracts. My photos (uploaded before the computer crash and iPhoto losses) show that I made a single loaf, braided and baked in a loaf pan instead of the suggested boule. It had a nice even crumb, but with the sweetness and flavorings, not much got eaten as a loaf bread. The remainder did make very nice French toast, though.