There are some kitchen projects that sound much more complicated than they actually are. Homemade bread was one of those for me.
We’ve made this bread twice now, and both times it has turned out. The second time, we decided that making bread alone apparently wasn’t enough, so we also made homemade butter and turned the whole thing into cinnamon toast.
Of course, making bread with little helpers means the finished loaf isn’t the only thing you end up with. At one point my youngest decided the flour was lotion. Then lipstick. So while the bread itself went according to plan, the kitchen was a little more…floured than necessary.
You can watch us make the bread, homemade butter, and cinnamon toast here—including what happens when you give a toddler access to flour.
The Homemade Bread Recipe We Use
I didn’t develop the bread recipe we’re using. We followed Lauren Allen’s Homemade Bread recipe from Tastes Better From Scratch exactly as written.
I’m not going to copy her full recipe here because it’s her recipe, and she has all of the ingredient amounts and complete instructions on her site. What I can tell you is what the process was like for us and what helped make homemade bread feel a lot less intimidating.
Making Homemade Bread Is Mostly a Lot of Waiting
The actual hands-on part wasn’t nearly as complicated as I once imagined. The recipe starts by proofing the yeast, then making and kneading the dough. After that, most of the process is giving the dough time to rise.
The recipe uses two rises: one after making the dough and another after dividing and shaping it into loaves. That’s probably the biggest thing I would tell someone making yeast bread for the first time: don’t start it when you need bread in 30 minutes.
The good news is that the waiting time isn’t working time. Once the dough is sitting there rising, you can move on to something else. Or, in our case, clean flour off a child.
What Should Bread Dough Feel Like?
One of the parts that can feel vague when you’re new to bread is figuring out how much flour to add. The recipe gives a range because the exact amount can vary. The important part is the dough itself.
Lauren describes the finished dough as smooth and elastic, pulling away from the sides of the bowl while still being just slightly sticky. That’s much more useful than dumping in flour until you’ve reached an exact number and hoping for the best.
Yes, The Kids Can Help—But Prepare for Flour Everywhere
This is exactly the kind of kitchen project I like doing with the girls because there are plenty of jobs they can help with along the way. It also happens to involve flour, which apparently opens up an entirely different category of activities.
My youngest decided flour worked perfectly well as lotion and lipstick. I can’t say I recommend that particular step, but the bread survived.
That’s kind of the point for me. Cooking with kids is rarely the fastest or cleanest version of cooking, but they get to be part of making something we’re actually going to eat. And eventually the flour comes off.
Shaping, Rising, and Baking the Loaves
After the first rise, the dough gets punched down, divided into two portions, shaped, and put into loaf pans for its second rise. The original recipe says to let the dough rise until it’s about an inch above the pans before baking.
Then the loaves bake at 350°F until they’re golden brown. We followed the original recipe as written, and both times we’ve made it, it worked for us.
Then We Made Homemade Butter, Because Why Not?
Fresh bread is already pretty hard to leave alone. Fresh bread with homemade butter is worse.
We made homemade butter with heavy cream while we were making the bread. The butter is actually an even simpler project, and washing it in ice water was probably the most interesting part for the girls.
The Actual Goal: Cinnamon Toast
Once we had fresh bread and fresh butter sitting in the kitchen, cinnamon toast felt inevitable.
And really, that’s the whole reason these two projects ended up in the same video. Neither homemade bread nor homemade butter needs to be an everyday project for us. But every once in a while, making both from scratch and turning them into something as simple as cinnamon toast is pretty fun.
We’ve only made this particular bread recipe twice so far, so I’m not pretending to be a bread expert. But it worked both times, the girls could be involved, and we ended up with two homemade loaves at the end.
Even if one of the helpers did wear part of the flour.
Growing as we go.