Life and art imitate each other

Part of the prompt for the Shousetsu Bang*Bang issue I’m writing for is to include a recipe connected to the story and have a photograph of the food. So today I made my mother’s Christmas spice bread and wrote the scene where it appears in the story. Baking in general is a major focus of the story and I’ve been doing rather more of it than usual the past few days. I saved this particular scene until after I had a chance to make the bread. I’ve never made a braided loaf before, for one, so I thought it would be nice if I knew what I was talking about. And it was just nice to get the smells and feels of the story for myself.

Photographing the bread was a less pleasant experience. Between the borrowed digital camera and my understandable lack of a studio with proper lighting, it was an adventure to find a way of framing the bread that did not show my beat-up oven or the cooling rack it was sitting on. I think it turned out okay, as far as photographs of bread go. I did have to get zoomed in pretty tight though, to block out the extraneous crap, so it looks a little abstract. The egg wash made it beautifully golden though, so the bread gets full marks for not sucking.

Published by Joyce Sully

Joyce Sully believes in magic and dragons and ghosts, but is not convinced her next-door neighbors are real. So she writes stories. Really, what else could she do?