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.