A year of Bready Bakes: JANUARY Danish Pumpernickel Bread from Scandilicious Baking

Back when we lived in Essex I made a new years resolution to make my own bread, and for the most part I loved the ritual of making a loaf on Sunday morning, but it just seemed to be eaten far more quickly than the stuff I bought at the store.  When we moved up to Edinburgh I tried to keep the rhythm of making bread every week but eventually things just ground to a halt. I'm not making excuses...but I did have a particularly frustrating experience with some faulty loaf tins that left non stick coating on my beautiful seeded loaves...

Anyway, I have decided again to turn my hand to baking bread. I'm challenging myself to try to bake something yeasty and bready at least once a month...it can be a different kind of bread, buns, a sweet loaf, maybe even doughnuts...I've scoured my recipe books and Pinterest and have come up with a long list of potential bakes to try over the coming months. 

This month I have decided to bake a Pumperknickel Loaf.  The recipe is from Scandilicious Baking by Signe Johansen, sadly not available on line...but I've found similar recipes searching Danish Pumpernickel on Pinterest.  

This is a super dense loaf. It is pretty easy to make and requires very little kneading. You basically make a paste out of the flours, rye flakes, and hot water and then once that is cooled you add some melted butter, treacle and yeast. Then you mix it all together, knead it a bit to make sure all the ingredients are evenly distributed and then leave it to rest over night. 

It didn't take too long to get the dough together one night after Lyra went to sleep and the next morning all it needed was to be shaped, left for a further hour to rise/rest (it doesn't really rise) and then baked.  The hardest part was letting it cool enough to slice into thin slices for our Smorrebrod sandwiches for lunch. 

Surprisingly Lyra really liked the pumpernickel bread.  I gave it to her smeared with a little bit of cream cheese convinced she would just lick the cheese off...but she happily devoured it all.