caveat artopta

Be ye forewarned that baking bread while the usual household population of four-half-the-time-and-five-the-other-half-of-the-time is down to three, with one of those being a bottle-refusing nursling (who is not yet a consumer of solids), will be detrimental to your post-partum waistline. And just out of curiousity, how long can I say my waistline is post-partum? Babygirl will be five months old next week. I'll always be post-partum by techinical definition, right?

But yes, it is true. If you take those three lonely oranges spoken of (and photographed) a few days previous and juice them up (manually; too much effort to drag out the juicer and then have to clean it), you will end up with the exact amount required for the recipe you should not be making in such a sparsely populated home, temporary though that scarcity of people might be. Homemade bread? Does not remain uneaten for long. Certainly not long enough to share with the missing family members. And if you count out the baby, as mentioned, the number of potential consumers is two.*

The juice. The Juice! Oh Em Gee! (I had to.) I grew up on frozen concentrated OJ and loved it. I could mix up a jug of it in the morning and drink it all by supper. I can probably count on one hand (possibly even half a hand) the number of times I've had fresh-squeezed orange juice. My little fresh-squeezed cup of juice had the intensity of a crappy-for-you drink like Tang or Sunny D but with the flavour of real, fresh oranges. It had that hit-you-in-the-taste-buds flavour burst. And the colour? Amazing. Look at it! Orange! Not yellow.

So. Take that little glass measuring cup of juice and add to enough ingredients to make the dough for Cinnamon Swirl Orange Bread. Split the risen-and-punched-down dough (I'm all about the hyphens today, aren't I?) into two as the recipe says but roll the second portion out a little bigger and spread it with way too much (is there such a thing?) melted butter and cinnamon sugar to make cinnamon rolls. Mix up the glaze called for in the recipe but instead of putting in on the bread, spread it over the cinnamon rolls instead.

The loaf of bread will be just fine without the glaze.

It has a delicate orange flavour from the juice and zest and a beautiful swirl of cinnamon and sugar inside. And this way it can be toasted. If it lasts long enough to make it to a toaster. Which it isn't. Lasting, that is.

* If the one solids-eating child remaining in the house decides that he doesn't care for the orange flavour of the glaze on the cinnamon rolls (but doesn't mind the orange flavour in the rolls) and chooses instead to have a half slice of bread in his school lunch, that's fine. You have a bread-eating partner. If that child then comes home from school saying that, on second thought, he doesn't really like the bread either because of the "brown stuff in it" (the cinnamon and sugar, perhaps?) and requests it please be made "without the brown stuff next time", you've lost that bread-eating partner. And you will find yourself eating two thirds (or is that three quarters?) of the loaf and 81.25% (yes, really) of the rolls with only two, possibly three, rolls being eaten by others (one or two by my mom and part of one by the boychild).

So caveat artopta - don't make those things over which you will lose the struggle with your willpower. And caveat mansor. For you will ingest way too much gluten and feel like a slug.