Thanksgiving happens twice a year for us because I have parents who are separated but who live in the same state. I used to try and squish in both sets of family on the same day but it was always stressful and often disappointing to everyone involved so I love that since starting my own family we have been able to work out a way to split the day. Since I’ve been baking all year, my contribution this year was bread. a whole lot of bread.

For Thanksgiving Day, I made 4 loaves of homemade bread. I used one of the first recipes I ever attempted for this blogging project and have been making it ever since. It was a hit, but I knew it would be good because I make it often.

For Thanksgiving 2.0 (today!) at my mom’s I volunteered to make dinner rolls… which I had never made before. I was a little nervous so I decided to try out two different recipes. One recipe I made last night (and stayed up later than I meant doing it) and the other recipe I started last night and let the dough continue to rise in the fridge overnight before finishing this morning. I’m excited to see how the two compare and hopefully at least one of the two will be enjoyable at our meal today.

The first recipe was pretty straight forward aside

Recipe 1: before & after shots…

from how sticky the dough stayed compared to other recipes I’ve worked with as this year has gone by. It did need to rise twice so that was where I miscalculated how late I would be up, but it smelled really good while baking and I hope that the rolls didn’t dry out overnight since we stored it in the pan with tin foil instead of transferring to a plastic bag for transport right away.

The second recipe sounded a little strange to me, but since it was by the Pioneer Woman, I just went for it. I had never heard of making bread in a  stockpot before. or used milk and vegetable oil for a base.

Halfway through I started getting nervous since the pot looked a bit like what I imagine of the gruel from a Dickens novel. But it did a lot of rising so this morning I

definite gruel consistency before letting it rise last night…

made my husband get up earlier than me to grab the pot out of the kitchen and start bringing it to room temperature when he started our morning coffee. It took a few hours to get it back to regular temperature and then I buttered up the muffin tins and started putting together the rolls.

Then they had to rise again before baking them off just before we left for Thanksgiving. They were baking as I wrote this post so I forgot to actually publish before going to the event, but here’s your before of the rolls and the after picture of them at Thanksgiving 2.0:

Do you think maybe this should count as #40 and #41 since I made two recipes? I thought about it I plan on at least two more projects by the end of the year so may as well so hopefully those plans work out and I will make my goal even with combining these projects!

I hope you all had amazing Thanksgiving weekends.