The moment we've all been waiting for.

Behold... the bread!

You may find this ironic, but I'm not obsessed with dessert. I like a little sweet every day, but my sweet tooth is not raging. The thought of eating an entire pint of ice cream makes me want to vom. But bread... that's another story. This is my elastic waist pant class, for sure.

Once I got past the rotten banana smell of the bread lab (hel-LO, fermenting yeast), it's been pretty awesome. Reasons:

• The ovens are 500 degrees, which warms up the room nicely counteracts the low of 14 that we've had three days this week.
• Bread making is super physical. Your hands (slash arms and elbows) get dirty and my arms are exhausted by the end of the day. My kind of baking.
• BREAD IS DELICIOUS! And for the most part, it only contains four ingredients. You just manipulate them to create different tastes and textures by changing their temperature, your timing, and how you bake the bread. MAGICAL!
• The teacher is a hilarious, jolly German. The class is really fun and his teaching style is laid back.

So far we've been focusing on baguettes. I'm going to take some photos of the crazy deck ovens that we have -- there's a gigantic platform that we use to load all of the bread into the ovens.

Here's the inside of my baguette, with nice little holes. The goal it to have lots of holes, but "none big enough for a mouse to hide" (my chef's instructions are vague but endearing). Actually, in the picture above, you can see the top half of the baguette flying in the air. Action shot!

Here are some ciabattas. Ciabatta is delicious, and the reason is probably because it sits in a giant pool of olive oil for an hour or so before you bake it. Chef described it as "gangsta bread"... because it's awesome, not because it instigates violent shootouts with the other breads.

Tomorrow is the last day of school before Christmas break so we don't have class -- instead, we have to deep clean the kitchen. Eeek. We are also expecting an ice storm tonight... so cross your fingers for a snow day!