In the last month, I’ve baked 8 loaves from the basic Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day recipe.

Five boules, which were more or less successful. The first couple were great, including the two I baked while extremely hung over the weekend of my birthday. That’s the beautiful thing about this recipe – even if your head is throbbing and you want nothing more than to be horizontal, you can shape a loaf and get it in the oven and have fresh bread to sop up last night’s indulgence in little more than an hour. We had a couple of loaves come out a bit spongy and without the gorgeous crackly crust, which I think was because I baked them at a lower temperature than was prescribed. I also think that I’m going to add a bit more flour in the next batch, as the dough has been really wet.

Two pathetic demi-baguettes made with the ends of the first batch of dough. They tasted fine, but were difficult to shape and never really rose.

One ciabatta, which I forgot to photograph, but which we used for sandwiches the other weekend with roast beef and good mustard.

One gorgeous baguette, so gorgeous and perfect that I went out in the snow just to take photos. Crackly crust, great crumb, can’t wait to bake another one.

Technically this amounts to eight loaves in one month, but really it was just one recipe and a bunch of different shapes. I figure that’s a good start, right?