This has been one of our favorite Holiday Recipes for the past couple of years, and everyone looks forward to getting these as gifts. The cover photo is from last year, when we used Rosella Jam for the filling!
The recipe and instructions are very long and a little time-consuming, but you could also buy the premade crescent dough and use that in place of the sourdough. You would just use the filling of your choice, a glaze or icing, and then bake about 15-20 minutes or until golden brown.
As you may have seen, we have really been trying to honor the Biblical Feasts and Sabbath. A part of that journey has led us to making our own Challah bread… it is so delicious and not too hard to make. The most difficult part for me was learning how to braid it. Here is a great instructional video that helped me:
Do you have a limited budget? Or maybe you want to give gifts, but you aren’t sure what to give?
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We love gifting foods for Christmas as everyone loves food… some are special treats that we only make this time of year so that makes them extra nice to give. We made several treats for our 2024 Polar Express Party and many of them were made as gifts to take home and enjoy… they are always a HIT!
Here are some of our favorite gifts to give (and receive):
I know we posted pictures of the mini bread loaves that we made for Christmas gifts and I might have mentioned that we used a similar recipe for pizza crust after my kiddos kept commenting on how much the bread dough made the kitchen smell like a pizzeria… we’ve been playing around with the recipes and finally have something we think is good enough to share.
This may not be the easiest recipe to make but it is well worth the effort and it gets easier the more times that you make it. Mr. Awesome has even said that this pizza dough is the best we’ve ever made and he really enjoys it… that says a lot coming from a former Pizza Hut fan!
I’ve also seen some Bagel recipes that are very similar to this bread recipe so I might try that one day… this may just be a one-dough-fits-all kind of situation that would simplify my life a lot right now! We generally use Mondays as our Meal Prep day but sometimes the only thing I actually get prepped is the bread dough for the week… it is so nice to be able to just pull a lump of dough out and have fresh bread whenever we want it or need it!
Just remember that everyone’s kitchen is different and your oven may be different than ours too as ours has not been acting very well lately but we have made these several times and these are the directions that we have been using. The printable recipe is at the bottom of the page.
If you want a recipe for more of a sandwich-type bread then try our Easy Homemade Bread recipe.
Are you still trying to come up with a gift idea for someone? This is a great gift to give… either finish the starter out to bake the bread or gift some starter and a copy of the directions to your friends so they can bake their own bread.
I was recently gifted several starters so I had to dig through my old binders to find my old recipes for this gift. It’s been over 10 years since I’ve made any of these recipes. I ended up making 2 loaves of the Basic Recipe, 2 loaves of Banana Bread, 2 loaves of Chocolate Bread, and a double-batch of pancakes, and I still have 2 cups of starter left over to start another batch.
I have included the basic bread instructions in this post and I will also try to include a pretty printable for gifting. This would be so cute to give a small loaf of bread with a small jar of starter and the instructions.
There are many other variations available and you can easily search for more flavor variations online. I will try to update the blog with some of the other recipe variations that I have in my binder.