Book #7 - Friendship Bread

I love to bake.  I like measuring out soft white flour in precise, leveled cups.  I like the smell of unsalted, sweet butter blending with brown sugar and vanilla in my white Kitchen Aid mixer. 

I’m no Paula Deen, but if she stopped by, I’d give her a taste of my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, cream cheese brownies, and chocolate pie.

Baking is fun, but truthfully, my primary objective is to feed my sweet tooth – all 32 of them.  My annoying health nut conscience knows that my butt and thighs will balloon to uncomfortable proportions if I eat all the desserts I make each week.  So, rather than throw all the extras in the trash, I take them to my neighbors. 

I’m a baked good pusher.

Seeking for insights on friendship, but needing a light read during this busy season, I picked up Friendship Bread by author Darian Gee.  Set in 2008 in a fictional small Illinois town called Avalon, this book weaves recipes for Amish friendship bread with stories of women helping each other through tough times.

The book begins as a plate of Amish friendship bread and its accompanying Ziploc bag of gooey white starter is left anonymously on the doorstep of a family grieving over the death of their 10 year old son.  Over the next several months, the bread and starter multiply, divide, and disperse through the entire town as restaurants, garage mechanics, quilting circles, and other quirky characters test out the recipes.  Toward the end of the story, the town folk come together in an Amish friendship bread-making frenzy, baking over 4,681 loaves for people in a recently flooded, neighboring town.

All the characters in the book love this bread, so I had to try the recipe myself.  On day one, I mixed the yeast, water, flour, sugar and milk, and poured it into a Ziploc bag.  I babysat the mixture for the next 10 days, mashing the bag, adding ingredients, and watching it inflate and deflate during its fermentation process.  On day ten, I made two loaves of bread and a batch of brownies (both recipes from the book).  The wonderful aroma coming from my oven surpassed all the expensive holiday-scented candles, oils, and air fresheners I buy to mask unpleasant odors in our home.  However, after all that work, I honestly wasn’t impressed with the outcome.  For the baked-good deprived, I suppose any hot, fresh bread tastes better than the waxy, store-bought cupcakes that dry out in the office lunch room.  But, as far as sweet breads go, I’ve had better.

It would not be a true Amish friendship bread experience if I didn’t push off some part of the process onto someone else.  Around noon on baking day, I attempted to take a plate of warm sliced bread to my two adjacent neighbors.  I didn’t dare pawn off a bag of starter to them.  I was the recipient of Amish friendship bread starter many years ago and always threw the mysterious bag of goop and lengthy instructions in the trash.  One of my favorite quotes from Friendship Bread was,

“Friends don’t give friends Amish friendship bread.”

At each neighbor’s doorstep, I knocked, waited, and never got an answer.  They either looked through the peep hole and tip toed away quietly, or they really were not home.  I sheepishly returned to my house, cellophane-wrapped plate still in hand, feeling a little rejected.  Later that night, I sent my children next door with a loaf of bread for Vena, my neighbor from Pakistan.  Small children love to ring doorbells and are much less likely to have their food offerings refused.  Vena kindly took the bread, walked back to my house with my children, and gave me a hug.   

Reading Friendship Bread made me wonder:

Is it a good idea to take home-baked goods to neighbors and friends? 

Is it a successful pathway to friendship?  Do my nice neighbors smile, accept the offering, shut the door, and chuck the plate of goodies straight into the trash, wishing I would just leave them alone?  It took me several months to find out that I had been proudly delivering warm chocolate chip cookies to a neighbor who gets a headache whenever he eats chocolate.  We have been the recipient of cookies, brownies, orange rolls, banana bread, toffee, and other sweets on many occasions.  Some were devoured in less than a minute while others were completely inedible.  However, in all cases, we appreciated the thought.

I suppose I will continue to deliver baked-goods to my friends and neighbors until they ask me to stop.  I’m not offended if the treats are not eaten.  If a dessert leaves my home, I clearly wasn’t going to eat it either.  For me, it’s more about the message.  The cookies, brownies, and breads are my way of saying,

I want to be your friend.