Five-minute Chocolate Prune Bread (with nuts)

This month, the Bread Baking Babes, specifically Jamie of Life’s a Feast, challenged us to make a different kind of bread.  It called my name for three reasons.

It's bread.

It's chocolate.

It's from one of my favorite bread baking books, The New Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (revised & updated edition), by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François.  I must confess that I'm somewhat biased regarding this book -- I created the index.  (I also worked on their previous two publications.)   Try to imagine having a preview peek at dozens of delicious bread recipes!  For a long-time bread baker, that is just heaven.  

So, of course, I had to rise up to the challenge.  (ha ha, rise up. . . .)

Except that the dough didn't.   Rise, that is.   The first proofing took a long time, nearly three times as long as normal, but it did rise.  The next day, when I prepared to form the loaf, the dough just had a weird texture.  I basically pounded the pieces together.  The outlook was poor.

Next, I put the loaf into a proofing oven.  Two hours later, it hadn't budged a bit.  But, ever the trooper until the end, I decided to bake it anyway.  I was totally shocked that the bread actually turned out fine -- three cheers for oven spring!!  The finished bread smelled heavenly and tasted the same.

I'd highly recommend giving this bread a try, whether you stick with prunes (ha ha, stick . . .) or live dangerously by adding nuts or dried cherries.

For the recipe, buy the book (you won't regret it) or stop by one of the Babes blogs for details and commentary.  

(I really shouldn't write posts late at night.)