Bread Bodies

While I was struggling for some ideas, I was sent a link to some bread heads by one of my teachers. I thought it was a really cool idea and wanted to give it a shot of my own since we had some (expired) bread mixes in the house. I took a few shortcuts - obviously, using a bread mix, and also using a break making machine, which took away a lot of the difficult elements (kneading etc).

I ran into a few troubles along the way. During the proving process, the mix began to overflow the machine (we used two mixes, which was clearly too much), so I had to disrupt it to move it to a bigger bowl. In doing so, I noticed the dough was really wet and sticky, so I added more flour until it looked how it was supposed to. I didn't let it prove any more after that.

Shaping the bread was more difficult than I expected. Compared to more mainstream sculpting mediums (like clay), bread dough was incredibly sticky, so it was hard to get any real detail. I tried my best, and accentuated areas using raisins. This didn't work too well because I didn't press some of them in far enough, so the bread head lost all his teeth during baking. After baking, the bread was still pretty raw in the middle, so I clearly didn't leave it in long enough.

Despite all those issues, I found the overall process really fun and found the results to be really interesting. I'd love to retry it, except using an in date mix to see if it helps with some of the issues. It could be really fun to incorporate the family to create individual heads and compare how they all look at the end.