Love this whole series of blogs on American baking. One of the first loaves I ever baked was a recipe given to me by my sister (origin unknown-the recipe, not my sister!) for a honey whole wheat bread that used cake yeast. This was back in the 70''s. That bread was a real winner, even my kids loved it. Now I bake bread every week for hubby and me, using mostly recipes from the KAF website. I suppose I should branch out a little, but there are so many varieties of bread on the site that I can't tear myself away! I baked the semolina rolls when they first appeared, and sorry to say, mine were a failure. That picture of the dough in the 8 cup measure? Well, mine looked like that after only 30 minutes. Good thing I was checking! Then I found it very difficult to knead in the raisins and pine nuts without working the dough very hard. After shaping, the rolls had almost no second rise (I gave them an hour and forty five minutes), and no oven spring. They ended up being very tasty hockey pucks! Can't figure out where I went wrong, but I suspect that it had something to do with that super fast first rise and having to overwork the dough to get those slippery pine nuts in. I tried posting a review at the recipe site, but it somehow got lost in the Internet ozone. One of my very few KAF failures. I will have to try them again, but this time adding the raisins and pine nuts at the beep on my Zo, since I don't think my yeast will have any problem with the early addition of sugar, judging by my first experience!

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