Colorful, Fun Bread!!

Here's a fun twist to an immortal, albeit, a sometime boring staple. Grab a bread recipe, a couple bottles of food coloring, and your favorite little helper to make some colorful treats. 

First, prepare your favorite Italian or French dough as the recipe dictates. If you don't have a favorite recipe, here's a link to quite a few: http://allrecipes.com/recipes/bread/

After you prepare the dough, let it rest for at least a hour.

After the dough has risen, divide the dough into equal parts. The number of balls depend on how many colors you want to work with. 

 

Place one ball on a slightly floured mat and set the rest aside. Add a few drops of coloring. 

Knead the coloring into the dough until the color is evenly spread.

It'll take about 5 min of kneading. Most of that 5 min, the dough will look like this.

Hang in there. Eventually, the dough will look like this.

Repeat this process with the remaining balls of dough.

Now it's time to call your little one. Have them roll out each ball of dough.

Roll out to the size of your baking pan.

Brush a thin layer of water on top of the dough. 

Place dough strip in baking pan. Repeat process with remaining pieces of dough, firmly placing each color on top of the previous one.

Here's an example of another bread Archer and I worked on together. Here he rolled little pieces of dough and put in this small cake mold. We skipped the layer of water in this one. The water layer helps keep the different layers of dough together to prevent air holes. Press the dough in tightly and you should be fine.

Allow your dough to rest again for at least a hour then bake in oven as directed by your recipe. When the top is golden brown (though that's a little hard to see when working with colored bread), and the bottom sounds hollow when tapped on, it is done.

Here it is cut open, just beautiful!

The kids loved eating their colorful sandwiches and buttered toasts. I have to say, at times I felt as if I was going to bite down into a lovely piece of colored white cake, but, rest assured, the food coloring will not change the flavor of your bread.

This activity does take a little more time than others, but both my little ones loved helping me make the bread dough, and then rolling and shaping the dough into the molds. Plus it gets them acclimated to cooking at an early age, which is very important. :) 

(Oh, and did a fail to mention, you get lots of yummy bread at the end.)  :D

Enjoy!!