I'm lost!

I love me.

In fact, I love me so much that I'm going to tell you another story about me.

This is a story that I didn't know. My stepmom shared it with me last night, when we were talking about how children tend to take the things adults say very literally.

It appears that, when I was 3, my stepmom ordered an ice cream cake for me from Baskin Robbins. She intended to order it from a store on Pacific Coast Highway, a road that winds down California's coast for hundreds of mile. Unfortunately, she accidentally ordered it from a different store on the same highway, three or four towns away.

In attempting to reach the store, with three-year-old me snug in the backseat, she got turned around.

"Oh dear," she said. "We're lost."

I burst into tears, believing that we were Hansel-&-Gretel lost, never to see our loved ones again.

"Oh NO!," she says I wept, crying giant-sized toddler tears. "But I want to see my daddy again!"

I can't help but wonder how great that ice cream cake tasted when we finally arrived home that night. Probably pretty darn good.

Mmmm, bread ...

Whenever anyone shakes their head at my weight-loss lamentations, and says something about how giving up bread caused them to lose 50 pounds in two days, I confess: I look at them like they're crazy.

If loving bread is wrong, I don't want to be right.

I've owned a bread machine, and loved setting the timer at night to wake up to delicious warm cinnamon bread early the next morning. I did the whole Amish Friendship Bread thing. If there are bananas within three blocks of me, I will turn them into SugarMamaBakingCo's banana bread.

So when I read Wan Life to Live's entry about making the Perfect Sandwich Bread, I looked in my pantry and decided to give it a shot.

It took nine whole ingredients, and then basically put itself together. With minimal effort on my part, my house smelled of freshly baking bread within three hours of my hauling out the Kitchen Aid mixer. And after 35 minutes in the oven .... viola!

Perfect is right ... despite my minimal bread-making experience, it came out beautifully. I waited about 5 minutes before slicing two pieces, slathering them with butter, cinnamon and sugar, and handing one off to my offical Taste Tester, who was working on the garage.

"No thanks," he tried. "I"m not really that hu ..." (This was when he saw that I wasn't actually going to leave the garage until he tasted my bread).

"Hey, wow! This is great!"

Isn't it funny how hunger can come back when you've got a piece of warm, buttery fresh bread in your hands?

This weekend I made two more loafs. One I sacrificed to the snacking gods, and to make garlic toast for Saturday's Oh-So-German dinner, but the other is wrapped in plastic in the fridge for BLT night.

And I just found a recipe for Honey Oatmeal Bread ...