The Bread You Bake When Your Facing is Melting Off

Steve believes it is the End Times and that the heat he's experiencing is more than a mere mortal can endure.  I'll concede that when it becomes the summertime and the earth heats up to normal summer temperatures and you live in a third floor apartment without an air conditioner and you get a day or two of 99% humidity, it's quite hot inside and that you should eat pasta salads and leave the oven alone.  There's no reason to start in with any kind of crazy I-wish-it-were-winter talk, though.  I NEVER wish for winter. 

To keep our home at its lowest possible temperature while still eating food, I baked this bread in the slow cooker yesterday.  It's a revelation.

The instructions are from the creators of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day (I assume you all already know about them, because I was buying the cookbooks at the library when their first book came out and I had to purchase approximately 52 billion copies of it and there were still never any available on the shelf).

Basically, though, you just take your bread dough and slap it in the slow cooker on a sheet of parchment paper for an hour or two (they recommend an hour, my slow cooker took almost two).

I used the artisan bread master recipe and it came out beautifully crusty on the bottom and soft on the top, although the top crust was very pale.

It did in fact take me all of five minutes of actual work to make and it kept the house nice and cool, which was nice, because it meant I didn't have to spend my evening holding The Bairn in front of the fan and telling Steve that he should just try the hot water bottle ice pillow, because it truly will deliver him from heat stroke.