Sourdough cinnamon raisin bread - WARNING: non-dietetic!

I tried a new recipe for sourdough cinnamon raisin bread that I have been taste-testing all morning (in the interests of research only, to be sure).  I got it from http://vegannomnoms.blogspot.com/2009/03/sourdough-cinnamon-raisin-bread.html

As you might be aware, I’m not into cooking, but I have this thing about sourdough – I don’t know why but I feel compelled to succeed at making a great loaf of sourdough bread.  I have set my handicaps:  Little patience for kneading, no cheating with electrical appliances, and, oh yeah, no oven.

That’s another story, the oven thing.

Anyway, now that my stomach is full of mildly underbaked sourdough cinnamon raisin bread, I have a new challenge:  Getting the baked-on sugar cement off the pan.

See,  I didn't follow the recipe exactly – I always preach following exactly the first time I make something from someone else’s recipe but in fact I rarely do that myself.  In this case I didn't have brown sugar (well, I probably do have some but I didn't look very hard for it after a cursory glance at the front of the shelves).  I also added a little dried lemon zest I had - I like the citrus taste in cinnamon rolls I enjoy at one particular local restaurant and thought that citrus might be a nice addition to the bread.  The result is pretty good but I think orange would be better. 

As for the sugar cement - the recipe calls for sealing the edges of the dough when rolling it up after sprinkling the dough with the sugar/spice mix.  I didn’t do much of a job kneading and maybe the recipe doesn’t call for enough flour (or maybe I didn’t measure the liquid part accurately – it eyeballed about right, it seemed to me) but for whatever reason, there was a lot of sugar leakage.

That didn’t seem all that important at the time.  I got a hint when I went to pick up the loaf to put in a bowl to rise and it started falling apart.  And after being left to rise overnight, the dough was kind of sitting in some sweet liquid broth – from the raisins?  Don’t know, but I poured some out.  Guess whatever it was, it had a high sugar content so now I have baked sugar cement on the bottom of the pan.  Also, as I mentioned above, it's undercooked – the recipe called for preheating to 450 and baking at 400, I preheated to 400 and ended up baking at 375 more or less.  That’s because I’m using a stove-top camping oven that just doesn’t like getting much higher than 400.  Like I said, that’s another story.

Meanwhile, the bread still is yummy - with all that cinnamon, sugar and raisins, how could it not be?