My English Muffin Bread Overfloweth

No one told me, so I was late in finding that April is National Grilled Cheese Sandwich Month. I had to act fast. (Must bake English muffin bread.) I must make grilled cheese!

In my fanciful visions of the greatest grilled cheese sandwich on earth, I immediately thought, "English muffin bread." It is so airy and crispy with a little bit of chew. Perfect. But I am weary of store bought (as I haven't sampled a taste of English muffin bread in years) and I hadn't any time for searching the local bakeries for theirs (if they even make it on a regular basis).

So instead, I'd make something I've never made before because that would surely come out better than any store bought option in town (you see where I'm going with this?). I shouldn't be so negative, really. I'll admit, it came out quite nice in texture and flavor, it just didn't toast right, which was disappointing. It browned beautifully slathered with butter in a fry pan, but in the toaster, where the magic should be made, it didn't really do it. While toasting away, I even had to cut away the top crusts before they got any blacker and the apartment got any stinkier (I find the smell of burning bread to be very unpleasant and very potent); at that point the face of the bread had hardly browned.

Most of the loaf went towards grilled cheese sandwich research. The last remaining slices, which begged to be toasted, received a different kind of treatment. In a grilled cheese dessert experiment, I had prepared two butters, one flavored with maple syrup and one with sugar. A swathe of the two flavors on opposite sides of each slice, and toast in a pan. They caramelized beautifully like a perfectly broiled piece of cinnamon toast. Crunchy, buttery, sweet love. This was definitely not an complete failure. Who am I kidding, it was a pretty damn good loaf of bread, despite its shortcomings.

But I will try this again. I found a great recipe, very simple, with just the right kind of helpful technicality. I only wish you could have seen it bake. Apparently, I used a smaller loaf pan than needed and the batter-like bread dough just oozed out and over the top of the pan in the first few minutes of baking. After the panic, and a piece of foil placed strategically on the rack below the baking bread, we had little mini English muffin toasty bits. Big bits. Advanced sneak-peek. Yum.