Amish Friendship Bread

Have you ever had a friend offer you a "starter bag" of Amish Friendship Bread? Well, I have... many times over the years and each time I have to laugh. The first thought you have after eating this sweet bread is how wonderful, and the thought of having a starter of your own to make fresh bread from every ten days is exciting. You start having fantasies about baking all of your own breads, which leads to other crazy thoughts like growing all of your own food and churning your own butter, and some day while your walking about a field of wheat in your Amish dress, there coming over a hill will be a young Harrison Ford, in his "plain" clothes (right off the screen from the movie "Witness") and he's making eyes at you..... So that's how you get sucked in. And truly it is great tasting bread and it does make you feel good to share it with friends.

But what your friends who offer you the starter don't tell you is that each week you must give away 3 cups of starters to other friends, and before you know it you run out of friends and none of the people you are friends with will take any more starter because they're in a pickle of their own trying to find friends to give the stuff too.

It had been years since I'd made any Amish Friendship bread and then suddenly one day at work, in the employee lounge, there it was. A sweet little note and several bags of starter sitting on a table, next to samples of Amish Friendship bread, begging one and all to take the stuff home. I remembered that I enjoyed the bread and I thought... oh.... what the heck and grabbed a bag.

It is now one month later and I have given away starter to the few friends I have left and my husband and I have eaten the bread pretty much everyday, off and on all day and I can feel and see that I've put on some extra pounds. I experimented a bit with some of the variations you can play with. For instance you can add different flavors of puddings and nuts, etc. to change the bread. A particular favorite is the addition of lemon pudding and poppy seeds, and another is pistachio pudding and chopped pecans. But seriously I'm not sure how much longer I can keep this up. I really don't want to go up another pant size.

Despite my words of warning however I do encourage everyone to try this. It can be a lot of fun and with strawberry season upon us, this bread goes great with fresh strawberries and whipped cream. Attached is a link to a website with the starter recipe, as well as some suggestions for variations. You won't regret making it, but you will need a lot of friends, and you will also have to tell yourself at some point when to bake up all of the starter and be done with it, so you can try other things.

Starter recipe: http://www.armchair.com/recipe/bake002.html