My ALMOST bread baking catastrophe

When life gives you flat yeast...

I should really know better by now but I did it anyway. I followed the recipe exactly and I ended up with a seemingly unusable mass of flat dough.

I have been making bread in my bread machine lately and I decided I wanted to make more than the single loaf at a time. In order to have enough room I need to use the Kitchenaid, and I decided to use the recipe out of their book.

This is the recipe. The part of this process that did not seem to work correctly was the first damn step. It says in the book, earlier on, that the fast method is to mix the yeast with the water first, and then add all the ingredients. I neglected to allow the yeast to sit and begin to become active before adding the rest of the ingredients, and just plowed on with it (despite being no mention of it in book and it being my normal process with the yeast).

I mixed up my dough and transferred it to a lightly oiled bowl and covered it with plastic wrap, then it was set on top of the refrigerator to rise. I checked on the dough over the next few hours but it didn't show much signs of rising. Dinner had to be made which caused me to promptly forget about the dough.

Next morning I was opening the fridge and saw the covered bowl.... "DOH!"

Well, the dough had not risen at all. I was looking at a two loaf mass of unleavened french bread dough.

"What the hell do I do with this?!"

The idea hit my head with a slight thud. Roll it out and use the cookie cutters to make a cracker like thing.

The oven was set at 400F and I laid all the person shaped ones onto the sheets and baked them for about 15 minutes. When they cooled there was still a little soft texture to them but a slightly crispy bottom.

The letters were all cut out to try and use all the dough up. I managed to get it down to a small ball that was rolled out and baked.

As chance would be, the sunset was awesome and I ran outside with the drone to get some video. In my haste I quickly forgot about the last sheet in the oven and went out flying. Upon returning to the house I suddenly remembered and ran to the oven to remove the now crackers. It actually worked out that I forgot them since it allowed them to actually crisp up.

The big lesson in all of this is to always activate my yeast before using it, no matter what the recipe says. The secondary lesson is that flexibility is a necessary trait in the kitchen and mistakes can lead to some tasty outcomes.