I'm not a baker (nor a butcher or a candle-stick maker)

Last night I had some friends over for dinner, and for the first time since Mrs. Sossin's grade 3 class at United Synagogue Day School, I baked a challah. Well, I use the word "bake" lightly, because despite the fact that making bread is basically a biology experiment, I have utterly failed each time I've tried to do it.

So this time, I bought a frozen, uncooked challah. It seemed Leora-proof, meaning that it looked impossible to screw up. The directions were simple:
1. Remove challah from freezer
2. Put on baking pan
3. Defrost at room temperature for 5 - 6 hours
4. Bake at 325F for 30 minutes
Easy, huh? But the challah was supposed to double its frozen size during defrosting, which seemed like kind of a dubious claim to me. So I took pictures every few hours and want to show you how it turned out.

Frozen whole wheat challah. Mmmm....

Here it is after about 1 hour. I don't have a ruler, so I don't know if it's any bigger, but right now it's about the size of a 710 mL bottle of water.

So I gave the yeast some time to do their thang, (approximately 5 hours) but the bread didn't expand very much.

Then I finally put it in the oven, and lo and behold, it started to grow! It was a miracle!

I kept on opening up the oven door to see it expand, because it was just too cool.
And then, once my friends came over, it deflated again.