Cooks' Delicious White Sweet Bread Dough

My mother used to make a wonderful bread when we were growing up. It was her favorite recipe, and usually she made the bread for herself to eat right before bedtime.  It was a special treat when us kids got to have some too. Sometimes she would make little "baby loaves" to share with us.

When adulthood came on, I remember starting to bake breads myself, and I wanted mother's favorite recipe. However, she had fallen out of the habit of making the bread and lost the recipe! This felt like a tragedy to me.

Maybe a year ago, or so, I called my mom up to ask her what she could remember of her famous recipe, and between what she told me and a recipe I found on the Internet, I think I have pretty much managed to resurrect this tasty treat! I hope you enjoy it.  We sure do!

I found this recipe on the Cooks website.

Delicious White Sweet Bread Dough

6-7 cups flour

½ cup sugar

2 tsp. salt

2 pkg. yeast (4 ½ tsp.)

1 cup water

1 cup milk

½ cup butter

1 egg

Heat milk, water and butter in pan until very warm, approximately 120-130 degrees. (You can skip this step if you use powdered milk instead (made with very hot water, 120-130 degrees or hottest from the tap), melt butter separately, then mix together the powdered milk mixture, melted butter and additional 1 cup very hot water from the recipe.)

In a large bowl, add 2 cups flour and sugar, salt and yeast; blend very well. Add warm liquid and egg to flour mixture and beat with a beater; slowly add rest of flour and knead.  Let rise about 1 hour in a warm place until dough is doubled in size.  Punch down and shape dough into loaves.  Place in greased loaf pans and let rise again.

Bake at 350 degrees for 20-30 minutes or until top is brown and bread is cooked through.  Brush hot loaves with melted butter, if desired.

My metal bread pans are larger than my glass pans, so you will have to experiment and see how many loaves this makes for your size pans.  I find this recipe makes either three medium loaves or two larger loaves with one or two additional mini loaf pans to finish off the dough.  Mini loaf pans only take about 20 minutes or less to cook.  

I personally like to use glass pans, because then I can see that not only the top of the loaf has browned, but I can also check the sides and bottom as well.  No one wants to cut into a doughy loaf of bread after going to that much work!