My attempts at an 8 strand plaited loaf!

I'm getting a bit bored of a certain well-known competitive cooking show, as it's becoming too competitive, too 'professional' and far too pretentious for my liking (honestly, who really cooks anything in a sous vide?). But, I'm loving this series of the Great British Bake Off, as it has kept its gentle tweeness, thanks mainly I think to the well-chosen and generally pleasant range of contestants, the knowledgeable (but not patronising) experts Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry and to the lovely Mel and Sue, who co-present the programme.

So far, in this series, I've been inspired to have a go at baking the rather tricky looking 8 strand plaited loaf. Before this, I'd only ever attempted a rather pedestrian 3 stranded plait. The instructions for plaiting the dough were a bit confusing at first, but once I understood what they meant, my plait started to grow and actually looked quite like the ones on the programme!

With my first attempt (above), I followed the GBBO recipe to the letter, despite having reservations about the amount of yeast used (I would usually only use one sachet for that amount of flour). I think this resulted in the bread over-proving, as the resulting loaf was flatter than I expected, had quite a close texture and wasn't particularly tasty.

My second attempt (left) was with my tried and tested challah recipe. As this dough is softer than a plain bread dough, it was slightly more difficult to plait and the resulting loaf wasn't quite as neat as my first attempt. It did, hower, taste better!

I've entered this post on this month's Fresh from the Oven linky over on Fuss Free Flavours (started by Claire at Purely Food and Michelle at Utterly Scrummy) .