Most Difficult Thing I've Made

Earlier this week I went out on a limb. I wanted to make one of my childhood favorite snacks; the soft pretzel. Typically, they are purchased at the grocery store in the frozen section and you quickly toss them in the microwave and snack on. They're also available at amusement parks, sports stadiums, and in just about every mall. But how do you make them? It's a bit more complicated than it seems. I started out by activating some yeast in some warm water.

Once the yeast was activated, I added some brown sugar.

Some vanilla.

A touch of salt.

And then some flour. This was challenging for me as I was slowly adding more and more flour. This being my first time making a pretzel dough, I had no idea how the consistency was supposed to be. I just kept adding flour until the dough pulled away from the bowl. But it continued to be super sticky.

Then I let the dough sit and rise for a while.

Now here's the trick to getting a nice and golden brown pretzel. I brought some water to a boil and added lots of baking soda. Then brought it down to a simmer.

While the water was getting ready, I started to work with the dough. I didn't take any pictures before finishing, because the dough was so sticky and extremely hard to work with. I was almost convinced that the pretzels weren't going to come out. After cutting the dough into equal sized portions, I rolled the dough and formed the classic pretzel shape we recognize. 

Then, the pretzels took a dip in the simmering baking soda water.

Once all the pretzels received their baking soda bath they were ready for the oven.

They came out of the oven nice a golden brown.

They pretzels didn't come out perfect, but they tasted quite good. I learned some things to make these pretzels better the next time I make them. The pretzels should go into the baking soda bath on both sides and for an optimized amount of time (which I don't know exactly yet). I needed to roll out the dough a lot thinner, but the dough for some reason didn't want to give up its shape. It was a very elastic type dough. Also, I need to work on perfecting the dough recipe and figure out correct proportions. With that being said, the pretzels really did come out better than expected. Megan and I really enjoyed them and thought they tasted great. I read online that the pretzels don't keep too long after being baked. So instead of risking it, we froze them. Today I heated up one of them that I froze, and honestly I think it tasted better than the day I baked them! So what's the most difficult thing you've ever made?