"All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast." ~John Gunther

"the first printed mention of bagels... is to be found in the Community Regulations of Kracow, Poland for the year 1610 which stated that bagels would be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth." 

~ The Joys of Yiddish" by Leo Rosten

Yesterday morning I made bagels!! I used this recipe and this step by step how-to, thank goodness for the internet! Life must have been much harder with black and white cook books!  OK, so here is how it went down:

The ingredients + sugar

 I first decided to make blueberry bagels, who doesn't love those?! I didn't think about it and used slightly frozen blueberries, which while melting lost all their liquids and chilled the hell out of the yeast... making it difficult to proceed with the rising... whoops.

 So I left it to rise for FOREVER and then made another batch of plain ones because clearly the blueberry ones were effed.... so then I laid the bowl sideways with heat coming straight from the oven vent into the covered bowl...

 which just made things more wet and mushy and toxic purple!

 So, after giving the blueberry batch 3 times the allotted rising time and the plain 2 times the suggested time it was time to make them into rings!

 Which, even with TONS of flour was incredibly sticky.  And at this point my hands were also purple... 

 But I got them all shaped, and was supposed to wait for them to rise again... SO MUCH WAITING!!!  While doing all this waiting I started looking into the history of bagels and am now pleasantly up to date on bagel facts and trivia!  I hope you also feel slightly more educated after reading the above quote and watching this bagel catastrophe (which turns out mostly good in the end) unfolding.

 But then I got to boil them!!!!

 Which was kind of odd and gross but I knew it was necessary to the best part of the bagel... chewy-ness!!

 Then bake them for 10 minutes, flip over and bake another 10 mins!

 TA-DA! They are super blue/purple but I am OK with that... because....

 They look good with cream cheese on them!!!  And, taste even better!!!

So, here is the whole bunch, minus one I ate, and they look pretty good.  There is something slightly wrong with the plain ones surprisingly not the blue ones.  They didn't want to rise properly the second time and so I finally gave up and boiled them anyway.  But, when I dropped them in the water they SANK! Which made me think of eggs, they are bad when they sink, or is it when they float... anyway, when they don't do the normal thing they are bad... where my bagels bad? Would they stink when I cracked one open?!?! Luckily, the answer was no.

I had one of the plain ones for breakfast today with egg, bacon and cheese on it! Sadly the worst part was the bagel, it was too dense and hard.  Maybe I will microwave it next time, microwaves make everything softer!  Or maybe they can be bird food.  I already have requests to make some cinnamon raisin ones (it is super hard to find bagels in Sweden!).  But, I am excited about a nice toasty blueberry bagel for breakfast tomorrow before school!  mmmm!!!