pbi Switzerland, Bern Regional Group: baking day for Human Rights

Hiya again

Last Friday afternoon and evening, three women from pbi's Bern regional group met at the ancient bakery of Buempliz, a suburb of Bern (once an independent municipality), to bake Peace Doves. We enjoyed the assistance of the "Oven Team", Kathrin and Hanspeter. Very many thanks to you!
Here are some visual impressions from the baking. Our "oven master" prepared the oven (and took some of these photos with my camera).
We used a very traditional "Zuepfe"*) recipe to mix the dough (from 10 kgs of flour) in the old-fashioned way: eight hands worked in a big trough made of beautiful white sycamore wood.
(*Zuepfe = traditional tressed loaf made of white flour, butter, milk, yeast, and painted with egg yolk)
It was great fun to knead all the week's frustrations into the mix of white flour, butter and yeasty milk.The big lump of dough at the end was almost too heavy for any one of us to lift. We shaped the doves by rolling small lumps of dough into a "sausage" and twisting it into a simple knot.

A snip with a kitchen knife cleft the little tail in two to give the dove a more birdlike look.
Above: the freshly tied doves; below: after about half an hour the doves have risen and rounded out. These are ready for painting and adding the currant-eyes before they go into the oven. Two currants marked the eyes, a brush of egg-yolk made sure the doves would turn out golden and shiny.
We baked them in the wood-heated oven -- that was probably the quickest step in the whole process, which lasted about four hours. (Above: the glowing embers before Hanspeter scraped them out of the oven)

The next day, a couple of days before the actual International Day of Human Rights (always on December 10), we sold the delicious doves to appreciative supporters of human rights. The count isn't in just yet, but we did manage to augment the pbi coffers. :) The sale went well, despite people already being stressed out with Xmas shopping. It was a cold, fairly wet day but six people sold some 140 doves within about three hours. Shame I didn't take photos of the finished product.

Peace!