Inspiration: One of my new-to-me favorite cooking shows is Girl Meets Farm. So much so that when I spotted one of Molly Yeh’s cookbooks on the shelf of my local bookshop, I decided to make a purchase. 

Within Molly On The Range was Yeh’s challah bread recipe. 

However, the enclosed recipe makes two loaves — which is a lot of bread! Undoubtedly, aware that these loaves are huge, Yeh also offers alternate ways of utilizing this base dough — including prezel buns. Needing more than the line of instructions given in the book, I quickly located Yeh’s recipe here.

And I must admit, though these bakes looked intimidating to make, once you overcome that trepidation, they are pretty straightforward. And, despite my amateurish scoring skills, these buns turned out great!

Learn From My Mistake: This recipe calls for baked baking soda, which is easy to make. However, in this form, it can (and did for me) easily irritate the skin with very little contact. 

Moreover, next time a recipe calls for baked baking soda, I will need to wear a mask while transferring it into a container, measuring it out, and before adding my wet ingredients into a mix. Since no matter how careful I was, the fine powder went airborne and irritated my lungs as well.

Agatha Christie’s Canon of Characters: I think Lucy Eyelesbarrow, from the Miss Marple mystery 4.50 From Paddington, would whip up this recipe (with far more finesse than I) for one of her clients. As the challah base recipe can yield at least nine different bakes, allowing Lucy to dazzle her clients with a variety of tasty treats with minimal effort! 

My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2025