Sunday Slow Bake: Sourdough Pastry Braid with Cream Cheese and Cherries

Allowing your mind to wander gives you the time and space to deal with emotions you’d rather hide from.

Sunday Slow Bake is one way I’m attempting to unplug from constant connection and slow down and focus on doing something I love, one step at a time. I cook a lot, but I often find myself multitasking in the kitchen, and my Sunday Slow Bake practice is a way to focus on the work of my hands. 

I’ve been making sourdough bread from a starter my mom gave me during the height of the pandemic. While I enjoy making the bread itself, I also like to find new ways to use my starter discard. In recent months, I’ve made cinnamon rolls, hamburger buns with sesame seeds, and I routinely make a multigrain sandwich bread I use for toast and sandwiches. 

So, when I came across a sourdough pastry braid recipe, I had to try it! This recipe was a bit involved. I had to make the dough ahead of time and let it refrigerate overnight. Then, the next day, I made the filling (I chose cream cheese and fresh cherries since I had an abundance on hand) and rolled out the dough. I’d let the dough refrigerate 20-plus hours, so let’s just saw it was adequately chilled and very difficult to roll out. All that work gave me a lot of time to think. 

Here are a few of the things I learned or noticed: 

• When I was struggling to roll out the too-cold dough, I got easily frustrated. I found myself thinking, “This is going to take forever,” even though there was nothing else on my schedule and I didn’t have to finish by any particular time. 
  

• At first I was using my French rolling pin and struggling to get the dough to do anything. While I was struggling, it made me think of a recent conversation with my mom when she said she didn’t like French rolling pins and I proclaimed that I loved mine. It was enough to make me grab my regular rolling pin from the drawer—and it absolutely worked better. Maybe all those times I’ve said I was bad at rolling out crust, it wasn’t me. . . it was my rolling pin. 
  

• I found myself getting antsy when I had nothing to focus on but the task at hand. I kept trying to hurry so I could get to the next thing, even though the whole afternoon was open. So much of my life is lived at a hurried pace that it’s hard to shake off the hurry mentality. 
  

• I didn’t think the dough was baking correctly in the oven. When I checked it at 11 minutes, it looked almost just like when I put it in the oven—but it was baking and came out of the oven perfectly browned. It’s proof that sometimes in the middle of the process, it’s easy to think there’s no something beautiful can come from the mess, but our God is a God who makes beautiful things. 
  

• Because I’d forgotten to start the dishwasher after breakfast, it was full and in the middle of a cycle, so when I got the pastry braid into the oven, I started to wash the pile of dishes. Washing dishes is one of those tasks where your hands are busy, but your mind isn’t, which means my mind wandered all over the place, from praying for friends in difficult situations to trying to process recent interactions with friends and dig into my emotions. So often, I avoid that type of self-reflection, but examining your emotions allows you to see your emotions for what they are and not let them run your life. 

Fresh out of the oven!

What will you learn, recognize or remember when you take the time to slow down and do something you enjoy, one step at a time? Tell us in the comments!