First try, step three

The crabapple dough that I kneaded last night rose in the bowl for nine hours. At eight o'clock this morning I turned it out onto a floured countertop, divided it in half with a dough knife, shaped the halves into ovals and let them rest for ten minutes, buttered two medium loaf pans, flattened the ovals to inch-thick near-rectangles and rolled them up into loaf shape. I put the loaves seam-side down in the buttered pans and covered them loosely with cotton cloth, and set them aside to rise again.

My second batch-- the no-crabapple sponge-- maybe I'll call it the Reinheitsgebot batch-- had also risen. I mixed in white flour, butter and salt in the same proportions as last night for the crabapple dough, kneaded it for fifteen minutes while listening to a discussion on NPR about the campaign-finance case soon to come before the Supreme Court, and set it aside to rise in the bowl.

On the campaign-finance case: corporations are made up of individual people, who (if they're citizens) already have influence on elections: they can vote. I see no reason why we should allow people who have more money to have more free speech than anyone else. I would prefer a system in which candidates had to demonstrate a high level of popular support (by a number of signatures, say) and then each got the same amount of money from a general pool held by the government. Anyone who didn't go through this channel wouldn't be allowed on the ballot. I'm curious to hear arguments against such a system... I guess I'll go look for them before my next post, when I've baked the first batch.