Challah catastrophes

You'll notice that that's in the plural.

1. I add all the liquid ingredients for my challah (7 eggs, plus honey, sugar, oil etc.), all the dry ingredients less the flour, a little bit of flour, and start the mixer mixing. Only it doesn't mix--the mixer blade on my Bosch pops up. I turn off mixer, reach in to set the blade in correctly, and instead of setting it correctly I suddenly realize that the entire contents of the bowl are rapidly draining out the 1.5-inch-diameter hole at the bottom of the bowl, because the bolt that holds the blade assembly together was not in and fell out. So I now have all the liquid and whatever of the solid ingredients have dissolved, all over my floor.

2. After cleaning this up (which took a LONG time), I go to open bag of flour #2--only to see the inside of the bag festooned with webs. Because it's infested with bugs. Heavily, heavily infested. I waste some time sifting, then realize that this is never going to work because it's organic whole wheat and I'm sifting out half the flour and probably none of the insects. I toss entire $6.19 bag of flour into trash, and open bag of flour #3, which looks OK.

3. I hazard guesses at how much of which ingredients are missing from the challah, add them, and start the dough mixing again in my smaller Bosch bowl. Then I realize that the counter I have just scrubbed (salmonella, y'know) is again covered with raw eggs, because the wet ingredients are not being incorporated into the now hard and solid lump of dough that was left when I lost the liquid the first time.

4. I will not be defeated! I unplug mixer, squish ingredients together by hand, add more water and oil and another couple of eggs, and turn the mixer back on. The dough looks lovely.

5. And then I notice that the top of the mixer, the plastic splash ring, is not sitting right. That's because the solid lump of dough that was revolving around the bowl pushed up against it hard enough to snap all three latch points, irretrievably destroying splash ring on my I-don't-want-to-remember-how-much-it-cost Bosch bowl. I toss splash ring into garbage.

6. I briefly consider fishing through the dough for the broken pieces of plastic, then laugh bitterly at the idea, because these pieces of plastic are, well, deadly, and it's not even a tiny little bit worth it. I toss entire batch of challah into garbage.

7. And start a new one. Stay tuned. I'm going to take out the garbage.