So my mother brought me 3 bags of cinnamon sourdough bread starter and some instructions last week.  For those of you that have never heard of such a thing, it’s basically a chain letter/pyramid scheme type of thing.  Seriously.  For every ONE bag of starter, you yield TWO loaves of sweet yummy bread plus FOUR more bags of starter.  This pretty much forces you to either bake like mad ALL the time, waste a ton of food stuffs, or foist a ridiculous amount of starter off on your friends and family.

This is what I started off with:

Looks innocent enough, right?  You’re supposed to mush the bag every day for 6 days, and on the 6th day, you add a bunch more sugar, flour and milk.  The bags puff up a lot with the fermenting going on, so you have to let the air out every so often.

After 10 days you get to dump out the bag into a bowl and add yet more stuff:

This is where you take out 4 cups of the batter and put them into 4 separate ziploc bags with which to terrorize everyone you know.  The rest goes into 2 loaf pans along with a generous amount of cinnamon and sugar:

And then you bake it.  I have to say, the house ends up smelling pretty yummy at this point.

And it tastes pretty yummy, too.  The first batch I made with no nuts; the second I added some chopped pecans, too, and it was even better.  But that’s a lot of baking to do , people!  Those 3 bas made 6 loaves (good thing for the big freezer!!!) and, horrifyingly, twelve bags of starter.  TWELVE!!!

And if you’re counting, each of those 12 bags will make 2 loaves, plus 4 more bags of starter.  See?  Pyramid scheme!!!!!  Work – intense chain letter!!!  And though it is very yummy, I have way more than I need.  So I forcibly nicely sent a few bags home with the in laws.  And all of you that live close by??  You’re next.