Gluten free baking- seven grain loaf

I wanted to try bread from a different recipe book to see if it was more successful, so I made the seven grain bread from ‘Gluten Free Baking’ by Michael McCamley. The basic recipe was very similar to previous ones, mix the dry ingredients:

Mix the wet ingredients:

And then add the dry to the wet. At this point the dough was very firm and stiff, whilst the recipe stated it should be soft dough. Nevertheless I allowed it to rise for about an hour in the tin:

However, after an hour the dough hadn’t risen at all, it was still at exactly the same height. I decided I needed to add more water to allow the dough the looseness required to rise. So I added more water and remixed the dough, unfortunately I forgot to measure how much extra water I ended up adding. This is what it looked like after I added more water:

The dough was slightly paler because the yellow from the egg yolks had been diluted more. This time the dough actually rose in the hour:

I baked it at 180C for about 50 minutes. This is what it looked like when it came out:

The crust had gone golden brown and hard, which was promising. The loaf was fairly difficult to slice, which implied that the crust would be nice and crunchy. Here it is cut open:

The crust was not actually that crunchy to eat, so maybe the loaf could have done with a bit more cooking. The crumb was quite dense and moist, so the loaf might have benefited from further rising time, and possibly more yeast. However, the denseness was beneficial in preventing loaf from falling apart. The taste was very good, quite nutty, complex with a hint of sweetness. The flavour of the eggs came through but was by no means overpowering the other flavours. Overall the loaf was good, but the recipe was fundamentally flawed, if I hadn’t added in my own liquid then the loaf would have been very dense. It’s important to be prepared to experiment and improvise when baking gluten free- even when following a recipe!