Inspiration tastes like rainbows

Today, I was supposed to be cleaning up/packing/organizing for the move into my apartment next Saturday. To give you an idea of the task at hand, I came home from school, dumped my bags in the game room, and, 3 months later, there they are. I've made marginal progress, but that's okay, since I'm a last minute kind of girl, Thursday and Friday will be frantic and I will be incredibly productive. In my journey to procrastinate, I decided to make something bread-related. Because, you see "it has to rise, and rise again, and probably a third time!". I am an excellent time waster.
Originally, I'd planned to make cinnamon rolls, but my father bought some the other day, and they're still sitting on the dining room table. "Okay," I said to myself "...what the heck am I gonna do?". Sooooooo I perused the internet (the whole internet) and found that panda bread that had been going around. "THAT'S IT!". Except I didn't want to do the panda...I wanted to do my own design. After much thought, I decided upon a rainbow...because the shape is technically easy, and the colors would be great! I really want to try other designs in the future
And so I set out to do it.
Unfortunately, the final product didn't rise as much as I'd like, but that's something that can be ironed out in the future...it was still tasty.



My hand after kneading all of the color in XD

Bread pre-final rising

After final rising

Fresh out of the oven


Rainbow bread:
1 1/4 cup of flour (bread flour/high protein flour's best)
2 tbs cornstarch
1 egg yolk + enough milk to equal 3/4 of a cup
2 tbs soft butter
1 1/2 tsp yeast
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt

I like to go ahead and preheat my oven to 400 Fahrenheit now, to make the kitchen nice and warm.
Whisk together the milk and egg yolk, and heat to about 100 degrees
Combine flour, cornstarch and salt
Activate the yeast in the milk/egg mixture, add sugar and let sit for about 5 minutes and then add to the flour, along with the butter. If you have instant yeast, just add the yeast, milk/egg and sugar to the flour straightaway.
Mix together, then dump out and knead until it's not all gross and sticky anymore.
Here's the fun stuff.
Divide the dough into 7 pieces , with one at least twice as big as the rest. The other six shouldn't all be the same size...they should get progressively smaller or bigger.
Add the coloring to the 6 small pieces (for a rainbow, purple should be the smallest, and red the biggest), and knead.
Cover the pieces separately and let the rise for about 30 minutes
Punch down the dough and let rise for another 20 minutes.
Now for the assembly.
Cut a piece of parchment paper the size of the bottom of your loaf pan.(I think mine's like 8x4x4 or something)
Take about 1/3 of the uncolored dough and roll it into a cylinder the length of the parchment paper. Stick it right in the middle.
Take the purple, roll it out into a rectangle and drape over the plain cylinder. Repeat with the rest of the colors, and the rest of the uncolored dough.


Stick that in the loaf pan and let it rise for at least another hour, in a nice warm place (like on top of the stove!)
Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the top is nice and brown.
Let cool, cut, enjooyyyyy