Prizes! Awards! Gimmicks!

Today we're launching our first contest at A Year in Bread. As the regular readers know, we've been looking at recipes from Daniel Leader's new book, Local Breads: Sourdough and Whole-Grain Recipes from Europe's Best Artisan Bakers, for the past three weeks. The book is due to be released this month, but we already have a couple of signed copies in our flour-covered hands that we're going to give away over the next month.

One copy will go to a reader selected at random. If you're interested in participating in this contest, send an email to AYearInBread with your name and email address and we'll add you to the list. The subject line should be "Local Bread Contest."

The other contest is more challenging. We're asking for your favorite homemade bread story. This could be an egg (or flour) -on-your-face tale of failure, it could be a memory of bread made for a special occasion, it could be an unexpected success or even a long-sought-for success. Maybe it was how you learned to bake bread at your mother's side, or why you started baking bread. Whatever the specific event or events, we want to hear about them. Your entry should be no more than 250 words if you're sending to us to post (on your own blog, go for broke), and creativity counts. Clever poems, silly songs (just tell us what tune to sing them to), and good old-fashioned humor are all welcome.

If you have a blog, post your story there with a link back to this post, and send us an email at AYearInBread with the permalink. If you don't have a blog, just write up your story and send it to us and we'll post it here. All those participating in the story contest will automatically be included in the random drawing.

The contests will end on August 30th, and we'll announce the winners one week later.

Let the games begin!

Technorati: Food | recipe | baking | bread | artisanal | artisan | bread baking | local+breads | contest