I had such high hopes… but it turned out so, so badly.  Well, tasty enough.  But UGLY as sin. It all started with a video that showed a beautiful, trim Israeli lady making the most gorgeous braids with the kind of ease that you only acquire after having made thousands of them. I watched it.  Naomi Rivka watched it.  We were inspired – hooray! As soon as I started to pull of this complicated six-braid, everything began to go horribly wrong, starting with the ginormous octopus contraption you see at the top of this post. From there, I created a not-too-shabby looking braided thingy…   And then tucked it together to resemble – um, a mummified dog?   Yuck, says Naomi Rivka. Meanwhile, she herself was inspired by another technique she’d seen in the video to create a round challah, wrapped with a band to make it more regal.  Beautiful!   Just to make the situation even more ridiculous, it turned out there wasn’t room on my (entire-oven-sized) baking pan for both