Daring baker February 2014 challenge: beautiful bread

I was on a bread making binge for three months. I was making so much bread I was running out of people to give the newest batch. I even managed to complete a Daring Bakers challenge after following the blog for years, and I mean years. I was invincible .
And then it hit. So here I am, fighting pnemococcus yet again ,slipping behind on two challenges. It is not as if I were out of the kitchen. In fact I was in two, first at work, then at home. All of that work with sugar,chocolate and cheese, macarons, and eclairs for the new cafe, the desserts and wedding cakes for the upstairs restaurant, miscommunication and cultural insensitivities meant I lost the energy needed to come home and work. I was on pastry overload. We all get there some days, sometimes, and mine hit big when my partner left for Paris on a much earned research trip.
 My best creation and I enjoyed japanese home style cooking , Gyoza ,soba, ebi lettuce maki, and grilled cheese sandwiches. Oh let me turn that into japanese- yaki cheese sandoichi, better yet, hotto sando. See family, my language skills have improved since you last visited ...more than a decade ago.
So today on a required leave day, I made the first part of millers bread, and the ferment for the croissant( thanks to a compensation purchase of the Bourke  street bakery cookbook. My partner might be in Paris but we have the oven,hehe.
The last thing I did before prepping the vegetables for tonight's dinner of couscous and veggies and sewing the cat-shredded curtain, was to make- drumroll please - the brioche base for the beautiful bread challenge , using my leftover  mixture. However, the oven was too hot and did not cool down fast enough ( I was using my japanese hitachi five in one, miniscule by foreign standards, large by japanese, oven because I was waiting for the new heating and baking stone for my gaggenau oven.
None of this information is probably interesting or necessary, but it gives you a sense of the frantic pace I am trying to maintain without becoming completely absent minded. So the people for the oven came, naturally, at the crucial time I am meant to cut and fold the dough but it is not in my lexicon to say, please wait and let me finish this or I will ruin my project, in polite, read formal, japanese. So I watched  the beautiful layers turned into pufferfish rounds.
It is baked. It is not beautiful. It is tasty, and thank goodness, though it looks rather over cooked it does not taste it. It tastes lovely but no, even I would struggle to say it were close to beautiful... So I will do what I have learned to do best, avoid saying anything and hope no one asks me my opinion directly.