Dough a Day

Who doesn’t love cinnamon rolls? One of my colleagues had his last day today, so I baked up a batch of his favorites to send him off. These are best coated in lemon glaze 🙂

The dough was prepped overnight and left to rise in the refrigerator. This made the dough very stiff, but easy to roll out in the morning. If you make these, make sure to leave sufficient space between them in the pan before the second rise. Also, sprinkle any extra cinnamon brown sugar over the top before placing in the oven. It will caramelize and create a great chewy texture.

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Sorry readers, I am a little behind on updates. Below is an incomplete gallery of items over the last few weeks. I have been playing with honey bee themes with the lame a bit, and experimented with focaccia and a psyllium husk roll. Needless to say the focaccia was much better tasting ?

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Accidentally doubled the sugar. Also added a cup of oatmeal.

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Experiments with the lame. The many cuts lead to an nice texture when baked. I found that a long second rest of the dough after shaping leads to a more even rise.

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Even bakers need to eat something besides bread!

I made my first paneer yesterday. Have to say, it was much easier than I thought it would be. I adapted this recipe from the Food Network slightly by substituting lime juice instead of lemon juice. Didn’t seem to make much difference. Chemistry or magic?

Cheese cloth that I purchased a few months back came in handy. It was much easier than the coffee filter technique that was used for Greek yogurt a few months back.

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Well, these were a major hit. I started the dough the night before to be ready at 830 am on the bread machine. I need to double check the manual, because when I came down at 730, expecting it to be mid rise, it was already well done. I think the time I set was for completion time, not for start time. Not a great interface.

Anyway, the dough was way stickier than I had worked with before. I needed to add quite a bit of flour to the counter to work it at all.

After shaping into small rounds I sprinkled with Jiffy corn bread mix and fried them in the stove with a little olive oil spray. The trick I found is to use low heat to get a good rise out the muffin, before it starts to burn. The first batch I made was a little undercooked on the inside, but still delicious. The second batch was closer to intended. I did not see the “nooks and crannies” like I expected, and will investigate how to improve that for next time.

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Tried to get a littler more detailed with the design today. Also split the dough into two loaves. Extra canvas 😉 The size is a bit small, but would be perfect for bread with dinner.

The design is a bit muddled, but you can kinda make out the wings.

Also purposely upped the water content of the dough. It made it very sticky to work with, but looked more like some of the other dough pictures I’ve seen.

I am trying out the delay feature on the bread machine tonight for some breakfast treats tomorrow. Hopefully I won’t have a mess of dough in the morning! Not that I ever have a dough volcano when I bake…

I have been working on improving what my son named ‘Butterfly Bread’ (BB). The bread is an adaptation from the bread machine recipe book that we purchased at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. This turned out to be a really good economic purchase and really bad waist line purchase.

The recipe is a basic white bread. That I have enhanced with Vital Wheat Gluten (VWG). I originally only had All Purpose Flour on hand when I got started and read somewhere that this will significantly improve your dough. Turns out All Purpose flour does not have the same protein content as a ‘Bread Flour’. I purchased this Anthony’s Premium Vital Wheat Gluten and use this to enhance my flours. See the photos below for an example of Butterfly Bread. I am currently working on my shaping technique as well as my lame game.

This dough one rose extra long in the bread machine (~3 hours…oops) and was baked a little longer than the usual 30 minutes at 400F that I usually bake for (~40 minutes). I noticed that this created a darker and richer crust than the usual BB recipe. The shaping was also easier by using a olive oil coat on it, instead of directly shaping on a floured counter. I will repeat this for the next iteration of BB.