Cinnamon Nut Roll Coffee Cake

Check out this amazing Cinnamon Nut Roll Coffee Cake. While it is called a coffee cake, it really is a brioche bread, with all of the richness of eggs and lots and lots of butter. 

And, it's "no knead!" The dough is stirred the night before and left in the refrigerator overnight. It is kind of a sticky mess when you first put it together, but it comes together during the cold fermentation. It also seems like not enough dough at all for a bread the size of an angel food cake. Well... it is... surprisingly enough. 

Pull-Apart Brioche Bread

This pull-apart brioch bread is soft, light, flaky, buttery, and rich, all at the same time. 

 

Brioche bread is made with an enriched dough that is high in butter and and eggs. It can be sweet or savory, or somewhere in between. It's a tricky bread to make, and can either turn out light and delicate, or heavy and dense. 

Ciambella Mandorlata | An Italian Easter Bread

 

Ciambella Mandorlata is an Italian Easter bread that is shaped like a ring and coated with a cinnamon sugar and sliced almond glaze. 

This Ciambella Mandorlata is a wonderful breakfast bread. It's enriched with eggs and butter, and very similar to a sweetened brioche bread.

Blueberry Brioche Coffee Cake

This Blueberry Brioche Coffee Cake is made with layers of no knead brioche dough and homemade blueberry jam.

The brioche dough for this coffee cake is so easy to make. You mix it in a three quart container with a dough whisk or a large spoon and then let it rise in the refrigerator for up to five days. This recipe will make one coffee cake plus a small loaf of bread.

New England Hot Dog Buns

I've always been curious about New England Style Hot Dog Buns. What makes them unique is that they stand up straight and are filled from the top, and the sides are buttered and grilled.

These New England hot dog buns are also famously used for lobster rolls and other seafood salad sandwiches.

Strawberry Swirl No-Knead Brioche with Strawberry Lime Jam | Strawberry Shortcake Bread

I am loving this strawberry swirl no-knead brioche bread. It's just slightly sweet and slightly buttery, and very soft and airy. To make it even tastier, it is filled with a swirl of homemade strawberry lime jam. 

This strawberry swirl bread is actually pretty easy to make, as long as you are comfortable with very sticky dough. It's very similar to working with a sticky ciabatta dough, except that this dough is enriched with some sugar, butter, and milk, resulting in a very tender bread.

No Knead Brioche Hamburger Buns

I've always been curious about brioche hamburger buns. The idea of serving a juicy hamburger in a rich and buttery bun sounds totally decadent.

Olive Oil Brioche Bread

This Olive Oil Brioche Bread is just about the most magical brioche ever. I know. I sound like someone who throws hyperbole and exclamation marks all over the place. "This is the best brownie ever!" This is the best egg salad ever!" That's not me.

Conchas (Mexican Shell Bread)

I am totally excited by these Conchas!

Water-Proofed Bread | A Sweet Brioche

This water proofed bread is enriched with eggs, milk, and sugar, and tastes amazing slathered in jam.

It's kind of a cross between brioche and challah, and the wild card is the amount of yeast that the recipe calls for. A lot.  And the water-proofing (which means proofing in water, not making the bread safe for taking out in the rain).

This month the Bread Baking Babes are baking a bread chosen by Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms. I am baking along as a Buddy.

This recipe is from the 1973 edition of the book Beard on Bread by James Beard.

The dough is proofed by wrapping it in a tea towel and plunging it in a bowl of warm water and waiting for it to rise.

The dough when it is first submerged into the water.

The dough after it has risen to the top of the water bath.

I'm pretty sure that doing the bulk rise the traditional way would have worked out just fine, but trying this method was a lot of fun. The rising time was definitely fast, only 30 minutes.

There was a lot of discussion among the Babes about the amount of yeast called for in this recipe, and a lot of the Babes cut back. Back in the day, bread recipes called for much more yeast than we use today. In the end, I wanted to stay true to the original recipe quantities, just to see what would happen.

I am still amazed that only 3 1/2 C of flour produced two loaves of bread. I definitely had my doubts. The dough was very wet and difficult to shape, and seemed like it would barely fill the loaf pans. Oven spring is an amazing thing.

If you use the two packets of yeast called for in the recipe, pay close attention to the dough so you don't over proof it.

In the end, the bread is wonderful. I took a loaf to work with a jar of homemade blackberry jam and it disappeared.

Water-Proofed Bread

Ingredients

2 packages of active dry yeast

1/2 C warm (100 to 115 degrees F) water

1 tsp sugar

1/2 C milk

1 stick (1/2 C) unsalted butter

2 tsp salt

3 eggs

3 1/2 C bread flour, plus more for flouring the tea towel

Instructions

1. Place the yeast in the bowl of a stand mixer, pour in the water and sugar, and stir. Let sit for 5 minutes. 
2. Place the mild and butter into a heat proof bowl and microwave until the butter has just melted. 
3. Add the milk and butter mixture to the yeast and stir. Stir in the salt. 
4. Add the eggs and whisk.
5. Add the flour and knead with the dough hook for about 5 minutes. 
6. Generously flour a tea towel and scrape the dough onto it. Loosely wrap the dough with the flour and tie it with string.
7. Fill a large bowl with 115 degree water and plunge the package of dough into the water. 
8. Watch closely for the packet to rise to the top of the water (about 30 minutes). Remove the packet from the water, drain, and scrape the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface. Divide the dough in half and shape as best as you can into two loaves. Place the dough into two oiled 8 1/2 by 4 inch loaf pans and cover with plastic wrap.
9. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Allow the dough to rise until doubled, about 30 minutes. 
10. Brush the loaves with water and bake for about 30 minutes, until the dough reaches an internal temperature of about 190 to 200 degrees F. 
11. Remove the loaves from the pans onto a wire rack and cool on their sides. After about 10 minutes, flip the loaves to the other side for another 10 minutes. At this point, you can either slice and serve, or wrap it up for later.  

This bread will stay fresh for about a day. After the first day, it makes great toast or French toast. It also will freeze well for later. 

Savory Brioche Pockets | Tuesdays with Dorie

This week the Tuesdays with Dorie group is baking Savory Brioche Pockets from page 421 of Baking with Julia, a book edited by Dorie Greenspan, and based on the PBS series, Baking with Julia (Child).

These brioche bread pockets contain a mixture of mashed red potatoes, goat cheese, chives, caramelized onions, and asparagus tips... a pretty amazing combination of flavors. They are topped with an egg wash, poppy seeds, and a sage leaf. Just to make them pretty. They are supposed to have this little rim around the edge and look like little pies. but my brioche had such great oven spring and ended up looking like dinner rolls. The contributing editor, Nancy Silverton (one of my idols... seriously, read her prose about bread baking in her book.. you will be hooked), suggests that these could be served as appetizers, but I had just one for dinner and it was quite filling.

Making these is pretty involved. First, you have to make the brioche dough and then allow it to ferment over night in the refrigerator. Oh yeah, and there's 30 minutes (thirty minutes!) of high speed kneading in your stand mixer.

After you make and chill the dough, you steam and mash the potatoes, par-cook the asparagus, and caramelize the onions.  Thankfully, once you shape the rolls, you can freeze them and bake them when you need them.

Verdict?

This brioche is the best I have ever tasted/made. Wow. I had some trouble working with it, but it doesn't matter. The texture and taste were perfect. Not heavy, not greasy, but light and airy despite the high butter content. I never understood the appeal of brioche hamburger buns... now I get it. I can't wait to try the portion of the dough that is in the freezer to make them.

What did I do differently from the original recipe? Not much. I nuked the the red potatoes without peeling them ( I used minis) and mashed the skins into the mix of potatoes and goat cheese, and I used the entire trimmed asparagus spear (the recipe calls for just the tips).

To see the recipe, visit Loaves and Stitches.  To see how other Tuesdays with Dorie bloggers fared (and to see their creativity with the recipe) visit the Tuesdays with Dorie site.

Gâteau á la Crème

This month, the Bread Baking Babes (12 awesome women from around the world who bake a specific yeasted recipe every month) are making Gâteau á la Crème. The Kitchen of the Month chooses the recipe and the Babes bake and post on the same day of the month. This month the Kitchen of the Month is Notitie van Lien, (click on her page to see links to all of the Babes' variations) and she chose this recipe from Kitchen Secrets by Raymond Blanc.

I am baking along as a Bread Baking Buddy. To find out how to be a Buddy, check out Lien's page.

This is a brioche dough with a citrus flavored filling that bakes along with the dough. It makes a wonderful breakfast pastry as well an impressive dessert.

BBA Challenge - Poor Man's Brioche & Challah

Installment number two of my year baking my way through Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice.

Poor Man's Brioche 

I had tried another recipe for brioche before and wasn't all that happy with it. Brioche is a very rich bread. It includes eggs, a bit of sugar, and a ton of butter. It's not flaky like croissants, and it's not sweet. To me, the first recipe I tried just seemed greasy. I ended up making a very nice bread pudding with it, but it annoys me that I would have to take such an elaborate recipe and then create bread pudding. Seems like "bread pudding" and "French toast" are the catch-all excuses for what to do with bad bread.

Fortunately, Peter Reinhart provides three versions of his brioche recipe. Rich Man's Brioche, with a pound of butter to make three 1-pound loaves, Middle-Class Brioche, with 1/2 pound of butter to make two 1-pound loaves, or Poor Man's Brioche, with 1/4 pound of butter to make two 1-pound loaves.

I made the Poor Man's Brioche. It was perfect for me. And I think my loaves are quite pretty. Perhaps I'll try Peter's "richer" recipes someday.

I definitely would make this bread again.

Google BBA Challenge #4 to see other bakers' experiences.

Challah

This bread is excellent. I had already made Peter Reinhart's Challah from Artisan Breads Everyday. That recipe (which is very good) called for a very large amount of egg yolks (in fact, that's why I finally attempted macarons). This recipe called for two eggs and two egg yolks. And the leftover egg whites could be used as a bread wash before sprinkling the loaf with seeds.

I will definitely make this challah again. It's very good.

For this bread,  Google BBA Challenge #6 to see other bakers' experiences.