We made the dough for our milk bread first and my irrational fear of cooking with yeast made me nervous immediately. We used fresh yeast instead of dry yeast, which was weird in and of itself. Fresh yeast in its packaging looks sort of like a stick of butter. Fresh yeast out of its packaging, I am unable to describe. In order for the gluten to form (baking is so scientific), we had to slam the dough on the table, knead it, and repeat. Imagine 26 students hitting metal tables with slabs of dough, repeatedly. Now multiply the sound by four and increase the temperature by about a million degrees, and that's how it felt. Once the gluten had formed sufficiently, we set our dough aside to rise -- the part of bread-making that really freaks me out. My dough started to explode out of the bowl.
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| IT'S ALIVE! |
Since baking is all about multitasking, we started to make our cinnamon buns while our milk bread dough was rising. I am not the best multitasker or the fastest worker, so I am resigning myself to being slow but precise. Or something to that effect. I was REALLY excited about the cinnamon buns. We made the dough, rolled it out (which took me forever and may have required a pep-talk from J-L), added melted butter, then brown sugar and cinnamon, then rolled it up (which was difficult to do prettily, but one day), sliced them, and put them in the oven. Yum.
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| I MADE THESE! |
The day was such a blur, that I can't even really remember the order in which we did these things anymore, but at one point we took our milk bread dough and rolled it out, shaped it, and let it rise a little bit more. I was so behind by then that I just skipped our 20-minute break entirely. Once everyone came back, we put an egg wash on our loaves of bread and stuck them in the oven.
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| My first loaf of bread....ever. |
Jean-Luc pretty much controlled the ovens for both our bread and our cinnamon buns, so it's hard to say what either would've turned out like if he hadn't been in charge of that. But we'll just say they would've been perfect. Today was the first day that we actually got to try something that we made, which was exciting. We didn't get to try the bread, but we did get to take a cinnamon bun (the better choice anyway).
We also learned how to make parchment paper cornets for piping chocolate. Basically you roll the parchment paper into a cone-type thing, fill it with chocolate, fold over the top, and cut a tiny hole in the tip. Jean-Luc was just getting us to roll the parchment paper first; I thought I would be good at this because of my "extensive" origami experience. This is when I needed another pep-talk. But we all need a little positive reinforcement every now and then, right? I think this might become a theme for the year... I'm okay with that.
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Today's Recipes
Milk Bread
500 g all-purpose flour
35 g fresh yeast
30 g sugar
10 g salt
1 egg
300 ml warm milk (30 degrees)
Cinnamon Buns
500 g flour
500 g pastry flour
150 g sugar
14 g salt
40 g baking powder
200 g butter
2 eggs
500 ml cold milk
10 ml vanilla
Filling
brown sugar + 5% cinnamon mixture
melted butter
Flat Icing Glaze
icing sugar
water
YAY! I told you the yeast would be fine!!! Everything looks awesome!
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