I spent the weekend making brioche. Just a single batch takes quite a lot of time, including a resting period overnight. The resulting bread is light, buttery and oh so tasty.
The dough started with a sponge. The recipe said to wait until the wet part of the sponge broke through the flour crust, like this:
The next step created a rather sticky dough:
Then a ton (actually only 1-1/2 stick!) of butter gets creamed in:
After a normal rise (to double in size) and resting overnight in the refrigerator (in this case, the garage), the dough was split into three parts. One was destined to become a typical brioche loaf:
The other two parts became cinnamon rolls.
I added 1/2 stick melted butter to the thinly rolled dough.
Then a mixture of 1 cup sugar and 2 Tbsp cinnamon, plus some chopped walnuts:
Finally, it was rolled into a log:
cut into 1″ pieces
and put half on a cooking sheet lined with parchment paper.
To see how the rolls behaved, the other half were put into a round cake pan:
The resulting loaf and rolls cooked a bit quicker than the recipe indicated, but came out beautifully:
The only thing the cinnamon rolls needed was some frosting made from 3 cups confectioner’s sugar, 1/2 stick butter, 1/4 cup creme cheese and 1 tsp vanilla (I cheated here and used Grand Marnier as a tasty substitute improvement):
Overall, I think this adventure was quite successful. We’ll have to wait and see what the final verdict is – I gave them all away already 🙂
