BBA Challenge | Bewitching Kitchen

Nine breads down, thirty-four to go!

From cinnamon rolls we follow a similarly delicious path, to a cinnamon-raisin-walnut-loaf (that’s quite a mouthful!). Running the risk of eternally jinxing myself, I’ll say that making this bread was a piece of cake, especially considering that I threw caution to the wind and halved the recipe again.

Peter Reinhart offers two variations to the basic recipe: a sprinkle of cinnamon-sugar before rolling the dough into a loaf (creating a beautiful swirl in the center of the bread), and a light coating with melted butter plus cinnamon-sugar on top after baking. I decided to skip the swirl, as both me and beloved prefer to go light on sweets. But the sweet crust on top was impossible to resist, so I complied.

Loaf1

dough9

The dough was very nice to work with, smooth, soft, and rose quite well. But, you don’t have to take my word for it… Just follow the link for additional photos.

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cinnamon roll

Moving along in the book, time for some cinnamon rolls!

I confess to having a small mathematical problem while making these. I opted to halve the recipe, but contrary to what I keep telling our students in the lab “always write down your protocol”, I decided to mentally make the adjustments while adding the ingredients to the bowl. Everything went quite well, until the final, most important addition: water.

I got distracted by the need to warm the filtered water in the microwave, and completely forgot to cut the amount in half. As the dough turned into pancake batter in front of my very eyes, I felt the all too familiar shiver up my spine; familiar as in “I’ve done this before”. Unfortunately, it was not too long ago, but apparently I did not learn the lesson.

Such is life. I started all over, mumbling to myself “these better be some outstanding rolls”

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