Mk2 Pineapple

Way back in 2010, I tried making pineapple buns. For those of you who aren't familar with pineapple buns, it's a soft, sweet bread from Hong Kong with a distinctive crunchy crust. It was also officially declared a part of the cultural heritage by the Hong Kong government in 2014. Not that I care about that at all - I just like the taste of the things! Well, my first attempt was a partial success. My Hong Konger (yes, as weird as it sounds, I am led to believe that that is the correct term) friend, Pok, said that the topping tasted completely authentic, but we both agreed that the bread was far too firm and not nearly soft enough. I think a second attempt is well overdue now, so I'm keeping the recipe for the topping, but throwing the bread recipe out of the window. In its place, I'm adapting one from an old Chinese cookbook that I happen to have on the shelf - "Chopsticks Recipes More Dim Sum" by Cecilia J. Au-Yang.

Pineapple Buns Mk 2

Ingredients

For the bread yeast paste

• 1 Sachet dried yeast
• 1/2 tsp Sugar
• 60ml Warm water
• 3 tbsp Strong bread flour

For the bread dough

• 280g Strong bread flour
• 60g Sugar
• 1 Egg
• 1 tbsp Condensed milk
• 80ml Warm water
• 50g Melted butter

For the topping

• 60g Caster sugar
• 60g Butter
• 100g Plain flour
• 1 tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 2 tbsp Condensed milk
• 1 Egg yolk
• Few drops vanilla extract
• 1 Whole egg

Method

1. Mix the ingredients for the yeast paste together into a paste and leave to prove for ~half an hour.
2. Form a dough from the yeast paste and all of the bread dough ingredients except the melted butter and knead until smooth.
3. Knead in the melted butter and cover and leave to rise for ~1 1/2 hours.
4. Cream the butter with the sugar and then beat in the rest of the rest of the ingredients for the topping except the whole egg.
5. Refridgerate the topping for an hour.
6. Knead once the bread dough again, divide into small bun-sized portions, shape and leave to prove for ~1 1/2 hours on a lined baking tray.
7. Divide the topping into even portions. Roll each portion out into a disc and cover each bun with one.
8. Beat the egg and brush over the buns.
9. Bake at 190C for ~15 minutes until the top is light golden.

Here they are before the prove. Pretty, no? 

But here they are again after the prove. As you can see, they've not risen at all really - clearly, it's not fermented properly. I have no idea what I've done wrong though - it's possible that the yeast was actually just too old and no longer alive, but I'm not 100% certain. Oh well, it's not going to stop me from baking it anyway!

And now with the topping added. I only actually used half of the topping in the end - I think the quantities of topping vs dough are pretty badly mismatched.

And here they are, ready for the oven.

Disaster! I was overly heavy handed with the egg wash, and you can see that the topping hasn't come out right. Plus, the top was soft, not crunchy.

The least-bad one of them...

So, it all seemed to go wrong at the end. But how did it taste anyway? Well, obviously, as the rise didn't work properly, it was very dense. I mean really, really dense. But also lovely and soft - so actually quite pleasant actually. The topping never went crunchy though, so a bit of a failure on that front. The flavour was nice though - the sweetness was about right in my opinion. All in all, it was definitely mostly a failure, but a tasty one nonetheless. I'll have to give them another go again soon!

A birthday cake

It was Fiona's birthday yesterday, so I said that I'd bake her a birthday cake this weekend. She likes Black Forest gateaux (as, incidentally, do I), but it's one of those faffy cakes that I don't tend to bake because it's so much effort. So what better excuse than her birthday! It's the same recipe as I used last time (waaaaay back in 2009!), with the only minor changes that I let the mixture down with a splash of milk before adding the egg whites because the batter looked really stiff, and I had to halve the quantities for the cherry gel because I only had one jar of morello cherries. But that's okay, as somewhere along the line, I lost my 20cm cake tin, so had to bake it in a larger, thinner one, which means that this one only has two layers - and I still ended up with leftover cherry gel. I guess having only two cake layers means it's not a proper Black Forest gateau, but then I guess none of my cakes are ever that accurate anyway!

Here it is straight from the oven. Less burnt than last time, but more cracked!

But as expected, once flipped over, it's looking lovely. I think it may have gone a bit dry, but we'll see how it is once it's actually finished.

My word, Black Forest gateau is a lot of work. The end result is really pretty though! The photos don't really do it justice; it turns out that my new phone really does have an appalling camera.

This is one seriously decadent cake. It's as delicious as you'd expect a cake with 800ml of cream to be!

New year's loaves

Happy new year! This new year's day, I'm baking some bread. Not because it's the new year, mind you; it's because we've got some leftover salad that looks a little ropey, and I think it'd be a fine addition to some bread (and because I've got time today!). It's not going to be anything particularly adventurous (fundamentally it's just an ordinary sourdough loaf), but it's still nice to get baking!

Leftover Salad Bread
Ingredients

• A generous dollop of Aage
• 500g Strong wholemeal flour
• 250ml Warm water
• 10g Salt
• A slug (~10g) of olive oil
• ~55g Leftover salad (lambs lettuce, olives, spring onions, mustard, olive oil and salt)

Method

1. Mix Aage, the flour, water, salt and olive oil together and form a dough.
2. Knead until not sticky.
3. Put in bag to rise for ~1 hour until doubled in size.
4. Deflate and knead.
5. Divide into two portions and knead the leftover salad into one.
6. Shape into loaves, return to the bag and prove for ~2 hours until doubled in size.
7. Bake at 220C for 10 minutes, then turn down to 190C for a further 30 minutes.

The salad turned out to have quite a lot of olive oil and moisture in it, which made the half of the dough with the salad rather sticky. I opted to shape the plain ball of dough into something approximating a bâtard, but the salad-infused one ended up as a generic boule shape because it was too sticky to shape! Here they are before the prove.

Ready for the oven. As you can see, slashing the plain loaf didn't exactly go to plan. It turns out that the kitchen knife I tried to use was not nearly sharp enough. I reverted to a bread knife for the salady one, which worked better. They are clearly underproved (which I'm pretty sure is due to insufficient sourdough starter activity - I really need to plan my bread baking further ahead so that I can get Aage out of the fridge and woken up properly beforehand!)

As ever, they look gorgeous coming out of the oven.

The salady one is slightly underbaked. I did think that that might happen, given the extra moisture and oil in it, but it's not bad really - the dough is cooked all the way through, it's just a little cakey in the middle. Lovely flavour though - the spring onion gives a really nice fragrance, and the chopped up olives provide the usual lovely bursts of salty punch. The lettuce cooked away to nothing, but that's exactly as expected. I'm definitely going to add spring onion to bread again in the future!