Garlic Rolls

Has anyone ever noticed how the holidays never really end? It’s weird. It’s like the holiday calendar starts in October and doesn’t end until July. Let’s count off: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah and Christmas, New Years, Groundhog’s Day and Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, USA’s Independence Day. It’s all so crazy, but I’m not complaining. Those months are filled with amazing and drool-inducing food.

I found these beautiful rolls on Baked Bree. Bree take beautiful pictures of her food and so many of her recipes look delicious. She does a lot of dinner and sides so I knew I would be able to find some kind of bread component for Christmas dinner.

The only thing I was intimidated by was the use of yeast. Before this recipe I have only worked with yeast maybe three times. I am a complete novice when it comes to working with this finicky creature. One thing always worries me when I use yeast and that is “what if it doesn’t rise!?”

These rose as beautifully as bread dough can rise. I was a little scared at first, since it ha hardly grown within the first hour, but then I looked away for just a second and BAM! I was looking at beautifully puffed up dough.

I can’t wait to work with yeast again. There are some yeasted cinnamon roll cookies I have my eye one that I want to make before I go back to college. Hopefully I will get those done.

Oh by the way, I don’t tend to measure out dough that needs rolling out. So the directions say to roll it out about 16x10 inches, but I think my rectangle was a little longer and wider. So do whatever looks good to you.

Garlic Rolls

Ever so slightly adapted from Baked Bree

Makes about 16-18 rolls

Ingredients

Dough

1 package (2 ¼ tsp.) active dry yeast

½ cup warm water

1/3 cup sugar

3-4 cups bread flour, separated

6 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted and cooled

2 tsp. salt

Garlic Butter

4 tbsp. unsalted butter, room temperature

1 clove garlic, finely minced

1 ½ - 2 tbsp. rosemary, chopped

Directions

Mix together the yeast and the warm water into the bowl of an electric mixer. Measure out the 1/3 cup sugar and remove 2 tbsp. Place the 2 tbsp. into the bowl with the yeast and water. Whisk ingredients together until the yeast has dissolved. Allow the mixture to sit in the bowl for 2 – 3 minutes.

Measure out 1 cup of flour and stir into the yeast mixture. Attach the paddle attachment to the stand mixer. Add in 2 more cups of flour, the rest of the sugar, melted butter, and salt. Mix on medium speed until the dough starts to come together. Slowly add a little bit of flour until the dough starts to pull apart from the sides of the bowl. For me this was at the 3 ½ cup mark.

Grease a large glass bowl with cooking spray. Pour the dough into the greased bowl and cover the top with plastic wrap. Set the bowl in a warm place and allow the dough to double in size, about 2 hours.

While the dough is rising make the garlic butter and prepare the pans. Beat together the butter, garlic, and rosemary. To prepare the pans line two 9 inch round pans with foil. Lightly grease the foil with cooking spray.

Once the dough has finished rising punch it down a little bit. Place the dough onto a lightly floured surface. Use a rolling pin to roll the dough into a 16x10 inch rectangle.  Slather the garlic butter all over the surface of the rectangle. Use a pizza cutter to cut the dough into 1 inch wide strips (I used a ruler to get straight and even lines). Roll the strips up and up the flat side down into the prepared pans (about 8 per pan). Cover pans with a tea towel let the dough rise for another 45 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 375 F. Bake the rolls on the center rack for 15-20 minutes or until the tops are slightly golden. 

Egg on Toast

Happy Monday! Well at least I hope it’s happy. A lot of people don’t like Mondays. I guess it’s because it’s the day right after the weekend and everyone is going back to work or school and real life starts all over.

I personally don’t mind Mondays; it’s Tuesdays I hate the most. Tuesdays are like the hangover to Mondays and that’s just not fun. Wednesdays get a little better because half the week has gone by, then Thursdays are super spectacular because the weekend is almost here, but not here, so you get t savor the weekend just a little bit more. Then Friday hits and it’s finally the weekend (although Fridays never feel like Fridays for me because I have a very long lab class that day that cuts into my lunch and then I’m left starving as I measure out 2g of Vitamin C, add it to some good old H₂O, watch the thing boil and hope it doesn’t turn too pink when I add just a smidge too much NaOH, but I digress)

So, here’s to all the people who just don’t like Mondays: a recipe so simple that you basically have to forget how the stove top works to mess it up.

My mom used to make this all the time when I was a little girl, this and hotdogs wrapped in pancakes with a side of ketchup (yes, it really was tasty and my sister and I often asked for it). For a while I stopped eating it, then over the summer I started craving it and made it for lunch at least once a week.

This is nothing new, some people know it as Toad in a Hole, but I know it as Egg on Toast. It is just bread with a hole cut out from the middle with scrambled egg inside. See, easy.

Drizzled with some maple syrup (don’t need to be fancy pancake syrup works just as well here) or honey (as I like to eat it now) this is simply the easiest thing to bake for breakfast or lunch, maybe even brunch.

Egg on Toast

Makes 1 serving

Ingredients

2 slices of your favorite bread

1 large egg, beaten

small pat of butter or cooking spray

maple syrup, pancake syrup, honey (optional)

Directions

Heat a skillet over medium – medium-high heat. Melt some butter on the skillet or grease it with cooking spray.

Cut a 2 – 2 ½ inch hole out of each slice of bread. Place one slice of bread (or two if your skillet is big enough) on the hot pan. Wait a minute for the bread to toast slightly. Pour in half of the beaten egg. Wait for a majority of the egg to cook (you’ll see it start to turn pale) and flip on the other side to cook. Repeat with the remaining bread slice and the remainder of the egg.

Drizzle with syrup or honey and serve warm. I also like the toast the little rounds I cut out. That way I get a little bit of toasty goodness and the bread doesn’t go to waste.  

Light Wheat Rolls

Happy Black Friday everyone! I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with tons of food, friends and everything else that is special about Turkey Day. Also, I hope you didn’t go Black Friday shopping. That is a scary sight and people get trampled and they fight over clothes and appliances. I don‘t think I ever will participate in the event, I‘m too young to die. But If you did go, I hope you got the flat screen TV you’ve been eyeing or whatever it was you wanted to get a good deal on.

So, on to bread. Every year I’m on roll duty for Thanksgiving. Something about making bread rolls is just fun. Last year I made these Honey Muffins as the carb component of the Thanksgiving meal, and they went so fast. This year I went with wheat rolls. On Thanksgiving Eve, I baked them, and then froze them so they would stay fresh for dinner. 

These rolls were very light (as their name describes) and fluffy. Everyone thought they were delicious and my mom even said there was a hint of sweetness to them. I kinda felt the same way, but it wasn't overpowering. I'm starting to think that whole wheat flour adds a touch of sweetness to breads, but maybe that's just me. I do love the color that whole wheat flour gives though, so I might be baking with more whole wheat, you never know.

Light Wheat Rolls
adapted from Katrina on AllRecipes

Ingredients
1 package active dry yeast
¾ cup + 2 tbsp warm water (110° F)
¼ cup sugar
½ tsp salt
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 egg, lightly beaten
1 cup + 2 tbsp whole wheat flour
1 ½ cups unbleached all purpose flour
egg wash

Directions

1. In a bowl of an electric mixer, dissolve the year in the warm water. Let stand for about 10 minutes until it becomes creamy.
2. With the hook attachment, mix sugar, salt, melted butter, egg and whole wheat flour into the yeast mixture. Once that has come together, slowly pour in the all purpose flour, ½ cup at a time, until the dough starts to pull away from the bowl.
3. Pour dough out onto a well floured surface and knead until the dough becomes smooth and elastic, about 8 minutes. I had some trouble here and had to keep adding more flour, so if the 1 ½ cups is not enough, don’t be afraid to add more flour.
4. Lightly oil a large bowl and place the kneaded dough in the bowl, turn to coat. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth and set the bowl in a warm place to let the dough rise until it’s doubled, about an hour. Punch the dough down and cover with the damp cloth. Let rise for another 30 minutes or until doubled in volume.
5. Grease 12 muffin cups. Punch down the dough one last time and divide the dough evenly into 12 portions. I found that weighting the dough was best and then divide it’s weight by 12 to get equal amounts of dough. Roll the dough pieces into 7x1 inch strips. Roll the dough up on the short length creating a spiral. Place the spiral dough into the muffin cups and let rise uncovered for about 40 minutes. Once risen, brush a little bit of egg wash (1 beaten egg + 1 tbsp water) on the top.
6. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Bake for about 10-12 minutes or until the tops are golden brown. Remove from the oven and serve warm. 

Two-Tone Yeast Bread

Yeast smells so good they should make a candle sent out of it. I would buy it, wouldn’t you? Over the weekend I was reminded just how intoxicating that smell was. I haven’t made bread since… well this cinnamon swirl bread I made last year.

Last week (or was it longer? I haven’t added anything new to the blog in a while and I apologize.) I mentioned that my cookbooks and magazines were feeling neglected because all of the recipes I have been using come from the Internet. Let’s face it though, the Internet is a handy gadget. So, I made a promise to my hardback recipes that I would use them, and it’s amazing how many recipes I have tagged and never thought of again. I really should keep better track records of what I flag.

This little gem of a recipe comes from the Taste of Home Fall Baking 2011 edition magazine. I had forgotten how long it takes to make bread, at least when you’re still a novice, and thankfully I had the time change to help me for once. (I got up at 5am because of that stupid time change.)

This is a two-tone bread and I was kind of nervous and excited for this recipe. Nervous because this is only my second time working with yeast, but excited because I was baking bread, and homemade bread is one of the tastiest things ever! The only tricky part about making this was getting the second dough to catch up to the first dough. It calls for an hour rising time and by the time I was done with the second dough, the first one had almost doubled in size.

The end product was so tasty. It was soft and moist and kinda sweet with a hint of whole grain. Not to mention, there is molasses in this, and with various holidays coming up, I think it would make a great bread for Thanksgiving. You could probably bake it in a pretty loaf pan and tie it with a bow to give to someone as a holiday gift. Or, you know, you could keep it all to yourself and slather it with some butter or jam to have for breakfast or afternoon snack, your choice.

Two-Tone Yeast Bread
slightly adapted from Taste of Home Fall Baking
makes 2 loaves

Ingredients
1 package (¼ oz) active dry yeast
1 ½ cups warm milk (110-115° F)
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp sugar
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp butter, very soft
1 ½ tsp salt
3 ¼ - 4 cups unbleached all purpose flour

1 package (¼ oz) active dry yeast
1 ½ cups warm milk (110-115° F)
3 tbsp molasses
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp sugar
2 tbsp + 1 ½ tsp butter, very soft
1 ½ tsp salt
2 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2 ¼ cups whole wheat flour

Directions

1. In a large bowl, dissolve the yeast in the warm milk, then transfer into the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the soft butter, sugar, salt, and 2 cups of flour. Beat with the paddle attachment for 3 minutes. Add in more flour until the dough has become soft and just a tad sticky (I used about 3 ½-3 ¾ cups flour).
2. Turn dough onto a floured surface and knead for about 6 minutes or until dough has become smooth and elastic. Place dough in a large glass bowl greased with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap and set in a warm place to double in size, about an hour.
3. For the molasses dough, dissolve the yeast in the warm milk in another bowl. Once the yeast has dissolved, place in the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the molasses, sugar, soft butter, salt and all purpose flour. Beat until smooth. Gently beat in enough of the whole wheat flour to form a soft and slightly sticky dough (I used about 1 ¾ cups of whole wheat flour).
4. Turn dough onto a slightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 3 minutes (for some reason, this one came together faster). Place in a large glass bowl greased with cooking spray. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside to double in size, about an hour and a half.
5. Punch each dough down and divide in half (so you have four balls of dough total). Roll one of the white portions out into a 12 in x 8 inch rectangle. Roll one of the molasses portions out into the same sized rectangle. Place one dough on top of the other, it doesn’t matter which. Roll up jelly-roll style and pinch seams and ends together so the inside dough doesn’t peak through.  
6. Place seam side down in an 8 in x 4 in loaf pan (Do this is you want a giant mound. I used an 8 in x 4 in and a 9 in x 5 in loaf pan and I think the second one fit better.). Repeat with the two remaining doughs. Loosely cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for another 30-45 minutes. 
7. Bake at 375°F for 30-40 minutes or until the tops are a golden brown and the bottom of the pan makes a hollow sound when tapped. Cool in the loaf pan for about 10 minutes before removing. Place on a wire rack to cool completely.