Recipe 44: Christmas Buns

The most wonderful time of year is almost upon us! The shops already have aisles of food, gift ideas and decorations in preparation! The countdowns have started on Facebook & Twitter and the Scrooges are loving that!

This made it the perfect time to turn over the page of the book and see the next recipe to bake – Christmas Buns! These scrumptious buns are much like Chelsea Buns but a few ingredients tweaked to add that festive taste!

To start with, I need to belt the butter and milk together making sure its only lukewarm and not too hot before putting it with the usual mix of ingredients of flour, salt and yeast. Time to mix the ingredients with my hands which was nice because it was so freezing, it kept my hands nice and cosy, haha! The mixture might be a bit on the soggy side, if so it's fine to add a little more flour.

Then it's time to knead the dough, it was much easier than usual probably due to being liquid in the mix and it smelt lovely! Like the previous recipe, the smell reminded me of a donut mixture. Then time to leave the dough to rise for an hour – I always leave mine for about an hour and a half though.

When the dough has doubled inside, I had to pour it carefully out the bowl and then roll it into a rectangle shape. After this melt some more butter and then brush over the dough, then add the dark brown sugar evenly over it.

The next layer is to add the dry apricots and cranberries evenly over the dough too! Roll it up into a tight swiss roll and cut it into nine pieces.

I was surprised to read that I only had to leave them to prove for just half an hour! Not that I'm complaining, it's great not have to wait around for hours but I wasn't worried they wouldn't fluff up enough! Of course, trust all the book tells you as it's always right, they did get bigger in size after just half an hour and then ready to go in the oven!

I feel like I usually over bake my bread so this time I promised I wouldn't and took them out just at the right time, even to me they looked a little on the pale side, as you can see on the picture below but they were perfectly baked, yay!

Then whilst they are still warm, I had to brush them over with some apricot jam to give them that lovely glazed shine on a bun!

The final stage was to leave them to completely cool, if not the icing will just melt in. Whilst this was happening, mix the icing sugar with a little lemon juice and then flicker all over the now cool buns – this part was really fun!!

Reviews? They looked visually delicious! According to everyone they also tasted great too!

So this is the end of the favoured bread chapter, I didn't get through it as quickly as I had hoped but that's another one down!

The next chapter is Sourdough – which is already proving to be difficult, most of the breads take 5 hours to rise and then need around 18 hours to prove, I've been trying to work out how I can get these time wise but it's proving to be a complete pain! I'm worried I won't make it through or it will take me years to complete! Fingers crossed I should be able to get 2 breads done this weekend, but we're see how it fits in with timings!