BakerAunt
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Skeptic--my stepson is happily branching out after having eaten half of a blueberry pie. 🙂
On Friday evening, I started an experiment. I have a recipe for Maple Breakfast Buns that came out of Breads, Breads, and More Breads, a Pillsbury booklet from the 1980s. It has been a longtime favorite. Although it is titled “buns,” these are a roll with a brown sugar maple filling. Last time I made them, I worked in some white whole wheat flour (1 cup), added ¼ cup special dry milk, added 2 Tbs. flax meal, and used the special Gold yeast. The results were good, but I want to get the rolls a bit lighter in texture and increase their keeping quality. I substituted in ¾ cup buttermilk for that much water and pre-soaked the ½ cup of oats in it. I also added a egg, which meant that I ended up needing about 3 Tbs. more flour; I put in 2 Tbs., and it was slightly sticky but ok to pat out and shape. After the dough rises, I will make the filling and shape it, then refrigerate overnight and bake it in the morning.
The regular filling is 1/2 cup brown sugar plus 1/2 tsp. maple extract. I wondered about using maple sugar, which would not have been readily available when the recipe was published, but after looking at some internet recipes, I'll stick with the regular filling.
After I bake them tomorrow, however, I may try the maple syrup glaze that KAF has for one of its doughnut recipes.
It's an interesting recipe that uses a technique--adding baking powder--that King Arthur also uses upon occasion. I do not understand the supposedly health conscious fascination with coconut sugar or coconut whatever.
I've made the cinnamon rolls in the King Arthur Wholegrain Baking Book and substituted some oil for the butter (except in the frosting), and it is still a favorite recipe with my husband. I find the texture slightly dense, but the filling and a bit of frosting make up for it.
I also have an oat maple roll recipe that I got from a Pillsbury booklet years ago. It has only a token amount of oats, but I've subbed in some brown sugar. It also did well with an oil substitution.
I've suddenly developed an urge to bake cinnamon rolls. I need to be able to bake something for my husband's family reunion. We are staying at a place with a kitchen, and these occasions seem to bring out a kind of culinary one-upmanship, or at least focus on the recipes of one family that bring out its memories. His cousins are all into butter. (One told me that I should forget about the dietary changes and just take the cholesterol lowering drug.) They also appear to be whole wheat flour adverse--and some people do taste it as bitter--but I have worked in white whole wheat flour as well as barley or oats and no one noticed. (They do make their feelings known.) There will be fourteen of us at some meals, so I will need at least 16 rolls, and I'll need to be able to park the shaped sweet rolls overnight in the refrigerator.
I have the "Snails" recipe from the mother of one of the families. I can tweak it for less butter. It had no filling with it, so I would need to look at fillings.
I will experiment tonight--while my younger stepson is still here to eat some of what I produce. It won't be Level 1--because Level 1 seems to require copious amounts of butter--but I will NOT be using pizza dough. (Couldn't the Level 3 baker have just bought prepared bread dough?)
I find that spritzing the dough with water before sprinkling on the cinnamon sugar also works well, a technique that I learned from Bernard Clayton's bread book.
Aaron, I have a recipe for "Snails" (English word for Schnecken) from my husband's aunt. Although it did not have a cinnamon filling, it can be made with one. I've made it with no filling and frosting on the top.
On Thursday, I baked a recipe from the King Arthur site that I baked last year and found this year while I was paging through the cookies in my binder trying to find one with lower saturated fat. I wrote excellent on it last year: Zucchini Chocolate Chip Pecan Bars. To find it on the KAF site, you need to go to a blog, so here is the link. It appears a little further down, past the zucchini brownies and the zucchini chocolate chip cookies:
I used a bit more than 6 oz. zucchini (actually a summer squash that has a very long neck without seeds, then a bulbous bottom, so I used what I needed from the neck). I used the white whole wheat flour, but I added 2 Tbs. flax meal and ¼ cup BRM milk powder. I used 90g of large Ghirardelli chocolate chips (maybe about ½ cup or so—saturated fat is given for gram weights, so I weigh them). The ingredients come together very easily in the food processor. With my changes the whole batch has 28g saturated fat, which when cut into serving sizes is not that bad, and my younger stepson will happily help eat them!
The episode was interesting, but as someone who has had to cut out most butter from her diet, I found it demoralizing. I know that there are some recipes that I won't even attempt to bake, such as croissants or brioche, because butter is essential for taste and texture. However, I can make very good cinnamon rolls by substituting oil for butter in the dough, and not using butter in the filling. I will allow myself a bit of a splurge on frosting/glaze with a bit of butter.
That said, I was fascinated by how the Level 3 chef cut her dough into strips, then rolled up the cinnamon rolls individually and put them into muffin pans. I make the long roll, like the other two chefs did, but I use dental floss to slice it, which makes a cleaner cut and less mess than a knife.
