30 Minute Puff Pastry

Puff pastry is much tastier when made with real butter, which is hard to find at a store. Luckily, making your own can be quick and easy. This recipe won't puff as much as a true French puff pastry, but will puff as much as what you can buy in the supermarket.

Ingredients

2 ¼ cups flour (bread flour is great for this, but all-purpose works too)

1 ¼ c unsalted butter (if using salted butter, omit salt) cut into ½” cubes

½ tsp salt

6 T cold water

Butter and flour, ready to go!

 

Method

 

Put flour in mixing bowl, add the cubes of butter. Toss to coat.

Dissolve salt in water. Pour over flour and butter and mix with a spoon or hands until it comes together as a dough. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and knead 10 times.

 Form the dough into a square, cover with a towel and let rest for a few minutes

  3 Double Turns

For each double turn:

Roll the dough into a long and narrow rectangle about ½” thick

 Make a mark in the center of the long side of the rectangle.
Fold both ends of the dough in to the center.

 Brush excess flour from the top of the dough and fold once more as if you were closing a book

When you begin the second double turn, place the dough 90 degrees from the way the dough lay when you “closed the book” with the first turn.

After you've done this 3 times, roll it out to ½”, wrap in cling film and store in the freezer (up to 6 months) or refrigerator (up to 4 days, after that it will turn gray). Thaw in refrigerator before using as your recipe requires.

Dutch Crunch Bread

Sara and Erica of Baking JDs were our March 2012 Daring Baker hostesses! Sara & Erica challenged us to make Dutch Crunch bread, a delicious sandwich bread with a unique, crunchy topping. Sara and Erica also challenged us to create a one of a kind sandwich with our bread!

We made sandwiches with leftover Easter ham and cheese and had tomato soup

I know this is pretty late, but the last month has felt pretty crazy and I just didn't have the time or energy to bake more bread after the pretzel extravaganza. Today has been rainy and chilly, so soup and sandwiches seemed like a good idea. I made the dutch crunch topping with brown rice flour and spread it on the rolls with a small off-set spatula, one of my favorite kitchen tools (I think I have 6 or 7 of them)

The topping spread on the rolls 

The roll dough was easy and rose plenty in my cool kitchen and the topping was easy too. I see us eating this more often!

and, as always, Hunter wanted some too!

Dutch Crunch Rolls

1 1/2 T yeast
1/3 cup warm water
1 1/2 cup warm milk
2 T sugar
3 T oil
2 tsp salt
5-6 cups flour

Directions:

1. In the bowl of an electric mixer  combine yeast and half the flour. Add wet ingredients and stir to combine.

2. With the dough hook in place add the remaining flour a quarter cup at time until the dough pulls away from the sides of the bowl. Let the mixer run for a few minutes to knead.

3. Place in a lightly greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap. Let rise for 1 hour, or until doubled (or more) in size 

4. . Once the dough has risen, turn it out onto a lightly floured surface and divide it into 12 equal portions. Form into rolls. Place on greased baking sheets

5. Let rise for 15 minutes while you prepare the topping.

6. Coat the top of each roll or loaf with the topping (recipe below). 

7. Once you’ve applied the topping, bake in a preheated 375º oven for 20-30 minutes, until well browned. Let cool completely.

Topping:

2 T active dry yeast
1 cup warm water
2 T sugar
2 T vegetable oil
½ tsp salt
1½ cups rice flour, I used brown rice flour

1. Combine all ingredients in a large bowl and beat hard with a whisk to combine. It should be thick but spreadable. Add more water or rice flour as necessary. Let stand 15 minutes.

2. Coat the top of each loaf or roll with a thick layer of topping. You should err on the side of applying too much topping – a thin layer will not crack properly.

3. Put rolls directly in the oven. The batch that sat out to wait didn't crack as much.

4. When baking, place pans on a rack in the center of the oven and bake your bread as you ordinarily would. The Dutch Cruch topping should crack and turn a nice golden-brown color.

Goodbye to A Piece of Cake

I recently (like yesterday) left my position at A Piece of Cake Bakery. Here are some pictures of cakes I did while I worked there. I rarely did a cake start to finish, so I had help with several of these, but many I did not. 

Sunday Conference Breakfast

I always like to make something fun for breakfast on Conference Sunday. I found an interesting idea on Pinterest and decided to try it. Ali at Gimme Some Oven  made German Pancakes in a muffin tin, creating little pancake bowls to fill with fruit and jam. We ate ours with Nutella and jam or bananas. We've also been treating ourselves to Trader Joe's Cocoa Almond Spread, which is just like nutella made with almonds. 

St Patrick's Hair Clips

 I got off work early today (it's a slow week) so I thought I'd make something for my Activity Day girls. I'd seen these four leaf clovers on Pinterest and decided to try them out. They were fast and easy, and cheap. I made 8 out of one sheet of felt and had enough for at least that many more.

I wanted package them cutely, but didn't want to wrap them, so I made little cards to put them on. I am very lucky to be working with such great kids in Primary, and enjoy teaching them new things or being silly and doing the Hokey Pokey.

Wedding Food

This weekend I catered a wedding for a friend from church. She had decorated the church hall with lanterns and lights and a drop-ceiling canopy. It was beautiful inside. It was also kind of dark, which is why the pictures aren't very good :)

I served, left to right, Meatballs in a spicy tangy sauce, puff pastry bites, spinach salad with strawberries and candied walnuts, mixed fruit salad (honeydew, nectarines, pineapple, mango, kiwi, red grapes, and blackberries) and a platter of ham, cheddar, and havarti with dijon, whole grain mustard, and mayo, served with pretzel rolls. We served a lemon blueberry punch and cold water with lemon to drink.

Puff pastry bites with boysenberry jam and brie cheese

punch was on the end of the table and cups (snap-together wine glasses) were on a small table to the side

I put out little frames with information about the food, but it was kind of dark and people kept asking what things were

I bought some dishes from CB2 for service and am sure I will use them again and again, especially the ice tongs.

The spinach salad had a poppyseed dressing

I made these plate stands for a bridal shower in October and just changed the color of the ribbon to match the wedding on Saturday. They are made from table legs from the hardware store and squares of wood and fit a square dinner plate on top. We have four of the plates, so it is easy to switch out a full and hot tray with an empty one.

Left-over rolls

The wedding went really well and I really wasn't stressed much at all. I guess that's what happens with experience!

Pretzel Madness!

I am catering a wedding this week and one of the items is a build-your-own ham and cheese sandwich on a pretzel roll. Yep, a roll made like a pretzel. I made a HUGE batch (YAY! for access to a 60 quart industrial mixer with a dough hook!!) of dough on Tuesday, let it rise in four 5 gallon buckets (gotta leave lots of room for rising) then boiled and baked 200+ rolls today. They taste great, and we even had left over dough that Mom made into small odd-shaped pretzel bites. Mom helped a lot, weighing out dough pieces for me to roll and boiling the rolls as I washed, salted, baked, and cooled the pretzels. 

This is half the dough. It was more bread dough than I had ever made.

First you divide and roll the dough, these were 60-65 grams each

Then you boil them in a mixture of water and baking soda for 30-45 seconds per side

Then you brush with egg, cut an X in the top (to allow for expansion in the oven) and sprinkle with pretzel salt

Bake until golden brown and delicious

Let cool

Wash, rinse, repeat, and soon you have this, which is only part of the 200+ rolls we made

And these are the little ones Mom made.