I'm a regular Christian college student juggling fellowship, academics, and my love of baking! Follow me in my life full of sweet baked goodies, English papers, poetry, God's blessings, literature, crazy ideas, and my ever-growing journey with Jesus. :)
FINALLY. Another recipe. It’s been a while… but this has been one of the coolest things I’ve ever baked. It was my second time EVER working with yeast and it was definitely not as intimidating as I thought it would be. The first time I used yeast I made pizza dough and that’s such a distant memory… This second experience working with yeast was somehow more scary— I was terrified the dough wouldn’t rise properly because I messed up on the flour proportions and mixed some of the ingredients out of order. But it was such a great experience overall!
I first saw the recipe on Elissa from 17andbaking a few weeks ago and I was determined to try it. I feel like I’ve been in a rut of baking very normal sweets… the run-of-the-mill cookies, quick-breads, muffins and cupcakes. Nothing particularly… crazy. This proved to be less of a challenge than I thought it would be, but it was definitely time-consuming. It is pretty much an all day project! I loved every minute of it though and even created a warm area in my apartment (my room with the heater on) for the dough to rise. I definitely would make this again but with a few adjustments….
This was the result :
As you can see, the crust is pretty brown and had a thicker and harder crust than I would have liked. I think it may have been because of the dark pan I used, but it wasn’t really too much of a problem. I’ve heard that William-Sonoma’s gold-touched pans are ideal for baking because they don’t cause extra and unwanted browning, but they can be a little pricey. Another thing that I’ll be adjusting the next time I make this is cut down on the amount of butter used for the filling. I don’t own a pastry brush, so this may be the cause of the extra butter, but I find that hard to believe… as I had twice the amount of butter than I needed! I ended up pouring the leftover butter into the pan, hoping that the dough would somehow absorb the buttery goodness… but I think it simply contributed to a more browned crust. One thing I changed this time is substitute grapefruit zest for the orange zest since that’s all I had on hand. I couldn’t really taste the grapefruit so I’m assuming it doesn’t make that much of a difference. Another thing that I noticed was that the bread was slightly more dense than I would have desired, so I think I would increase the rising time for both rising sessions. A lighter loaf is inarguably more heavenly! A lot of icing also dripped down the sides when I drizzled it on, so I’d probably try to split the layers while it’s still warm to insure more icing in the actual cake rather than a light coating on the top.
All in all, I’ll be making this again when I have a free day… but first, home-made thin mints, upside-down apple cake, pumpkin pie, banana creme pie, and pastry dough. :)
Happy Baking!
-Mandy
P.S. I didn’t post the recipe here because I felt like it was too long… but you can check it out at Elissa’s blog! The link directs you straight to that specific blog entry.
