The day of the great British bake-off, I mean bakery course has arrived. It also just so happens to be one of the hottest day of the year. Oh bother. Luckily the kitchen was fully air conditioned so we were in no danger of dying from heat stroke that is of course until the ovens came on.
The first task of the day was to make the enriched dough. Enriched because it contains sugar, milk and egg . All was going swimmingly until the chef man, Tony, decided that we were going to need half again of each ingredient. So instead of 600g of flour, we now needed 900g and so on. I was actually surprised at how well the weighing process was going, I was expecting to do at least the majority of it wrong. Alas the same cannot be said for poor old Joy, who half way through measuring out her ingredients noticed that her scales had gone from weighing out everything in grams to weighing everything in pounds and ounces. Hence she had to weigh everything out again.
When making any form dough, you need to knead. ha ha punny. By kneading the dough, you are releasing the elasticity in the gluten, gluten is your friend and so you want to release it in all its glory. Strong flour contains more gluten than just bog standard flour and so it is tended to be used in dough making like when making bread,buns or pasta. Kneading is also very therapeutic and I can pretend to be hitting certain people....ahem..
We now need to let our bread prove before we can knock it back. Ha ha theres some bakery terms for you. To prove the bread you basically put in a warm place for the the dough to rise slightly. The proof is in the punch when Tony got our bowls out of the prover (OK it was actually the steamer set to a really low heat but saying they had a machine just for the use of proving sounds better) Everyone's dough seemed to have risen a considerable amount apart from Liz's which hadn't really risen at all, gutted.
Oh my whose is that beast? I asked when my Mr Chef-man brought out some dough that had literally doubled in size. O hey, apparently it was mine. To knock back dough you basically punch it and carry on kneading it, in essence undoing all the rising that the dough has done whilst proving.
So now we had made the dough, we got on the exciting bit, making buns!!
On the cards today were:
Chelsea Buns
Devon Splits
Iced buns
and wait for it......
DOUGHNUTS!!!
you can probably tell which one I was most excited about.
Its best not to think about the amount of butter and sugar that goes into decorating these.As my housemate put it - I was going to make her diabetic with all these cakes- but no one was complaining when I walked through the front door laden with sweet nothings.
