Week Three: Cinnamon Swirl Bread

I was super excited to try to bake bread, so I went with a recipe from “The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book”, seeing as how the Blueberry Scone recipe from last week went so well.

This recipe required me to buy some new toys, which made me very happy. I went to Crate & Barrel for these:

That’s a bench scraper, a French rolling pin and a loaf pan. As it turned out, I didn’t actually need the rolling pin (I smooshed the dough out with my hands), but I will need it eventually. These three items set me back less than $25.

This was also the first time that I got to use the dough hook on my KitchenAid mixer. I’ve now officially used all three attachments that came with it. Sooner or later, I’ll get that pasta attachment, but that’s another blog.

YARRRR!

With everything in place, it was time to start. I mixed cinnamon, sugar and brown sugar together in a bowl, then milk, butter and eggs in a mixing cup, and then started dumping the flour, yeast and salt into the mixing bowl. Once the dry ingredients went in, I added the wet and started kneading:

(How many photos did I have to take to get a decent shot? Three.)

Once the dough had cleared the sides of the bowl, but still stuck to the bottom, I turned it out onto a ‘lightly floured’ counter. This time, ‘lightly floured’ actually meant ‘lightly floured’:

Once the dough was kneaded into a smooth, elastic ball, it went into a greased bowl with greased plastic wrap and sat for a little over an hour to double in size. Once that was achieved, I turned the dough back out onto the counter and smooshed it out into a rectangle. I then wet the dough and sprinkled the cinnamon/sugar/brown sugar mixture on top. Then it got dampened again. I would have taken a picture of this, but my hands were covered in cinnamon and I didn’t want to gum up my camera. The dough then was rolled up jelly-roll style and dumped into the loaf pan:

From there, it was left for another hour to rise again. Once that was achieved, the top was brushed with butter and sprinkled with some reserved cinnamon/sugar/brown sugar mixture. Then it went into a 350 degree oven for “40 to 60 minutes.” The ambiguous times in this particular recipe irked me a bit. I know that ovens are finicky and you have to watch your food rather than rely on a clock, but twenty minutes??? I’m not going to sit in front of my oven starting at the 40 minute mark and just wait. So I set the timer for 25 minutes, at which point I rotated the pan. Then I set it for another 25. This is what I got:

I think it turned out fine. I shook it out of the pan:

It kind of looked like a covered wagon. My only issue with the loaf was that one end was pointed up and the other end was pointed down. I’m not sure how I could have fixed that. I’ll have to look into if/when I bake another loaf of bread.

Finally, after some cooling, it was time to cut into the bread and see what happened on the inside!

HOLY COW IT WORKED! Look at that swirl!

I’m so glad this worked out! The bread is DELICIOUS and may be the best thing I’ve made so far.

Tune in next week when I make Vegan Chai Latte Cupcakes for Rob’s birthday!