Brioche

My mom always talks about all the 'new' foods that my dad's family introduced her to after she and my dad married. You know, really exotic things like granny smith apples and biscuits. I don't think my mom had ever had either one before the first time she had dinner with my dad's family, and when I was growing up, I never understood why. Now that I'm cooking Eleanor's recipes, though, I'm starting to get it. Eleanor was not a biscuit type of lady. She was a yankee, and as such, she made rolls, brioche (who knew?) and other light, yeasted, risen baked goods... or at least those are the kinds of recipes she saved.

Before starting this project, I was always nervous about making yeasted baked goods. Rolls, breads, even certain types of muffins made me nervous because mine never seemed to work correctly. Either they wouldn't rise at all (looking at you, every pizza crust I've ever made), or they wouldn't taste right if they did (et tu, challah?). But Eleanor seems to have been a specialist at yeasted breads-- since this brioche is maybe the third recipe that I've made from the box that requires a risen dough.

Why, you may be asking, does this matter? Well, here's why: when I set about doing this project, I was dying to know what kind of a cook Eleanor was. Whether she followed directions or did her own thing in the kitchen, whether she even used recipes or if she just made things up as she went along.

I always kind of thought she just did her own thing-- she was no shrinking violet, and she was highly opinionated, so I figured she would have been just as bossy when it came to cooking. But it's starting not to seem that way. She kept meticulous notes on tweaks she made to her recipes-- noting the dishes she used to make certain things, or the time her oven took to cook something. And when it comes to meticulousness, is there anything more fickle than yeast?

Judson helped with the kneading. Those are not my arms.

Making yeast dough requires two things I'm not great at: following directions (just kidding, I'm a total square and great at following directions as long as it's not in the kitchen) and patience (something I am terrible at in all arenas of my life). So maybe the real reason my pizza crusts have always been a bit dense is not due to the foibles of the recipe, but the foibles of the chef. Regardless, on starting this project, I became convinced I would succeed at the recipes, and succeed I (mostly) have.

It turns out, if you just measure out your ingredients in an exact fashion, keep your water as warm as possible without crossing over into 'hot' territory, and set aside enough time for the dough to rise even in your extremely drafty Scottish flat, you can make almost anything. (And when I try to wallow in my self-pity because I live in a drafty flat in Scotland without a 'warm spot' to let my dough rise, I remind myself that Eleanor, too, lived in a house with no air-conditioning, but hers was in central Florida, where the temperature regularly crested 37C/98F before 9am, and so finding a place to get any ingredient down to room temperature would have been just as much of a pain for her.)

So maybe this project is teaching me a couple of things: First of all, Eleanor might have had opinions about everything (remember, she once told my mom I was going to 'grow up spoiled' because my mom was rocking me and singing me a song when I was 6 weeks old), but she knew how to follow directions when the situation warranted it. Secondly, there's not a lot you can't succeed at in the kitchen if you just agree to put aside your smarts, be humble, and follow the directions in the recipe to the letter... or maybe I just got lucky because this is a Better Homes and Gardens recipe from 1978.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. Judson literally ate half of the batch of brioche muffins that we made on the night we made them, because he was so in love with the flavour. I cooked them in a muffin tin because the recipe didn't really advise how to cook them, and I wanted wee brioches like the kind I used to buy in Paris. They were rich and buttery, and didn't even need toppings to be good (though no one would judge if you smeared a wee bit of plum butter on there and took it to work for breakfast every morning for a week). Set aside the time to make these the right way and you definitely won't regret it.

The recipe:

Brioche Rolls

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Lightly grease a muffin tin.
Dissolve yeast in warm water.
In a medium-sized bowl, combine eggs, butter, and cooking oil.
Add yeast mixture to egg mixture and stir well.
In a large bowl, stir together sugar, salt, and 1 ½ c flour.
Add yeast mixture and beat well.
Stir in enough of the remaining flour to make a soft, silky dough that doesn't stick to hands.
On a lightly floured surface, knead dough 3-5 minutes or until smooth and elastic.
Grease the bowl with a spritz of cooking spray and put dough in it to rise, turning once to grease all over.
Cover tightly and let rise in warm place for one hour or until double.
Punch down, shape into a ball, and twist off palm-sized pieces.
Roll the pieces into balls gently, and place in muffin tin.

Yields approximately 15 muffins.

the ingredients:

4 ½ tsp active dry yeast
½ c warm water
3 eggs, beaten, at room temperature
1/3 c butter, melted
1/3 c vegetable oil
3 ½-4 ½ c flour, divided
3 tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt

 

Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

Did you make a giant loaf of Easter bread last week AND a full-size batch of hot cross buns? Do you now have more raisin-studded bread than you know what to do with, filling your kitchen and threatening to overpower you and your family if you eat anything that isn't a sandwich?

I have a solution for you!

Bread pudding gets such a bum wrap. If you can find it on the menu at a restaurant, it's inevitably pitted against such hard-to-resist sweets as flourless chocolate tortes, vanilla crème brulée, lemon panna cotta, or raspberry sorbet-- all lovely in their own right, and far more exciting then bread pudding sounds. But really, what could be better on a rainy spring night than a steamy teacup full of warm spiced bread pudding, straight from the oven? Spiced with cinnamon and raisins with a creamy, custard-like texture, this is the perfect comfort food, and a total upcycle at that.

There are a lot of recipes like this in the box: dishes that feature ingredients you'd have to throw away otherwise. These are the recipes that Eleanor saved and used over and over because they helped prevent unnecessary waste (including a recipe for mock apple pie that contains... you guessed it! No apples). Since the box was started during WWII when even the most basic foods were being rationed, I guess she became good at stretching her dollars-- and her pantry. Written in what I assume is Eleanor's own hand, the original recipe card for this includes the notation “(good)” at the top, underlined twice-- so you know it was a winner for her, too.

So don't throw away your next loaf of stale bread; get creative and make yourself a bread pudding. It's the perfect dessert for this time of year when the weather vacillates between warm and freezing (cold out? Serve this hot! Warm outside? Serve it chilled!), and it's versatile enough to be appropriate for breakfast or dessert (scoop a dollop of yoghurt on it for breakfast, or serve it with cream as a dessert!) Seriously, what are you waiting for?

This is the perfect recipe on which to use up the remnants of a sweet bread you have laying around (Hawaiian bread would be an absolute dream here!), but the original actually calls for plain sandwich bread, so that would work fine, too. I've included two different amounts of sugar below, depending on how sweet your bread is to start with.

The verdict:

4 spoons out of five. I'd give it five, but by the time I made this, I was so tired of bread that it was hard to muster up as much enthusiasm as this deserved.

The recipe:

Old Fashioned Bread Pudding

The ingredients:

6 slices stale bread (white or your choice of sweet breads)
2 tbsp butter, melted
1 tsp cinnamon
Scant ½ c sugar (if using plain bread, add an additional 2 tbsp sugar)
½ c raisins (optional, but recommended as they definitely improve the texture and flavour)
4 eggs
2 c milk
1 tsp vanilla extract

THE DIRECTIONS:

Preheat oven to 176C/350F.
Grease an 8x8 (or 1 ½ quart) baking dish and set aside.
Cut crusts from bread and brush remaining bread with melted butter.
Sprinkle with cinnamon (and 2 tbsp sugar if you're using plain bread).
Cut bread into quarters (mine were more like cubes because my slices were thicker).
Arrange in layers in prepared dish, sprinkling each layer with raisins as you go.
In a separate bowl, beat eggs just until combined.
Add scant ½ c sugar, milk, and vanilla to eggs and stir until sugar is dissolved.
Pour egg mixture over bread.
Set dish in pan of 1 inch hot water and place in oven.
Bake 55-60 minutes until “silver knife inserted ½ inch into pudding comes out clean.”

This post also listed over at #InspireMe Wednesdays!

Hot Cross Buns

Easter 2012 was the first married holiday that Judson and I celebrated. It was barely a month into our marriage, and less than two weeks since we had returned from our honeymoon, and we were excited. I had never really heard of hot cross buns before that spring, except for as the first song I learned to play on both the recorder and the clarinet, and I definitely didn't know they were an Easter treat until the portion of our honeymoon that we spent in the UK. I guess it was close enough to Easter that all the cafes and coffeeshops we passed on the street seemed to be advertising them, and I was fascinated, as I tend to be by anything that's covered in frosting.

So when we returned to the US and were invited to an Easter brunch, I knew exactly what we would make. Hot cross buns! We'd be so domestic! We'd be the envy of the party! People would finally stop teasing Judson about having an empty fridge throughout his bachelorhood! We'd be so adorable when we arrived with a cloth-covered basket full of steaming rolls, people would fall all over themselves just to be friends with us. I'd dole out advice like Martha Stewart on complicated topics like proofing yeast and the best type of dried fruit to use when making Easter desserts, and it would be the official beginning of our grown-up lives together!

So Easter weekend came, and we stayed in on Saturday night to make the buns. I found an authentic recipe on a British website, we made the dough on Saturday evening and set it aside to rise all night. Sunday morning I sneaked out of bed early to punch down the dough and set it up for a second rise, then preheated the oven and jumped in the shower. Judson awoke sometime while I was in the shower, and attempted to put the buns in the preheated oven... but when he opened the oven, it was ice cold.

He came to tell me the news, and I panicked. Dripping wet out of the shower, we stood in the middle of the kitchen panicking. In general, I pride myself on keeping calm when cooking disasters happen-- I mean, unless you've lit something on fire that wasn't supposed to be on fire, the worst that can happen is that you order takeout and have a good story to tell later. But this was our first married holiday, and we were going to spend it with new friends and their friends, who we had never met, and everyone there was married and had kids except for us, and we wanted so badly to not have everything screwed up, but, there we were.

It turned out our oven, which we had not yet used (I moved into the house the week before we got married, Judson moved in after our honeymoon, and we had only been home for a week), was non-functional. I hesitate to say “broken” because I'm not sure it actually ever worked. We had a terrible landlord who didn't really care much about the condition of the house, and I was irate that we now had no oven, and when we called to tell him about it, he said he'd get us a new one in “a week or two.”

But it ended up being the first (albeit minor) catastrophe we had to navigate as husband and wife: Judson dealt with our landlord (this was already not the first major issue we had with the place) while I mixed up frosting, formed the dough into buns, and texted our hostess to see if she could spare some space in the oven. (Huge faux pas, I know, but what were we gonna do? We lived in Atlanta, it's not like there were grocery stores where we could go buy store-brand hot cross buns on Easter morning).

This is the only piece of Eleanor's Pyrex Collection that still exists, and I wish I had more of it. At least if only one piece survived, it was the biggest mixing bowl ever.

So, slightly worse for wear but still alive and kicking, we showed up at our first married function with a tray full of raw dough and a bowl of glaze, which I cooked side-by-side with the Easter ham, thanks to the flexibility of our adorable hosts, who never made me feel bad about it. Keeping track of the oven when you're cooking two things at once is tricky at best, though, and the buns turned out a little browner than they should have been, and a little too chewy from being transported across town, but all in all they were still mostly edible. But I've had my eye on hot cross buns ever since-- I've got unfinished business with them and always knew I'd have to cross that bridge again, this time with a fully functional kitchen.

Oh, and that oven? The landlord replaced it with one he bought from a junkyard, which didn't bother us because it was in good shape and appeared to be new. We tested it to make sure it worked before our landlord left the building after he installed it, and everything seemed to be in order... until the first time we tried to use it to cook a frozen pizza, preheated it as normal, opened it to put in the pizza, and realised that it had no racks. A seemingly small detail, but without it you can't use an oven. So we were back to square one. The landlord raced over with, I kid you not, a cooling rack and two bricks wrapped in aluminum foil and tried to convince us to use that contraption instead of forcing him to buy yet another oven. And I fell in love with Judson just a little bit more when he put his foot down and refused, forcing the landlord to purchase us a new oven (from a real store, no less!), so that, by the time we had been married 6 weeks, we had already gone through three ovens-- more, I think, than my Eleanor and Wilbur probably went through in their entire marriage.

So without further ado, here is the recipe for hot cross buns that I found in Eleanor's recipe box. You should make these this weekend. People will be impressed, and if you're in doubt, just look at it this way: it's impossible for you to have a worse time making these than I did three Easters ago.

The verdict:

5 spoons out of five. These buns are pretty easy: it's a one-bowl recipe with only one rise necessary, and since you make the buns in a muffin tin, there's not even any of that pesky shaping of the dough that always ends up with me covered in stickiness. Make these for Easter Sunday and have them with your coffee. Even if you leave out the raisins, you won't regret it.

The recipe:

Hot Cross Buns

The Ingredients:

2 ¼ tsp yeast
¼ c water, lukewarm
2 1/3 c flour, divided
1/3 c sugar
1 tsp salt
¼ tsp soda
1 c sour cream
1 egg
¼ c raisins
½ c candied citrus peel, chopped
1 tsp cinnamon
1 c confectioner's sugar
1 tbsp milk
½ tsp vanilla

THE DIRECTIONS:

Grease a 12-cup muffin tin and set aside.
In a large mixing bowl or bowl of a stand mixer, dissolve yeast in the hot water.
Add 1 1/3 c flour, sugar, salt, soda, sour cream, and egg and mix 30 seconds on low speed, then 2 minutes on high speed, or “300 strokes by hand,” scraping down sides frequently.
Add remaining 1 c flour, raisins, peel, and cinnamon and mix thoroughly.
Divide batter evenly among muffin cups and set in a warm place to rise.
Batter will rise slightly but not double.
Preheat oven to 176C/350F and bake 20 minutes until golden brown.
While buns are cooling, mix together confectioner's sugar, milk, and vanilla into a quick glaze.
Once buns are completely cooled, frost a cross on the top of each with glaze.
Allow to set and serve with breakfast, brunch, or Easter lunch.

Yields 12 muffin-sized buns.

This post also featured as part of The #WeeklyVenture Linkup over here.