If she can do it, so can you.

Cinnamon Rolls (Just like Cinnabon!) July 21, 2012

There was such an awesome smell that wavered through the house when this was baking in the oven!

And the moment it came out, I couldn’t resist sinking my teeth into it!

And boy was it delicious and fluffy!!! **cue : It’s soooo flufffyyyy! aka Agnes from Despicable Me!**

The quality of this roll is just fantastic. I added in lightly toasted walnuts into the cinnamon brown sugar filling and I really think it made all the difference! Everyone raved about it!

I made this with my breadmaker so I must say that it was really simple. I will probably try making this again soon without a breadmaker and hope to post my results here… but in the meantime, here’s the recipe:

Cinnamon Rolls

Bread ingredients

235 ml warm milk (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
2 eggs, room temperature
75 g butter, melted
200g wholewheat flour
400g unbleached bread flour
1 teaspoon salt
80g white sugar
10g yeast

Filling

180g brown sugar
2 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
75g butter, softened
70g chopped lightly toasted walnuts

Directions:

1. Place ingredients in the pan of the bread machine in the order recommended by the manufacturer. Select dough cycle; press Start.
2. After the dough has doubled in size turn it out onto a lightly floured surface, cover and let rest for 10 minutes. In a small bowl, combine brown sugar,  walnuts, cinnamon and butter into a paste.
3. Roll dough into a 16×21 inch rectangle. Sprinkle evenly with sugar/cinnamon mixture. Roll up dough and cut into 12 rolls. Place rolls in a lightly greased 9×13 inch baking pan. Cover and let rise until nearly doubled, about 60 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Bake for 20 minutes or till top is golden brown. Enjoy!

Notes: Bread best eaten on day it is baked. But this is quite a big portion and if you have extras you wish to have for breakfast the next day, place the cinnamon rolls in the microwave for 10 seconds to warm it up so that it’ll be hot and fluffy again!

Rice Cooker Bread: Ja-Pan #2 December 2, 2006

I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! Weeeeeeee!

Haha… Sorry for the over excitement… But I miss baking and cooking so much!!!

And yes, for my very 1st bake: Bread ‘baked’ in a rice cooker!

Someone in the forum that I frequent(KC), introduced us to this clip which shows how bread can be made in a rice cooker! And I told the fellow people that I’ll give this a try once my exams are over!

Some background on how this bread was created.

There is a popular anime series in Japan called “Yakitake!! Japan”. Yakitake means ‘freshly baked’ in Japanese and well, Japan has a double meaning: first being Japan as a country, and Pan is the Japanese translation of ‘bread’. The anime’s story is about a boy called Kazuma Azuma who posessed solar hands and is a prodigy at baking bread(because the yeast thrive very well in his warm hands, allowing his bread to rise faster).

Ja-Pan#2(yes, he names all his bread ‘Ja-Pan #X’ where X is the number) is one of the bread that he creates using a rice cooker.

I was rather intrigued when I first read about and watched the clip and since I had a modern rice cooker, I thought it would be a good experiment to take on!

This is a very simple recipe however it is very time consuming(took me 5 and 1/2 hours!), so I’d advice that you make this only if you’re very free(like me now! hahaha!). And you MUST have a modern rice cooker to bake this.

When I say modern, I mean this:

And NOT this:

Why the modern type? Because it has a timer capability that allows one to set the timer. Also, they come with a micro-computer that adjust a constant temperature while you cook your rice, porriage, slow-cook etc…  For the older types, all they have is one button that you press down when you want to cook your rice.

This bread had a mellow, a slight salty taste to it and was a lil’ chewy. I guess this must be due to the fact that Japanese like chewy and sticky food, like their mochi and rice…  I feel that the butter and milk both made this bread very fragrant and enhanced the taste of the bread.

So, for those of you who have a modern rice cooker, you can consider making this interesting bread… It’s quite easy and shouldn’t be that difficult to follow…

(haha… I’m very tempted to skip writing out the recipe, but I shall be nice… :P)

What you need:
350g Bread Flour
21g Butter
21g Sugar
35ml Milk
180ml Water
5g Dry Yeast
6.5g Salt

(As you can tell from the video, they said that an important step in making bread is in the measurements, so I would suggest using a digital scale to measure out the ingredients.)

What to do:(Nothing beats watching the video on how to do it. So, watch it!)
1. Mix some warm water with the yeast and put aside.
2. Put in the remaining ingredients, except the butter.
3. Mix and knead until all the ingredients combine together and you can shape it into a ball.
4. Take the ball of dough and put the butter into the centre of the dough. Knead the butter into the dough until it combines together and the dough becomes less oily and less sticky. Shape into a ball shape again.
5. Leave the dough in the rice cooker pot and cover with a cloth, let it rise for an hour in a warm area(primary fermentation).
6. After an hour, lift the dough and drop it from a height of 50cm to release the air trapped inside the dough. (DO NOT punch the dough, they were very adamant about it in the video!)
7. Put it back into the pot, cover and let it rise again for another hour(secondary fermentation).
8. Put pot with risen dough into the rice cooker, set timer for 1 hour.
9. After it finishes the 1st cycle, turn it over using a spatula. Start the 2nd cycle of 1 hour.
10. After the 2nd cycle, turn it over again. Start the last and final cycle(weee!)
11. When the 3rd cycle has completed, remove the bread and leave it on a wire rack to cool.

Enjoy!

Notes:
1. I poured out 180ml of warm water and used part of it to mix the yeast, because I read somewhere that someone had problems with a sticky dough, so I didn’t want to add too much water.
2. In the final cycle, I would suggest that you check on your rice cooker because for my case, the thermostat kept shortening the overall cooking time because the rice cooker was hot inside and didn’t need the time to heat up the food that was inside.
3. Be prepared to wait a long time while this bread is being baked. I guess its good in a way, just knead the dough, dump it aside, go do your other chores, come back after an hour, check on it, then go back and do your chores, then throw it into the rice cooker and just check on it every hour. For me, I was playing this game, Cake Mania(cos I like to bake mah!), while waiting it out… haha… very fun, and a good time waster…

Banana Nut Bread April 25, 2006

No, my exams ain't over yet.

BUT, I had to get rid of over-riped bananas and ok, I admit, my hands were itchy, so I choose to bake a bread using my breadmachine(okay, its my mum's, not mine, but hey, I'm the only one who knows how to use it!). I love breadmachines cos they do all the work for you. Mix, knead, rise and bake! Easy peasy! Esp for Miss Lazy here… 😉

This was a nutty delight. Very fragrant(cos the whole house smelled like banana as it was baking). And yes, I could taste the banana! BUT, alas, the texture was more cake-like than bread.

The peeps over in the western part of the world seem to name this a bread just because its baked in a loaf pan! But seriously, its consistancy is leaning towards cake than bread. But then again, I read somewhere that they call it a bread because it has less oil/fats as compared to a cake. (So, this is just a low-fat cake in disguise!!!)

But whats in a name? It turned out beautiful and was exquisitely moist (not forgetting, low fat too!). So yes, this recipe is a keeper.

There's just one thing, this bread taste much much better from the 2nd day onwards! Seems to me like almost all banana bread/cakes tastes better from the 2nd day! The flavour seemed to have matured and developed more intensely. Mmm…

Go ahead and give this recipe a try. And yes, remember to keep some and let it rest for a day then tell me if it does taste better from the 2nd day on… =)

(PS: Yes, those stuff sticking out of the bread are toothpicks. My arty farty creative boyfriend wanted to create the look of freshly cut slices of bread still sticking to the side of the bread, but the bread kept falling and he had to resort to using toothpicks to keep them from falling! But, unfortunately, he didn't choose the right angle to snap the photo.. :(… oh well…)

Banana Nut Bread

• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 2/3 cup milk
• 2 eggs
• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup mashed bananas
• 1 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

1. Place all the ingredients listed in order into the bread pan.

2. Select the Quick Bread/Cake cycle. Press "Start". Check after 2 minutes if the mixture is well mixed.

3. Sit back and relax, enjoy the wonderful aroma as the bread is baking.

4. Remove the bread from the bread pan and allow it to cool completely before slicing. Enjoy!

Notes:

~ Use over-riped bananas for a better banana taste!

~ Use ang-ba jio bananas cos they are perfect for baking purposes! They tend to be more fragrant and have a more intensed flavour. If not, Del Monte Bananas work wonders too.

~ Put the walnuts into a toaster/oven and lightly toast/roast them for 3-5 minutes. This releases the oils in the nuts and enhances the flavour.