Although this blog is only couple of months old I’ve already written on a few occasions about how much I enjoy making bread. Based on that you won’t be surprised to hear that Bake Off bread week was too much of a temptation to only bake the once.
Bread always feels like particularly guilt free baking to me. With cakes and pies there is a certain feel of luxury and treats, whereas with bread I think of it more as a necessity. At least that’s the excuse that I use with myself for getting into the kitchen so often.
In my last post I talked about how I got on with the floury baps that were the technical challenge this week. That meant that if I wanted to try another of the bakes it was either a filled tear and share loaf or some scored and decorative bread. I’ve had some previous attempts at scored bread but somehow a certain tentativeness with the blade has always defeated me. I know if I cut too deep the loaf is going to open up like a burst football during the baking process and I know that if I don’t cut deep enough there won’t be much to show for my efforts. As a result I’m normally somewhere between the two with cuts and crosses on the bread that even I would struggle to claim as decorative. I will have to try again but this wasn’t the week for it. The other key consideration was that we were hungry and wanted some bread that we were really going to enjoy.
Tear and share breads are always a fun home bake because once you’ve found a basic recipe you can play around with it and try different ingredients. To add a bit more complication to the bakes in last weeks challenge they were filled bread but there’s no reason why a tear and share can’t be plain. Pulling pieces from a still warm loaf is always going to be fun, whether on not the bread is filled.
The bread that I opted to bake was a cinnamon & raisin. The recipe describes it as a jumble bread and really it’s piles of cinnamon swirls baked together to form a loaf. After the first prove the dough, which you’ve already added the raisins to, is rolled out to a large rectangle then brushed with milk, cinnamon and muscovado sugar. You then create one giant cinnamon roll, cut it into pieces, then pile the pieces into the baking tin. One final brush of milk and into the oven.The recipe tells you to use a standard loaf tin for the bake but I find that a small round cake tin works best. Not only does the round loaf look better but it also allows you to pile the cut cinnamon swirls higher. Once it’s out of the oven this means that there are more pieces of sweet and sticky bread waiting to be pulled from the loaf.
The sugar and cinnamon in the recipe might be undermining my arguments about bread being guilt free but it was the weekend and if you can’t have some luxury then when can you.
There’s link to the recipe that I used below.
Cinnamon and Raisin Jumble Loaf
David in the kitchen. 