Last weekend we went to a food festival in Oxford. The whole day was really great, and a particular highlight was one of the talks I managed to sneak off to without the children.
It was with a man who has a company called "Bake with Jack", apparently he's on the TV but I've never seen him (not that I watch huge amounts these days so that's nothing to go by).
He did a demo where he made some apple cinnamon buns, he was a great speaker, really engaging and funny. I also picked up quite a few tips with baking.
The next day I then decided to make some, of course when baking I can't do much without my Middlest helping me!
We used the recipe from the Bake With Jack website, really easy to follow. I have to admit the one tip he kept saying was to trust the recipe, if he hadn't have said that then I'm sure I would have added more flour when kneading. To start with it went really sticky and normally I would have added extra flour to stop it sticking, but we kept working it and within a few minutes it all pulled together and worked lovely, just kept using the scraper to clean the stone we were working on.
We also used some of the first apples this year, mixed up with sugar and cinnamon to make the filling, we were pretty generous with this so there was plenty for each bun.
Considering there was only 375g of flour in the recipe it was amazing to make 16 buns!
This was a lovely lazy Sunday activity to do with my daughter, and something we could all enjoy eating!
Looking forward to making them again - I think using canned apples would be great for this as well, so we could make them all year round.
Anyone else enjoy making enriched dough goodies to snack on?
Love the pic of the Middlest working the dough! She is so intent on the task.
ReplyDeleteShe really gets into it. Need to do more by hand really and less with the machine. Its a great activity for them.
DeleteAmong other things I like the fact you have bench heights that suit your kids working heights. Those buns look great and we love the icing technique.
ReplyDeleteThey have steps they pull up to work off. Makes it so much better for them. They've all been helping with the cooking since they could stand really
Deleteyour kids are going to know how to do so many things! a big lesson to learn with baking is to not add too much flour. this goes for everything. when you knead the dough,it develops the gluten which brings the dough together. if you add too much flour up front and then you knead it, it will end up giving you a heavier, drier end result. those buns turned out beautifully!
ReplyDeleteBread is one of those things you never stop learning about and I'm always so glad when we take the effort with something new. Really want to do more by hand going forward, the kids get so much out of it, yeah we might get some failures but that's all part of learning.
DeleteKev, these look delicious.
ReplyDeleteI can tell you that teaching your children to cook will sick. Ours are all late teens/early 20's but still all enjoy cooking to some extent from full meals to cookies. In that, at least, I think we have succeeded.
"Will Stick. Stick". Darn my sausage-like fingers....
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