Today we decided we were just going to have a simple dinner of burgers and salad but we realized we didn’t have any burger buns (we had burger meat, etc.) so we decided to make our own sesame seed burger buns. In addition, we made a loaf of bread and our own creation: chocolate rolls! We rolled out rectangles of bread dough and put chocolate chips inside, sealed them and baked. The burger buns were ok but the chocolate rolls were AMAZING–filled with gooey delicious chocolate. We decided we should have made more of them and less burger buns.
Making bread is pretty simple, you just have to make sure your yeast is newish and that you have time to let the dough rise twice. The ingredients are milk, butter, yeast, flour, a little sugar and salt. You heat the milk and let the butter melt in it. Then you combine the dry ingredients with about half the flour and add to the milk mixture. You can use a mixer to mix these together, but as you add the second half of the flour you have to use a spoon and eventually your hands to mix and knead it. After you have kneaded it for 8-10 minutes you shape it into a ball and let it rise for at least an hour, until it’s doubled in size.
Then the fun part: Punching the dough down! After that you knead it a litte more and split the dough in half: half is for a normal loaf of bread and half is for the burger buns and chocolate rolls (or you could just make two loaves of bread…but that’s a little boring). To make the loaf shape, you roll out one of the halves into a rectangle and then roll it up again and put it in a bread pan. The burger buns are easy: just balls of dough that you flatten and for the chocolate rolls, after you’ve rolled out the dough into a small rectangle and sprinkled with chocolate chips, the trick is to pinch the ends togther so they seal (so the chocolate won’t escape). Then you have to let everything rise again for about an hour.
Just before we baked everything, we brushed the burger buns lightly with milk and sprinkled them with sesame seeds, then into the oven! There is nothing as good as the smell of baking bread! All of the chocolate rolls disappeared within minutes of coming out of the oven…we barely had room for the burgers
