Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Mini-Bread Surprises

 
On Tuesday morning one of K's friends came over to play. I almost always bake something up for play dates and this time was no different. I had given a few of last week's cupcakes to the same family, so I didn't want to do cupcakes or even cake again. I wasn't really in a cookie-type mood either, so I settled on bread. The bonus is that with my trusty bread-maker, making bread is super fast and easy!
 
I chose a "butter roll" dough and then divided it into 24 tiny 22-gram balls. Then I let them rise.
 
 
I wanted to make them a bit sweet/desserty by stuffing them with chocolate. But the more I thought about it, stuffing 24 dough balls of chocolate was not so exciting - with 24 of them, surely I could find a few other things in the kitchen to stuff them with. I found a variety of stuffing options, but settled on caramel chips and orange marmalade, along with the chocolate - eight of each.
 
 
I flattened each ball out a bit, stuck two squares of chocolate, a small palm full of caramel chips, or a dessert-spoon full of marmalade in the center of each circle, folded it up and put them in muffin tins seam side down.
 
Once they were baked, my plan was to put something on the top of each to distinguish which was which. I bought some chocolate pens - white, brown and pink - and figured it would work out perfectly! Brown for the chocolate ones, white for the caramel ones and pink with a dried cranberry for the orange marmalade ones. The only problem was keeping them separated after stuffing and during the baking. I knew that I would forget what position they were in as soon as I put them in the oven. Even if I wrote it down, I figured I would carelessly mess it up somehow. Then I saw the "washi tape" sitting on the counter. I have heaps of rolls, so picked three colors and put a tiny swatch on the ends of the cupcake tins. Genius!
 

 
Since there were eight of each flavor, I did a full tin of both chocolate and caramel, then two of either the chocolate or caramel, plus four orange in the final two tins. That sounds way more complicated than it was, I just can't work out how to write it coherently - sorry!! Then, I just used the tape to mark which ones were where. It worked out flawlessly!
 
As soon as the surfaces were all cooled, I marked each one and then took them out of the tins to finish cooling. For the chocolate and caramel, I did different shapes and a few faces to make them look extra cute.
 
 
Once you took a bite, you got a nice surprise!
 

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