I messed up from the beginning. Well this is marmalade bread and butter pudding that I made on this past Easter Sunday, using yuzu marmalade and candied peel of natsu-mikan, or so-called Japanese summer orange, both of which my mom had made. It was delicious.
So what was wrong with it all?
Like I have said, I messed up from the beginning when I forgot that I had been going to make Hot Cross Buns, or sweet rolls traditionally and specifically served in the morning of Good Friday. When I realized it in the Thursday evening, I was exhausted from work and didn't have ingredients at hand. I had already run out of time, but I decided to make some anyways even if I wouldn't make it in time.
So I did try and make Hot Cross Buns dough in the following evening of Friday, casually hoping that I would at least be able to have a bite on "Friday" on a timezone of somewhere in the world, say, Hawaii, which is 19 hours behind that of Japan.
The plan didn't quite work. Not only did I fail to make it in time, but I actually never had Hot Cross Buns out of the oven - at least in the way they are supposed to be; the dough didn't rise in the first place, and it never did. Period. I don't know exactly what went wrong - maybe it was too cold in the kitchen, maybe I left the yeast to get formy a bit too long, or whatever. I felt too daunted to chuck the whole thing, but I was also too bummed to bring myself to carry through and make the fiasco look like Hot Cross Buns, so I shaped the dough into rolls and baked them, but skipped the cross part on the top.
The bread had barely risen when they were out of the oven, but managed to taste okay. As they were baking, I fished around to find a way to eat the buns in a more enjoyable way, and settled on the idea of using them in bread pudding; that way, stone-hard bread might be a little more palatable, I hoped. As I happened to use a Delia Smith recipe for Hot Cross Buns and failed, I decided to have Delia make up for the failure and gave a try to her recipe of bread pudding (no, it wasn't really like that, I know, it wasn't her fault that it failed, me, loser).
That's how the bread and butter pudding came out - it was, I repeat, delicious, hot out of the oven and served with a dollop of mascarpone cheese. In fact, it would have tasted even better if it hadn't been for the miserable failure of my bread-making attempt.
Now I have to wait another year to give it another try to make Hot Cross Buns.
4 comments:
never, ever a failure, dearest, as long as you try. and you tried twice to rescue it, so that definitely counts for something :-)
Posted by santos.
Chika,
I too decided to make Hot Cross buns this Easter. I had been to the grocery store with my mother-in-law and was so disappointed to find that they were all sold out of the delicious sticky, fruity buns that when we got back to the farmhouse, I immediately delved into the recipe drawer. I ended up combining two different recipes to make the buns, and there was no candied peel, so I simply grated an orange into the dough as it was being mixed. I made crosses on the buns using white butter icing. Everyone enjoyed the buns, but I wished they would have risen a bit higher. My mother-in-law gave me a tip: don't punch down the dough (after the first rising) before forming it into buns. Have you heard of this practice before?
Posted by Erin
I also made hot cross buns this year and completely failed with them. The dough didn't rise at all or become nice and soft. They ended up like hard little rock buns. I was very unhappy. I still blogged about them, but I don't know what I did wrong.
Bread and butter pudding sounds like a great way to use them up!
Posted by Niki
Hi there,
santos - thanks! I'm glad I was able to make something out of it - I hate dumping food.
Erin - good thing your buns turned out good and you guys all enjoyed them! :) I am a rookie baker when it comes to bread-making, but as far as I konw you are supposed to gently punch down the dough after the first rise? Well in my case, there was no "first rise" so it was irrelevant. :P
Niki - your buns at least looked like Hot Cros Buns!
Posted by chika
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